Shooting down America’s gun-crazy mentality
“Just one of those crazy accidents,” is the way Gary White, coroner of Kentucky’s Cumberland county, summed up the death of two-year-old Caroline Starks last week. Caroline’s five-year-old brother shot her in the chest with a rifle he’d been given for his birthday — a rifle that had been left standing in a corner with one shell in it.
Ah, yes, just another of those crazy accidents. Just another crazy day in the crazy, gun-obsessed, paranoid United States of America. On it goes.
The Dallas Morning News reported recently that 700 teachers and school administrators showed up for a free class in concealed handgun training at a Dallas high school. Three school divisions in Texas already allow teachers who are certified to do so, to carry concealed weapons in classrooms, and more school divisions expect to join them. Grade 1 teacher Leah Smith suggested to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that “more protection can’t hurt. Maybe it would save lives.” And principal Lolita Looney said the added bonus would be teachers could defend themselves out of school, too. “We never know who we’ll run into at the grocery store or just out and about. We should be prepared.”
Ann Y. Smith, blogging on nrawomensoutlook.org describes how she would have been prepared had Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokar Tsarnaev dared to hide in her yard. Lamenting the fact that Massachusetts’ tough gun laws have caused a precipitous drop in the number of gun licences since 1998 (down from about 1.5 million to 200,000), she writes: “The odds that this kid would choose a home (whose yard to hide in) with no lawful resident firearm owner were pretty high.”
She says “... there is no question what my husband and I would have been doing while the town sweep was in progress. We’d lock our doors, stay glued to the local news and make sure our firearms and plenty of ammo were accessible until the siege was over, and beyond. In the event an extremely dangerous, wanted murderer tried to invade my home, I wouldn’t have to wait for a foot-patrol officer to knock on my door. And I dare say there wouldn’t be a chance of the police interrogating him if he succeeded at making himself an unwelcome guest in our home.”
Is anarchy reigning down there? It sure sounds like it. These gun nuts apparently don’t believe in due process, or even the time-honoured precept of innocent until proven guilty. Smith would simply have shot and killed a young man in her yard — it doesn’t even appear to occur to her that such an individual might be an innocent person, like a crime victim, hiding from someone who had possibly tried to abduct him. Nope. Too bad for him, whoever he is. Step into Smith’s yard and you’re dead, because apparently the Second Amendment not only gives you the right to bear arms, but to bypass the democratic rule of law and your intended victim’s right to due process.
This week, media focus was on the National Rifle Association’s women members, hyped as being “armed and fabulous.” These ladies can even enhance their fabulous look by wearing jewelry like the AK-74 necklace, advertised in the Girl’s Guide to Guns at $140, and featuring a silver model of the Kalashnikov assault rifle.
Meanwhile, the Huffington Post began chronicling the number of people killed by guns in the U.S. since the Newtown, Conn., shooting last December. As of mid-April, the count stood at 3,300.
The anecdotes could go on and on — but the only word to describe all of this is “insanity.”
The average person in the U.S. wakes up in the morning, gets the kids off to daycare or school, and then heads to work. After work, the routine may involve picking up the kids or running a few errands at the grocery store, then going home to dinner, and maybe heading out to watch the kids play soccer. Who — to cite Lolita Looney, the Texas principal at the handgun training seminar — does this average adult American expect to run into in the course of an average day, who would need to be killed? The level of paranoia is truly incredible. Equally incredible is that gun-carrying Americans seem to have a sense of entitlement about taking the law into their own hands. Gun advocate Natalie Foster, in a video on the Girl’s Guide to Guns site, suggests that women need guns to protect themselves from abusive former husbands. I wonder if Foster will be around for these women when they’re charged with murder.
What’s going on down there? A Wild West mentality that’s run rampant? Anarchy?
You’d think that after Newtown, there would have been much sober second thought about the proliferation of guns. Instead, there’s only been much fiery pro-gun rhetoric and irrational second thought — even the U.S. Senate voted down the bill on expanded background checks for gun purchasers.
The United States has gone crazy with its siege mentality and frontier-justice mindset. You couldn’t pay me to live there.