Careless and apathetic

I’ll make an exception, if you want to save my life,

Brigitte Bardot gotta come, and see me every night

— Elton John, “I Think I’m Going to Kill Myself”

The cases of James and Jennifer Crumbley, both convicted of involuntary manslaughter in separate trials after their son killed four students and wounded seven others with a gun they purchased for him as an early Christmas present, made me think of something that happened to a friend in high school.

My friend was a piano player, good enough that after he grew up he went professional and played standards and pop hits on the cruise ship circuit. When he was 14 years old, he wanted to be Elton John. He wore platform shoes and oversize sunglasses. He built himself a harpsichord from a kit.

He learned his pop hero’s repertoire. His fingers had no trouble with the keyboard parts, but his brain was slow to process the lyrics. So he scribbled out the words to a peppy tongue-incheek parody of New Orleans jazz and tap dancing and left the sheet of paper on his music stand.

A few hours later, his mother and father knocked on his bedroom door. When he saw their grave expressions he figured he must have done something very wrong, but couldn’t figure out what it could possibly be. There was no baggie of leaves in his underwear drawer for them to stumble across. He was making good grades. What now? He silently sighed.

His father touched him on the shoulder. “Sit down, son,” he said solemnly. “We need to talk.”

Now he thought maybe his grandmother had died.

Then his father unfolded the piece of paper he was holding in his hand. And he began to read the lyrics to track three of side A of “Honky Château,” the chorus of which goes:

Think I’m going to kill myself, Cause a little suicide, Stick around for a couple of days What a scandal if I died Yeah, I’m gonna kill myself Get a little headline news I’d like to see what the papers say On the state of teenage blues

My friend burst out laughing, but his parents weren’t convinced they hadn’t found their son’s prominently displayed suicide note until he pulled out the album and played the song for them. And even then his mother wondered if there wasn’t something wrong with him for enjoying such sick entertainment.

We got a good laugh out of the story at school the next day, and I filed it away.

I don’t know that my parents ever went through my drawers, but I always assumed they did. I assumed they noted the mileage on the odometer of the car I drove. They trusted me, but I never thought they were stupid. I knew they noticed things.

I used to think the joke was on my friend’s parents. I used to think they over-reacted. These days I think what they did was only prudent.

Lots of people, some of whom you have probably voted for, don’t think there is anything we can do about the level of gun violence in this country. There are already more guns than dogs here, and there is a powerful and cynical lobby that works to promote the idea of gun ownership as something like a sacred obligation.

There really are people who are convinced that their right to exotic firearms trumps your kids’ rights to live.

But the truth is there is a lot we could do, if we were only prepared to act like grownups.

You might think, for instance, that everyone would agree that careless or apathetic gun owners ought to bear some responsibility for the damage their lost or stolen guns commit. No one should be on the side of careless and apathetic gun owners, especially not those who style themselves as the good people with guns—the sheepdogs who like to advertise their readiness to protect society against bad actors.

These are the people who are most responsible with their guns, who use trigger locks and gun safes. Most of the gun owners I know are aware where their weapons are at all times, and they know they are unavailable. You cannot call these people careless and apathetic, even if someone breaks into their house and uses a thermal lance to cut into their safe and take their guns.

A grownup might look at how we treat the owners of dangerous exotic animals when considering how to treat people who own devices that are 5,000 times more likely to kill someone than an animal is in this country. We apply strict liability to those animal owners, and we ought to. If your snake gets out and bites me and causes me pain and suffering, I’m going to have a cause of action against you. You’re going to have to prove that you took every reasonable precaution to prevent that snake from escaping or being stolen to avoid being held liable for damages it causes.

Short of some radical hippie from PETA breaking your snake out of its enclosure, you are probably going to have to write me, the snakebite victim, a check. At the very least, as a responsible—not careless and apathetic—snake owner, you might consider looking into finding some insurance company willing to, for a small monthly premium, indemnify you from any damage caused by your snake.

But we don’t treat gun owners equally in this country. We give them special privileges. We give them de facto immunity regardless of whether the harm suffered by the victim is intertwined with their careless and apathetic behavior. We do this because a lot of the people who make our laws, some of whom you probably voted for, are owned by the gun lobby which seeks to maximize the profits of firearm and ammunition makers by scaring people—most but not all of whom will act like responsible adults—into buying more and more of their products.

And one of the ways they do this is by promoting the myth of the Constitution as Holy Writ which should neither be amended or even thought about too hard because it sprang from the minds of infallible white men who thought it OK to own other people and that bloodletting was a best medical practice.

That’s childish. But that’s what we are: a nation of TikTok infatuated children. With a lot of guns.