For about 30 years (ca. 1982-2012) I wrote a more
or less monthly column for my old hometown’s newspaper, The Ledger, of Polk County. Sometimes my writing was rewarded with hate mail, and it gradually dawned on me that
the two topics that generated the most hate mail from my fellow Floridians were
guns and racial equality. The writers of the hate mail loved the former and
hated the latter. At first I didn’t see a link between these two issues, but
finally I got it: what connected them was paranoia, irrational fear of a
supposed threat. So if you want to receive hate mail, I recommend you write a
piece like the one I'm working on here - a quick blurb that does not show love for the gun industry.
Today Orlando, of all places, has become
associated with gun control issues, and this, along with the Democrats’
Congressional sit in, forces me to think about guns, something I
generally don’t like to do.
Actually, when the killing at Orlando’s Pulse
nightclub took place, I was in Canada attending a wedding with my family. Because
of this, I didn’t feel the emotional impact as powerfully as I might have, had
we been home at the time. The impact did get to me, however, yesterday when I
visited the site of the crime and saw the many comments and symbols left by
caring individuals on behalf of the victims. I was surprised at how quickly I
was reduced to tears at the site. Perhaps it was because it is a hangout for a
lot of people who are dear to me - friends and former students.
Pulse - With Wall and Memorial Markers
While we were in Canada, my wife and I had dinner
at a Toronto restaurant in which a friendly waiter chatted with us about our
trip. When we mentioned we were from the Orlando area, the mass shooting came up at which point he said to us, “That was an attack on my
community.” At first I didn’t get what he was saying, and I asked him if he was
also from Orlando. “No,” he said, “I’m gay.”
I should have understood more quickly. After all
the Orlando killer didn’t target Pulse because of the city in which it was
located.
Birthplace of Rollins College
But back to guns. A terrific article in the
current New Yorker by Evan Osnos digs
into the multiple strands that bind the arguments over guns together. One point
that leaps out at me in his piece is the fact that the gun industry is
fundamentally anxious to maximize its profits by boosting sales. This, of course,
is normal capitalism, when normal products are at issue.
What makes the “maximize profits” precept
problematic here is that the proliferation of guns is resulting in deaths that need
not occur – a few of which Osnos’s article describes. The current scenario, in
which the gun industry, bolstered by the lobbying power of the NRA, pushes gun
sales to the limit, reminds me of the tobacco industry in the 1950s and 60s. Tobacco
executives at that time, though they knew their product was killing people by
the thousands, peddled a bogus story that helped it maximize profits, no matter
the cost in lives.
As Osnos writes at one point, “…a whistle-blower
named Robert Hass, who had been Smith & Wesson’s marketing-and-sales chief,
said that companies knew far more than they admitted about how criminals
obtained guns, and that ‘none of them, to my knowledge, take additional steps…to
insure that their products are distributed properly.’”
Of course they don’t, because capitalism says you
must maximize profits, and taking such steps would surely put a dent in those
profits. It seems the magic of the marketplace can make both ethics and lives disappear
in a puff of smoke.
Osnos concludes his terrific piece with the
comment that the pro-gun and anti-gun worlds are growing further apart to the
point where each side is coming to see the other as wishing to inflict harm. I
can’t say I disagree with this entirely, though as someone who would like to
see stricter gun controls, I don’t think of myself as exactly “anti-gun.”
I can sympathize with hunters, with people who,
misguided though their ideas may be, would like to have protective guns in
their households, and so on. What I don’t have any sympathy for are such
grossly misguided notions as that household guns are necessary for our “freedom,”
and that increased regulations are somehow the tools of tyranny. These ideas
are - not to put too fine a point on it - nutty. And I am especially hostile to
the linking of ever-increasing gun sales to the raw avarice of the profit
motive – a motive that has no regard for the bloodletting it triggers.
On the Memorial Wall outside of Pulse
