Marching for Our Lives - March 24, 2018

I’ve written before that racial hatred and the love of guns seem to fester together as part of a noxious stew in the hearts and minds of some Americans. But recently I’ve become aware of another correlation, one between domestic violence and mass killings. According to an NPR report of November 7, 2017, “perpetrators of domestic violence…accounted for 54 percent of mass shootings between 2009 and 2014.” The data for this statistic comes from the FBI and media reports as analyzed by Everytown for Gun Safety.

I’m not sure how we can put this information to practical use, except possibly by keeping guns out of the hands of domestic abusers. This means, for one thing, current regulations have to be enforced. The same NPR report cited above points out that “the Texas gunman, Devin Patrick Kelley [who shot up a church congregation], was court-martialed for assaulting his wife and their young child in 2012, although this information apparently was not included in the formal government database that tracks such things.”

The domestic abuse-mass murderer correlation makes me weep for my fellow males. Now don’t get me wrong, I am not hostile to men in general. As I’ve said before, I am not anti-male and, in fact, many of my best friends are men. But there is in our society a certain way of being male that can spell Trouble with a capital T and that rhymes with V and that stands for Violence. A key feature of this troubling version of masculinity is its glorification of the male capacity to whup ass or otherwise wreak havoc. I feel sure that this concept of maleness underlies the actions of domestic abusers who wind up killing so many.

I have a suggestion to offer with regard to dangerous males, and I will broach it here even though I realize it is utterly impractical: What if males were to be made ineligible to own guns? Wives, mothers, daughters and female friends could own them, but the men would have to check them out for temporary use - only with the women’s permission.

Okay, this is an impossible dream, but I would like to point out that if it had been in place over the past 20 years, many hundreds of people whose lives have been lost in mass shootings would be alive today.
 

On a slightly more practical level, why not amend the Constitution to nullify the individual’s right to bear arms? For decades the Supreme Court used to rule that this “right” was restricted - as the framers intended - to those participating in “well regulated militias.” But, when conservatives gained control of the Supreme Court, they overturned these customary rulings and expanded this right to all Americans, militias be damned.

Now please note that most democratic countries don’t insist on the right of citizens to weaponize themselves, and yet these countries all continue to be securely democratic. We Americans could do the same. And think about how out of date the Second Amendment is. After all, a militia in the eighteenth century had the capacity to effectively resist federal forces, but this is clearly not the case today. I don’t believe anyone with a lick of sense thinks that the citizens of Lubbock, Texas, (for example) could fend off an incoming division of U.S. Marines by relying on their household arsenals – no matter how many AR-15s those arsenals contained.

In other words, the original purpose of the Second Amendment was to protect citizens from an overweening federal government, but this Amendment is useless for such a purpose today. What protects us from having a division of Marines overrun our home towns are the values instilled in those Marines and their commanding officers – basically, their devotion to American democracy. We can thank their high school civics teachers, among others, for those values.

I don’t believe it’s necessary to deprive every American hunter or responsible gun owner of his or her guns. But I do think it would be a step in the right direction if we could get gun owners to admit that democracy does not depend on or even benefit from private gun ownership.

In the meantime, what practical goals can we hope to reach today? Well, taking my cue from the remarkable young students who flooded the streets of American cities yesterday, I would say we should hope for:
 

1. A ban on assault weapons
2. A ban on high capacity magazines
3. Universal background checks for all gun purchasers

And about those students, Wow. Hats off to them. Who would have thought, before the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School tragedy, that hundreds of thousands of young people could mobilize and organize in such a dramatic and at the same time touching way? I am so impressed. May the Force be with them as they shake Congress to its NRA-funded roots.

In case you missed them, here are a few pictures of these young heroines and heroes.

        Marching in Washington, DC. 

 From Evelyn Hockstein, The Guardian

         11-Year-Old Naomi Wadler, Washington, DC

                      By Andrew Harnik, AP

                           Athens, Georgia
Photo by Joshua L. Jones, Athens Banner-Herald via AP

Once these young activists have achieved their goals, maybe we can start rethinking the Second Amendment.

Hell Is for Sleazos

There was a time when the only citizens who enjoyed “Second Amendment rights” were those belonging to a well regulated militia.

But, since conservative presidents, starting with Ronald Reagan, began packing the Supreme Court with conservative fanatics, the originalist, common sense interpretation of the Second Amendment was rejected in favor of a looney interpretation that appeals mainly to gun profiteers.

Even Justice William Rehnquist, a  conservative Nixon appointee, regarded the newly emergent pro-gun court as guilty of fraud (his word) in its bizarre interpretation of the Second Amendment.

The amendment, in its entirety, reads, “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

In other words, gun ownership is not an inherent right for every nut case or conspiracy theorist in America.

The post-Reagan justices, however, (by five to four majorities) have decided that gun ownership is indeed the “unalienable right” of such nut cases or anyone else who, for any given problem, likes to keep murderous options on the table.

God willing, we will see a Democratic president in the White House after 2016 and she or he will put normal human beings on the court who will return the Second Amendment to where it stood for 200 years – as an adjunct to well regulated militias.

Part of our problem is that there are some rather cunning conservatives who are much better than the rest of us at conjuring up misleading verbiage. The very use of the phrase “Second Amendment rights” is an example of this. The gun lobby supporters have effectively created the impression that this amendment has nothing to do with militias, when, in fact, that’s all it has to do with (or did, until the court fanatics began to pretzelize its logic). The country would be well served if we could insist on the originalist phrase “Second Amendment militia rights.”

Speaking of language, even the very name of the NRA is dishonest. The real purpose of this organization is not to serve the interests of gun owners, the majority of whom want to see tighter regulation of gun sales. No, the NRA’s purpose is to serve gun manufacturers and sellers. Since these profit-driven industries are focused on maximizing income, they will do anything to boost sales, and if this means the school shootings will go on, that’s not, apparently, a problem for them. The NRA promotes their agenda, not the interests of the gun owners who favor tighter regulations. So, I have to believe that we will all benefit if, instead of saying NRA, we were to refer to this organization as the “NRA Gun Sellers’ Lobby.”

A little awkward, admittedly, but so much more honest than simply “NRA.”

While we’re on the topic of honest language, there are a few more phrases, foisted on the public by cheesy propagandists, that need to be modified or replaced. One of these is “job creators.” Republicans spout this term when they want to continue the trend that diverts all of America’s wealth into the hands of those who are already super-rich. “Don’t raise taxes on the job creators!” is the slogan, implying that taxing Donald Trump will mean that your unemployed brother will never get a job.

But the real job creators are the middle class and the poor. The so-called “job creators” only create jobs when these ordinary citizens boost demand by spending their money. These people, the middle class and the poor, have the potential to create jobs, or at least they do when conservative policies don’t break their economic backs as happened in 2008 (and 1929).

Think about it: if people like Mitt Romney and Donald Trump really are the “job creators,” why the hell didn’t they start creating jobs in 2008?

Even the phrase “free market” is 90% bullshit. I think conservatives like to toss it around because the word “free” is closely tied to the idea of all that is good in America. But how “free” are so-called free markets?

When WalMarts started taking over retail sales in towns all across America (except for parts of Vermont!), the immediate result was that thousands of small business families that had operated freely for generations were crushed. “Theoretically,” these families could have got their hands on several billion dollars in loans, established contacts with slave-labor manufacturers in Asia, employed illegal tactics to stifle unions, funneled money to members of Congress who would write laws in support of their practices, and then competed “freely” against WalMart on its own terms. But only “theoretically.”

In reality, their only freedom, once their longstanding family businesses were bankrupted by WalMart, was the freedom to accept minimum wage jobs at WalMart, often shaped so as to strip them of benefits.

So is this capitalist market really free? As an Animal Farm pig might have said, “In capitalism, all of us are free, but some of us are freer than others.”

Because of the deceptively positive tone of the phrase “free market,” I recommend that every time some right-wing pundit tries to promote lower taxes and looser regulations on “job creators” for the sake of the “free market,” we call Bullshit! on his or her use of the phrase “job creator” and, furthermore, insist that he or she replace “free market“ with the more apt term “capitalism.” “Capitalism,“ I believe, is more morally ambiguous, and hence, more accurately represents what goes on in the corporate-dominated economic arena in which we now struggle to survive.

                              Hell: Next Nine Exits

When Dante toured Hell, he found the Fourth Circle occupied by sinners whose souls were driven by Greed. Their punishment included spending eternity pushing huge weights, representing the wealth they had grasped at in their mortal lives. Here, I think, is where Dante might have encountered the “job-creating” Walton family, had 14^th century Florence been afflicted by WalMarts.

   Fourth Circle Dwellers with Their Money Bags

But where should the NRA Gun Sellers’ Lobby end up? Well, there is the Seventh Circle, reserved for the Violent. But maybe they’d have to migrate back and forth between the Seventh and the Eighth, the latter dedicated to those guilty of Fraud.

I don’t know, though. After this week’s killing in Seattle, and especially after the Sandy Hook children’s massacre of 2012, I’m inclined to think the NRA Gun Sellers’ Lobby belongs in the center of the Ninth Circle; I suspect this organization might be an avatar of Satan himself.

                            Dante's Cold-hearted Satan