Tone-Deaf Senators
My jihad for more effective gun-control laws continues with this radio commentary, which aired on the March 8 Morning Edition of New England Public Radio. It’s essentially a version of the op-ed piece I wrote for the Washington Post, condensed for a 4-minute broadcast. NPR had asked me for it, and I agreed to record it, in the faint hope that it might open a few deaf ears, particularly in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.
I say a “faint” hope because of an interview I saw recently on Anderson Cooper’s show on CNN. (You can watch it at: http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2013/03/01/ac-flynn-gun-control.cnn).
The man being interviewed was Edward Flynn, police chief of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, following his appearance at a Senate hearing on a proposed assault weapons ban. Chief Flynn had had an heated exchange with Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, but I won’t go into that. What struck me was his angry response to the actions of some conservative members of the committee as people from Newtown, Conn., were about to offer their testimony. The senators walked out!
“I was appalled,” Flynn told Cooper. “They found urgent business elsewhere.”
He had every right to be appalled. One might ask, “What could be more urgent than passing legislation that will save innocent lives, especially the lives of our children?” Those senators’ answer appears to have been, “Making sure we don’t offend the NRA and other gun-lobby groups is more urgent. We want to get re-elected.” Their refusal to hear from those whose lives were wrecked by the massacre at Sandy Hook school was both cowardly and callous, though it may have been in keeping with the “Christian” values they so often espouse. After all, as was said at the memorial service for the victims, the slaughter added “twenty new angels” to heaven’s population of white-winged souls.
I said in my op-ed piece and radio commentary that the guns themselves are the problem – the assault rifles, the semi-automatic pistols with high capacity magazines. That problem is aggravated by another – the culture of violence that’s grown in this country in the past thirty-odd years, a metastasizing cancer on our collective soul. The hyper-realistic, interactive computer games that give the gamer the thrill of annihilating entire crowds with less effort than it takes to crush an ant. The blood-drenched movies racking up doomsday body counts. There are so many explosions in these gory epics that merely watching the trailers is enough to give you shell-shock.
The target audience for this stuff is young men. Probably, ninety-nine out of a hundred can play the games and watch the films without being affected, but the one out of a hundred who is affected, dangerously so, should concern us. The Adam Lanzas, the Jared Loughners. To such unstable minds, murder becomes an acceptable way to solve your problems and express yourself, and the ease with which they can obtain firearms gives them the means to realize their horrific fantasies. Do you have a grievance against society? Are you pissed off at the boss who fired you? Hey, buy an AR-15, load a 30-round banana clip, and shoot everyone in the office. Or open up in a crowded movie theater, and prove that the limit on the 1st amendment – You can say anything you want except to yell “fire!” in a crowded theater – doesn’t apply to the 2d amendment.
The cultural cancer is evident within the gun-culture. Recently, I had a conversation and an exchange of letters with an old Marine buddy from Vietnam, who later became a sociologist. Like me, he’s a hunter and target-shooter; also like me, he’s outraged by the gun-lobby’s indifference to the bloodshed firearms are causing in the United States. Thirty-thousand homicides and suicides a year (Yeah, I know the old bumper sticker: “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” And I know the counter-bumper-sticker: “People kill people – with guns.”).
In the past twenty years, my friend has made an unofficial study of what goes on in gun stores and at gun shows and shooting ranges from Maine to California.
“The participants have changed,” he wrote to me. “There has been a change from stable, mature farmers, ranchers, outdoorsmen, and military veterans who admire and appreciate the craftsmanship, structural beauty, and historical value of firearms to immature, unstable, anti-social, angry, paranoid, delusional, and insecure people who are fascinated by and obsessed with the capability of the most contemporary guns to create mayhem by spraying as many bullets as quickly as possible.”
I guess the votes of such people were on the minds of the senators who walked out of the hearing.
Mass killings took place in America when my friend and I were growing up in the 1950s and early 1960s, but they were as rare as July 4th snowfalls. They are now commonplace. In the mid-1990s, while I was researching for my crime novel, Equation for Evil, I learned that some newspapers had adopted an unusual editorial policy. A mass killing would rate front-page coverage only if the number of victims exceeded four.
Two days after the Newtown butchery, I woke at three in the morning, thinking about the murdered kids and their families. I couldn’t get back to sleep when my thoughts turned to my three granddaughters, ages ten, four, and three. Later on, I phoned. I had to hear their voices. I spoke to the ten-year-old, who was old enough to be aware of the massacre. At the end of our conversation, I told her, “Stay alert, sweetie. Be aware of your surroundings at all times, keep on the lookout for trouble.”
It was not unlike the advice I’d given to marines I trained after I rotated back from Vietnam: Stay alert, stay alive. Maybe those were the wrong words to voice to a child, but that’s what we’ve come to – a granddad counseling his granddaughter to be vigilant, because he’s afraid some heavily-armed maniac will try to kill her.
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