Let’s NOT Have a Conversation

Freedom is a slippery thing.

In recent memory we, as a country, were asked to give some of it up in order to secure a greater good. Our rights to privacy were lessened so that government agencies, we were told, could more quickly and accurately detect terrorist activities. This was in the aftermath of 9/11. I have no way of knowing if the sacrifice was worth it, besides the obvious fact that we haven’t had another attack. Many of us weren’t happy about it—I know I wasn’t.

But my happiness was immaterial. A decision was made that a sacrifice was needed, because the situation called for some sort of action. Things couldn’t go on the way they were any more, after such a dreadful tragedy. It was the price of doing the business of protecting the country. I was there in New York on 9/11. I walked out of 5 World Trade fifteen minutes before hell broke loose. I’m a pacifist, but I wanted an eye for an eye. Our anger was real, as was our resolve that what happened that day should never happen again. How that anger and resolve was misused in the following years is a topic for another day.

There is only one topic today. It’s those children and the brave adults who protected them. It’s beyond words I have the ability to provide. I do not wish to diminish the grief we all feel by talking about guns. But guns need to be part of the discussion.

In the immediate aftermath of the Newtown shootings, gun advocates and gun control advocates jumped to their positions. “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” “People kill people WITH guns.” Plenty of well-meaning folks suggested that this wasn’t the time to talk about the issue. Others suggested we needed to “have a conversation” as a nation at some unnamed time in the future. Still others said we should be talking about mental health, not guns.

I respectfully disagree. Now is the time to talk about it. We don’t need a future “conversation”. The issue is complex, and mental health is a part of it, but not the only part.

Here’s what I need to know from my American brothers and sisters who resist gun control: what price freedom? Is your right to own an assault weapon worth a life? Would you be willing to sacrifice it for a greater good? If your answer is “no” I’m guessing that you believe there is no connection between the availability of these weapons and the rash of mass killings we have been experiencing in this country. Our mental health system isn’t working. If someone really wants to kill, they will find a way. If you take away the guns, only the criminals will end up with them.

Nearly none of the perpetrators of these mass killings came out of our mental health system. There were signs of trouble, yes, but few of them were medicated or institutionalized. The idea that these were obviously crazy people who could have been stopped if only a psychiatrist had signed them in for treatment is a myth. These are sad, desperate young men who live on the outskirts of inclusion. We need to be able to identify them before they snap, and mental health professionals can help improve that in the future. But blaming the mental health system for their actions is a smokescreen.

If I really want to get to the Stewart’s in my town, there are various ways to do so. I could walk. I could ride a bike. I could call a taxi. But I’m not going to do any of those. I’m going to drive my car, because it’s the EASIEST way for me to get where I need to go. If someone really wants to kill, they will find a way. Agreed. And if someone wants to kill the most amount of people in the least amount of time, they are going to use an automatic weapon. That’s why our troops use assault rifles and not bows and arrows. In the recent shooting, 26 lives were ended in about two and a half minutes.

But if we make laws banning automatic weapons, next you’ll come after my other guns.

Ah. There’s the rub. You want your gun. You feel safer with it. Maybe you hunt. Maybe you just think it’s incredibly cool. Either way it’s your constitutional right and you’re not gonna give it up until they pry that gun from your cold, dead hand. You want to protect that right, so you adopt certain beliefs: that this is a fundamentally dangerous country, that there are gun toting criminals we need to protect ourselves against. That if they have the guns, we need to as well. That a few renegade lunatics are no reason to start banning guns. That it’s not the guns’ fault. And maybe you believe every one of those things are true.

But so is this. The price of the right to own a gun is in lives. That’s the cost of doing business. The price of “freedom”. Lives. Access to firearms makes it easier to kill. I find it hard to understand arguments against this statement as anything more than simple denial. Automatic weapons are made to kill quickly and efficiently. So are rifles and handguns. And they do. It is their raison d’être.

Are we willing to continue to pay that cost? Or will we change?  What price freedom?