Stephen Gottlieb: Response To School Shootings

After this latest school shooting with 17 dead, I’ve read wonderful pieces by people who lost loved ones to guns, and banal pieces by wonderful writers whose imaginations were fried by the horror. What’s left? Sometimes I try to convince, or fire the choir. Here I’m trying to understand why we can’t put the guns away.

There are many strands in our struggle over guns.

• Some decided the Civil Rights Movement justified refighting the Civil War. There’s literature at gun shows and conclaves of gun owners that would be out of place anywhere else.
• Some associations, like the NRA, respond to their most committed, and extreme, members. The NRA’s extremists found a way to hold and even enlarge their membership while pushing it further toward the wrong – the opposite of left is certainly not a synonym for correct.
• Some politicians have been scaring people for decades. It’s us against them and support your police – hardly an issue until it’s used to justify shooting some people in the back – that’s against the law for everyone else and I can’t support so-called “law enforcement” that shoots people in the back.

Let me suggest another. The Founders’ divisions persist. The Founders talked and wrote about the general welfare, the opposite of selfishness. They did not glorify freedom from regulation. The record shows amazing levels of social regulation – and by the way you couldn’t keep ammunition in your house – it belonged in armories. The Founders believed in social responsibility, though they certainly did not always act the part.
On the other side, their “Don’t Tread on Me,” patriotic slogan is now taken as an emblem for extreme libertarianism. I’ve seen people so sure of their right to do whatever they wanted that they were outraged when cutting their driveway through a neighbor’s property and cutting down her flowering bushes drew a very angry response. And once the Revolution ended British restraints on westward settlements, the former colonists couldn’t wait to snatch Indian land across the Appalachians. Indians didn’t count any more than slaves did; in fact Indians were often enslaved as well as exterminated. If “we” want something, and “we” can get it, then “we” should take it. “Don’t tread on me.”

Many schools reduced violence by banning guns, but many gun enthusiasts think more kids with guns would make schools safer. Many cities reduced violence by keeping guns off the streets. To a carpenter problems can look like nails; to orthopedists problems can look like broken bones; to gun owners ….

The tools we hold invite the responses we make. They dis or disobey us, here’s my tool and it makes these surgical cuts in your internal organs. So as innumerable old western movies celebrated, you had to “hang ‘em up.” (Whoever thought those movies could teach us anything?)

It’s not just macho culture; not just about gender or sex. It’s about getting what we want, controlling the world, not sharing or living in it.

Trayvon Martin never threatened George Zimmerman even if he convinced a bizarre jury that he was in reasonable fear, but Zimmerman had a gun which made it easy to shoot a man in the back. That’s a piece of “American culture” I can do without. I much prefer people with the decency and the wisdom to try to live together in peace, paz, pacem in terris, shalom, salaam – peace in any language and the peace that we claim in all faiths.

The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.