Editor’s note: Walt Amses is an educator and writer who lives in North Calais.
Although, the vast majority of gun owners are safe, law abiding and a threat to no one, the shooting in Aurora, Colo., last week demonstrates (again) that however peaceful most of us are, advanced weapon technologies, designed for killing the maximum number of people in the minimum period of time, should not be readily available to anyone capable of plopping money on a gun shop counter.
The masked, body-armored gunman, who strafed the audience at the premier of a new Batman movie after lobbing canisters of what appeared to be tear gas, was able to take down 71 innocent people in a matter of seconds. Twelve died and 20 remained on the critical list days after the carnage.
The shooter had at least three legally purchased guns, including an AR-15, the civilian cousin to the military’s M-16. The gun fires ultra-high velocity ammunition with the capacity to literally destroy heads and rip off body parts while firing shots as fast as the shooter can pull the trigger.
Nonmilitary firearms have killed over a million Americans over the last 40 years and are 22 times more likely to kill or injure a family member than an intruder.
The resounding silence from most elected officials including the president and his GOP opponent was broken by the self-serving abject stupidity of Texas Republican Louie Gohmert’s attempt to take craven advantage of tragedy by saying the attack was on “Our Judeo Christian values” while wondering aloud why there wasn’t someone in the audience also “carrying,” who could have cut short the carnage by cutting down the shooter.
This is the astoundingly wrong-headed yet all too common response from the psychotic National Rifle Association and their genuflecting minions in Washington. That it goes largely unchallenged in Congress is a national disgrace. Nonmilitary firearms have killed over a million Americans over the last 40 years and are 22 times more likely to kill or injure a family member than an intruder.
Anyone who believes that simply pulling out your own gun and dropping a perpetrator in his tracks is logical — or even remotely possible — has been playing too many video games. Years of research on police discharging their weapons shows that overall, somewhere around 34 percent hit their intended target. That percentage drops to 13 when the target is firing back.
The delusional pipe dream that there simply aren’t enough guns, perpetuated by avatars of paranoia like the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre, has become a cordite smoke screen that prevents us from asking the one, simple question that still matters: Why should anyone be able to purchase at will, the capacity of creating instantaneously, the scale of human carnage in a school, movie theater or shopping mall that we would ordinarily associate with combat?
And if we’re ever able to figure that out, or indeed, even have to opportunity to discuss it, maybe we’ll be able to figure out why we live in a country that deems it more important to regulate toys, candy or lettuce more stringently than lethal weapons.
