Editor’s note: This commentary is by Walt Amses, who is a writer and former educator from North Calais.
[O]n a windy, rainy Sunday morning that felt more like March than June, a couple of paragraphs got written illustrating just how outrageous I thought it was for Budweiser to rename their flagship beer “America,” when I clicked on the New York Times website and re-evaluated the meaning of “outrage.” A man had entered a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, and gunned down over 100 people, killing 49, the worst such massacre in U.S. history, yet numbingly familiar, as is our increasingly creepy paralysis to do anything about it.
In the immediate aftermath of the maddeningly repetitive mass shooting scenario, conservative responses were stratospherically out of touch with presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump blaming President Obama while suggesting he’d been “congratulated” for predicting Muslim culpability, and Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor of the intellectual third world called Texas, essentially blamed the victims, sanctimoniously suggesting men “sow what they reap.”
Other prominent Republicans found extreme difficulty making a smooth transition from supporting their evangelical constituents, who had been demonizing the LBGTQ community through “bathroom” bills for months, to acknowledging the carnage in Orlando as a hate crime. It took more than 48 hours for any of them to even utter the word “gay.” As anxious as they were to pass laws protecting people against non-existent toilet crime, they were just as reluctant to address the proliferation of mass shooting with any tangible action, so all encompassing is their fealty to the National Rifle Association.
But the complexity of the Orlando horror, coupled with the nightmare of the NRA holding the country hostage, offering nothing but “more guns” as the solution to every problem, should burn one single question into the psyche of every American: “If not now, when?” What catastrophe are we waiting for? How many Sandy Hooks or Columbines do we need? And how idiotic do you have to be to believe that “concealed carry” everywhere will actually make America a safer place to live?
Puzzling over “how this could possibly happen” has gotten pretty old by now. It happened precisely the way the Trump phenomenon happened: It was created by the Republican Party (and Fox News) through years of irresponsible rhetoric, racial dog whistles, condemnation of immigrants, and conflating gay marriage with needing to “take back our country.” So too has the National Rifle Association created an environment of abject paranoia where the easy firepower acquisition necessary for the U.S. to maintain its exceptionality as the only industrialized nation where mass shootings are more common than McDonald’s remains unchallenged.
It doesn’t appear to matter that the vast majority of Americans and tellingly, even a majority of NRA members, would welcome some form of legislation that at least matches gun accountability with gun availability. Right now there are an estimated 357 million guns in the country, enough to arm every man, woman, child, adolescent, cab driver, librarian, Walmart cashier, coal miner, farmer, hippie, teacher, CEO, teenager, race car driver, psychologist and ice cream scooper with 40 million left over … just in case. If that sounds like enough to you, you’d be wrong. According to the NRA, there’s never enough.
Right now there are an estimated 357 million guns in the country … If that sounds like enough to you, you’d be wrong. According to the NRA, there’s never enough.
What’s worse is that given modern weaponry and our current interpretation of the Second Amendment, “gun rights” seamlessly translates into every citizen who’s initially “a good guy with a gun” having universal access to the means of becoming “a bad guy with a gun.” That’s right. Every single one of us has the “right” to enter a gun shop or gun show and come out with enough firepower to instantaneously create a war zone.
Obviously we’re no more likely to confiscate hundreds of millions of firearms than Trump is to deport 12 million people or construct a 3,000 mile wall and have Mexico foot the bill. We’re also probably not going to outlaw gun sales any time soon … too many constitutional and legal barriers. But we can certainly explore the parts of the Second Amendment that the NRA chooses to ignore. What, for instance, do the words “well regulated” allow us to do?
It might help if those of us in the anti-gun crowd had at least a rudimentary knowledge of guns — what they’re for and how they work. As well as some understanding of gun cultures which are not all comprised of white supremacists, off-the-grid survivalists, or paranoid nut jobs. Some quite sane people just like to shoot guns. But the leadership of the NRA doesn’t represent these people, or hunters or sportsmen.
And however utterly insane the NRA might be, as they say, even a broken clock is right twice a day and so it is with the gun lobby. Example: Well-meaning people are calling for a ban on automatic weapons, believing when they hear the words “assault weapon” or see an AR-15 or AK-47 in a photograph, they’re looking at a machine gun. Automatic weapons have been outlawed since 1934, which the carnage crowd happily uses as a talking point to undermine other — more credible — arguments for new gun legislation.
Classification as an assault weapon is also unfortunately determined largely by how a firearm looks. Some hunting rifles have a quite similar capability, firing off a round each time the trigger is pulled and some triggers are extremely sensitive, able to get off close to 100 rounds in under a minute.
So what are we left to do? The obvious certainly should be addressed immediately. The absurdity of being on the “no-fly list” but still able to purchase a gun must end. Those with a history of domestic abuse should not be allowed to own firearms. Universal background checks — including closing the gun show loophole — should be overhauled now. And finally, most importantly, the one single alteration that would have revolutionary impact on the future of mass shootings is to dramatically reduce the legal magazine capacity.
There is absolutely no necessity of having 30, 60 or even 100 shots in a magazine for any sane shooting purpose under the sun. The only people who might have a problem with this restriction are those who probably shouldn’t be eligible to buy a gun and the leadership of the NRA. Who cares? This needs to happen yesterday.
It’s been a week since the Florida massacre but it feels like a year. I’m trudging along a familiar hiking trail in a state forest and it’s humid, with temperatures 40 degrees warmer than they were last Sunday. I can’t let go of Orlando and the premise that a nation capable of meeting JFK’s challenge of landing a man on the moon — and that was over 50 years ago — should at least be capable of beginning the conversation about how we can prevent our people from shooting each other so frequently.
At my turnaround point, a hazy Camel’s Hump crouches in the far distance. I realize it’s Father’s Day and the countless number of times I’ve taken this hike with my now adult sons, and how grateful I am to have them in my life. But again my mind drifts back to Orlando and then to Sandy Hook and even back to Columbine and the hundreds of other fathers whose lives have been shattered by America’s love affair with the gun.
