Fire!

Fire!

Picture an animal, maybe a nice fat pig, ready for slaughter.  Slam a high capacity magazine into your assault weapon and fire!  Pieces of pig fly everywhere.  Blood and gore paints the target area.  And all this violence takes less than 5 seconds.  Just think what you could do in 5 minutes!  Actually, we know what the bodies of 20 little children looked like after 5 minutes of shooting.  The sight of those bodies drove grown men; men trained for medical emergencies, to serious emotional aftershock.  They could not get the slaughtered bodies picture out of their minds.

There won’t be anything in this piece but raw emotion.  If you want facts and figures go look them up.  What you will see here is a plea for reason and caring, not justifying.

The utterly ridiculous posturing of three young Republican leaders is constantly in the news. They are handsome, articulate, and extremely well funded.  They righteously care about the 2nd amendment and your right to own any weapon or ammunition you want.  If you could have a real pig in your back yard just to shoot at and watch fly apart, the three Republican young leaders would support your right to do that.  They really care about rights.  Rubio and Cruz would die for your right to own weapons.  You are entitled to defend yourself.  It’s in the Constitution!  You should have no constraints whatever because constraints don’t do any good. The Three Large Political Gun Nuts have isolated themselves from the terrified bloody children facing a storm of bullets, reasoning that no law could have stopped the crazy man anyway.

What?  That’s right.  That is supposed to be an argument to do nothing.  “Crazy people will get guns and do violence”.  According to the NRA there is no way to limit access to guns in a free society.  So the murderer at Sandy Hook could have dozens of weapons and hundreds of rounds at his disposal.  And Connecticut, even with some gun regulation, couldn’t do a thing to stop him.  The murderer was well qualified!  He and his mother, now murdered as well, had dandy certificates from the NRA.  Certificates that proved they were qualified to shoot and shoot large.  Despite good efforts, Connecticut let the NRA decide the shooting qualifications of a mass murderer.  The NRA decided that the availability of high magazine capacity weapons in Connecticut had to be okay.  After all, nobody could have predicted that the murders at Sandy Hook would be caused by the availability of violent weapons. 

Availability.  That is a key word.  When one seeks to do violence, one reaches to the thing that is at hand.  When you feel there is no way out but death, you reach into a drawer at the bedside table and get out your rapid-fire Glock.  Rapid fire hardly matters when you are shooting yourself.  You may be dead before your gun stops firing.  Or if you are so angry with your wife that there is simply nothing for it but to kill her, go ahead.  Grab that gun and shoot.  Children playing at your house may even know that they are not supposed to open the gun cabinet.  But they do.  And “how does it feel to shoot a gun” becomes mayhem in seconds.  The guns and the ammo are right there and so available.  It takes time to deal with emotional problems.  A gun deals with emotional problems in seconds. 

America can deal with availability.  We deal with regulating availability every day in hundreds of ways.  And they work.  Try to buy some poison at your local store.  Try to drive your car any place at any speed you want.  Try to get married without a blood test.  Try to get a job without a diploma.  Try to punch out your neighbor for any reason and the law will be called.  Just because your fists are available doesn’t mean you get to swing at will.  We can put the screws to gun violence by demanding that availability be curtailed.  We can legislate amount, number, speed, competence, and justification, and we can make them stick.   Hunters and “sports shooters” can have their guns.  They are going to have to fill in forms, and do it more than once. Those minutes devoted to filling in forms and waiting for approval will save countless lives.

Americans are smart.  We can deal with consequence and liability.  If you have to indulge in dangerous behavior of any kind, you are going to have insurance.  Even living your life, not usually considered dangerous, requires insurance.  If you want to own weapons capable of enormous violence, you can’t just order them on the Internet.  First, you have to show proof of insurance.  And the greater the capacity of some things to do violence, the more that insurance is going to cost.  Weapons that shoot 30 times faster will cost 30 times more to own, and you don’t get one without buying liability insurance.

The Mayor of Doylestown, Libby White, will link arms on Saturday with Mayor Nutter of Philadelphia and Mayor Bloomberg of New York City.  They will stand together, with hundreds of local concerned citizens, in front of the Bucks County Courthouse in Doylestown, on Saturday, April 2, at 12:00 noon.  There will be talk about regulating gun violence.  There will be talk about availability and liability.  There will be courageous efforts by everybody standing there in the March sun; efforts to reach toward reason and sanity in the face of the NRA, the wimpy politicians, and the BIG TIME POLITICIANS who claim constitutional immunity for gun violence in America.  Join them.

Ann Melby Shenkle

Doylestown, PA