More than a half century ago, the desperado stood on the veranda, red cowboy hat pulled down to shield the sun, showing off his fringed vest and chaps, his six-shooters at his side, ready for action. Hey, even at five, I was a cute little guy!
No one thought anything about it. Not my parents or my aunt taking the black and white picture with that old look down through the top view thing Brownie camera we still have around here somewhere. We live in a gun culture. And our indoctrination begins early.
I am not anti-gun. A few years later my father and grandfather would begin teaching me the difference between those toys and the real thing in the fields and forests around the ancestors' farm in Lithia. My first "real" gun was a bolt action .22. We would put the beagles in the car and rabbit hunting we would go.
Guns weren't toys. Somewhere along the way we learned the difference between playing bang-bang in the back yard and safely handling the real thing. We knew after the backyard games were over everyone would get up and go home when Moms called us in for dinner. With the real thing we knew it didn't work that way.
But things have gotten way out of hand. Maybe a deeper look is necessary.
First, we need to admit we live in a culture that glorifies violence, particularly gun violence. Ours is a culture that revels in revenge. Tv shows, video games, and movies are designed to move us to stand up and cheer when some fake hero blows away the bad guys. Mayhem is the order of the day.
The NRAs answer is to arm everyone, even public school teachers. Give everyone a weapon and let's just all go freakin' at it. I really don't think more guns in school or anywhere else is the kind of answer we're looking for. Even Wyatt, Morgan, Virgil, and Doc had enough presence of mind to demand all the cowboys turn in their guns at the edge of Tombstone. Maybe they were on to something.
We certainly don't need civilians having access to assault weapons. An AK isn't designed for deer hunting. No more firearm sales of any kind without proper federal background checks, proper training, licensing. No more gun shows where any escaped felon can buy an Uzi. There is something to the argument that less guns will mean less gun violence. With the possible exception of countries at war, Americans have more guns than anyone else and we kill one another more often than anyone else. But we all know the stats. We've spent the days since Newtown reading them.
I suggest we look a bit more deeply. We tend to define violence as the use of the fist, the knife, or the gun. But that's only just the surface of things; the outward manifesting of something deeper.
In the middle of the last century, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, writing in, if memory serves me, Moral Man, Immoral Society, pointed out there are two kinds of violence: overt, and covert. The overt violence of the gun, the fist, the knife, he wrote, is but an outward manifesting of covert violence. Covert violence like dehumanizing poverty, for example. Granted, Niebuhr was writing about a much larger scale of violence; the causes of WWII and other armed conflicts. But his work leads me to ask whether the same thing might be true of school shootings.
The authors of Rampage, the Social Roots of School Shootings, published in 2005, would tend to agree Dr. Niebuhr was on to something. The editors of the Jan. 7/14 issue of The Nation do a good job of boiling down this research to its essentials. Shooters are responding to the covert violence of social isolation, bullying, exclusion, ridicule, rejection, etc.--pretty much the stuff experienced by those kids in high school that never seemed to fit in very well. You know, the outcasts.
Nothing like Newtown or Columbine happens out of the blue. There are signs. Increasing withdrawal. Depression. Despair. Acting out on an escalating scale. Hostility to authority and a host of others. Rampage... and studies like it need to become part of our curriculum for teachers, students, clergy, counselors; maybe for all of us.
Though I do think assault weapons should, and will, be banned, by itself that will not solve the problem. But less access may stop a few; and less access to large clips and assault weapons will at least limit the carnage.
But we have to do more. What we need to do is, to paraphrase an old source, become a bit more conscientious about becoming our brother and sisters' keeper. We can educate ourselves to the warning signs. We can summon the courage to speak up before the shooting starts. We can resolve in this new year to reach out to the outcasts among us; to the kids who are silently screaming for help. We can teach our teenagers and young adults to be more sensitive to the kids who don't fit the magazine image of masculine or feminine good looks or dress or sex appeal. We can learn to reach out. Because no one--no one--suffering that much emotional pain has the ability to reach out for help on their own.
These issues are complex. And I have only skirted the surface. They are not easily solved. Answers are multifaceted. But it seems to me that the foundation upon which any real solutions must be built is the simple knowledge taught by all the world's faiths. That the answer to the question, "Am I my bother/sister's keeper?" is supposed to be, "Yes."
The Jawbone.
