Maybe It’s Time to Unload, Not Reload (or, Pissing In the Wind, Yet Again)

Above The Timberline

by Wayne Mergler

ANCHORAGE, AK—(Weekly Hubris)—1/17/11—I do not remember what I was going to write my column about this week. I think it was going to be an attempt to be funny, witty, and charming; an attempt to amuse and entertain the kind and generous folks who take the time to read me.

But now, I can only sit here at my computer with the constant replays of the tragic and horrific events that played out in Tucson, Arizona this past weekend in my head.

Whenever this sort of thing happens—and it happens all too often in this country—I become numb for a while, a few hours or days or weeks, and can’t quite wrap my brain around the horrible events that have happened in my own country, in the “land of the free and the home of the brave.”

God knows, you would think I would be used to this by now. I am, after all, older than Methuselah. I am a member of the Baby Boomer generation and, as such, have seen more than my share of the violence and bloodshed and outrageous stupidity that has all too frequently scrawled itself into the history books of the last 50 years. And it never seems to end.

We reel from tragedy to tragedy, talking about how something should be done, how we have to somehow keep guns away from crazy people and hotheads and, simply, the blatantly evil, and yet, we do nothing.

Nothing is done.

And, I fear, nothing ever will be done about guns in this country.

We have all been emasculated by the National Rifle Association, that fraternity of thugs and assassins, who intimidate and browbeat and incite fear and insecurity and hold the American public by the balls. And they are all armed and dangerous, so we rarely give them much of a debate. God forbid, they shout, that someone should try to regulate the use of firearms in the United States of America.

“They’re tryin’ to take our guns!” they cry out, hysterically.

Of course, in truth, no one is trying to take their guns. No one is opposed to hunting rifles or shotguns or pistols for target practice. But there is no reason on earth why anyone should have access to assault rifles and semi-automatic weapons. No one hunts with them, unless they are assassins or are attempting to annihilate large groups of people. There is no reason whatsoever for these weapons to exist except to kill people. Lots of people. That these weapons may be easily purchased by anyone, even crazy people, is INSANE.

They don’t care. Ain’t nobody gonna take away their guns!

And then, of course, they invoke the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution. God and our Founding Fathers want them to be armed and cocked and ready for action. We have to defend ourselves, of course, they proclaim. We have to defend ourselves from our neighbors and our children and our colleagues and from anyone who has a differing opinion from our own. We have to defend ourselves from our fellow Americans. We don’t “retreat” from our disagreements; we “reload.” We “target” people and groups and districts that we don’t like. We make maps with the crosshairs of targets over those we don’t like. Our political leaders talk about how they want their constituents “armed and dangerous.” Some talk proudly about “packing heat.”

As my favorite political cartoonist Walt Kelly, creator of “Pogo,” once wrote: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

It makes me physically ill.

As I write this, the city of Tucson and the rest of the country is trying to make sense of the senseless, of the horror that happened in a Safeway shopping mall on January 8, the beginning of a new and optimistic year.

As of this writing, six people are dead, including a federal judge, a young congressional aide, and a nine-year-old child. Fourteen others are wounded, some critically, including a lovely, warm, and bright young United States congresswoman.

Somewhere, deep inside me, I am horrified but, mostly, what I feel is numbness. This is not a surprise, not a shock. This has become the American Way of Life. Violence, guns, anger, hatred, vitriolic language, and distrust of anyone who dares to express an opinion contrary to one’s own. We have proud, cocky, gun-toting latter-day cowboys roaming our streets, with a “blow the bastards away” mentality. How can we be surprised when things such as this happen?

We are the single most violent country in the world. Of the supposedly “civilized” nations, that is. Statistically, there are 90 guns for every 100 people in this nation. We pack more heat than even some of the outlaw nations of the Third World. And there are Americans who are proud of this. They think, in their demented, paranoid brains, that that helps make this country great, that we are able to defend ourselves, that our guns make us strong.

They are wrongheaded, misguided, and just plain ignorant, but nothing can convince them of that. Even if we all started turning our 90 guns per 100 people on each other and ended up with a coast-to-coast bloodbath, these people would think they had nobly defended their cause. Exactly such thinking as this led to the American Civil War a century and a half ago. It started with hotheads eagerly ready to defend their honor and their principles and ended up with a nation that had wiped out an entire generation of its sons and brothers and neighbors and left such national scars that we still have not fully recovered.

And yet, with our culture of guns and violence, hate speech and vitriol, we still proclaim ourselves to be the moral leaders of the world. We truly expect other nations to follow us, to respect us, to want to be just like us, when, in reality, many other nations are horrified by our values, our behavior, our statistics.

About 20 years ago, when I was studying in London, I sat one night in a crowded pub in Soho. An attractive young couple sat at the table next to me and we began to converse. When they discovered that I was an American, the young woman said, “Aren’t you terribly afraid to live there?”

“Afraid?” I said. “No, why should I be afraid to live there?”

“Well, because it’s so violent,” the young woman replied. “And everyone has guns. Aren’t you afraid that you will be shot?”

Recently, in the Anchorage airport, we had an alarm accidently go off, causing a bit of a stir in the airport while the security people checked it all out. One woman, a tourist from Sweden, became hysterical with terror and had to be sedated. She thought that she was going to die, to be killed by bombs or guns. Later, when she had recovered, she told me that she had been a nervous wreck ever since she entered the United States because it is such a violent country that she did not feel safe here.

As exaggerated and silly as these feelings may seem to us, it is sobering to realize that this is how some in the rest of the world view us. And why wouldn’t they? For every assurance I tried to give them, they could come back with countless examples of shooting, assassinations and mayhem in our country.

I grew up with guns. My father, a United States Army officer, always had guns. He was a collector and had an entire cabinet full of some of the most beautiful guns ever made. He polished them and cleaned them and made them beautiful to behold. But he rarely shot them. In fact, he almost never shot them. He did like to hunt. Occasionally, he went deer hunting. As a rural Southerner, he had grown up hunting rabbits and squirrels and birds. But never did I ever know him to abuse a weapon in any way, nor to engage in rhetoric about the sanctity of his guns.

I live in Alaska, which probably has, despite its small population, the largest number of guns in the country. (I don’t know that for a fact; I’m just guessing.) Many Alaskans are hunters; most Alaskans take a gun with them when they are traipsing through the Alaskan wilderness. That’s only sensible in a place where a bear can kill you in a heartbeat. Most of my friends own rifles, but I don’t know anyone who owns or feels the need to own a semi-automatic weapon.

When I first moved to Alaska, in 1968, my father, worried about my safety against beasts of the wild, gave me a Winchester rifle and insisted that I take it. I have never been a gun person, but I took the Winchester for two reasons: 1) my father earnestly wanted me to and, touchingly, was concerned for my safety; and 2) I was a greenhorn. For all I knew, he was right. I would need to protect myself against “lions and tigers and bears, oh my!” But, after several years in Alaska, when I had not used the rifle and began to realize that I never would and that I would probably do far more harm than good if I leveled a rifle at a bear, I sold it to a gun collector who was thrilled to have it. If I get eaten by a bear now, it will be my own fault.

I am telling these little anecdotes to show that I am not opposed to the ownership of guns. I am not opposed to hunting. In Alaska, it is a way of life. I am not opposed to gun collectors. I can appreciate the beauty and the artistry of a well-made instrument. What I am opposed to is the ability of any idiot, any whack-job, to able to get his hands on assault weapons and semi-automatic pistols and any other ridiculously dangerous weapon. Yes, I know, if you want to kill people you can do it with knives or even with your bare hands but, at least, the poor bastard has a fighting chance of defending himself against such an attack. A gun is a coward’s weapon and no one can defend himself from it.

They will say, “You can defend yourself against it, if you are packing heat, too.” No, that is a recipe for even greater disaster. Two wrongs have never made a right. And the guy who carries the most powerful weapon may win, on one level, but ultimately it is a no win situation. No one ever wins a war. No one even wins a gun battle.

But I don’t expect to win any converts with this column. I have heard all the arguments on both sides time and again, and I know that I have said nothing here that is particularly new or original. I am just trying to release my screaming frustration at the insanity going on around us all.

I was 19 years old when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Like everyone says, I can remember exactly where I was and what I was doing. I was a journalism student in my second year of college and I was in the newspaper classroom, working on a feature I was writing about student nurses. A friend came in and blurted out, “Kennedy’s just been shot!”

Of course, I didn’t believe him. I waved him away; I was busy composing masterpieces. I couldn’t be bothered by his silliness.

“It’s true! He was shot! In Dallas! It’s on the news right now.”

That was before easy access to instant information. My friend Haskell, a fellow journalism student, and I ran up the hill to the administrative building where we knew a TV was always on in the lobby. When we arrived, the room was full of students, all glued to the TV, all riveted in horror to the news. It was our first experience with such sudden and senseless and world-shattering violence. We knew our history books. We knew about the Civil War, about our fathers’’ valor in World War Two, but this was happening now, in our world, in our country, clearly the greatest country in the world, and it was too horrifying to be real.

But it was real. And it was followed by so many other incidents, some involving guns, some, homegrown bombs, that we all began to feel a kind of numbness seeping into our brains.

Just a few years later, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King also lay dead, felled by the bullets of assassins.

A deranged student in Texas climbed up a campus tower and shot and killed students as they walked to and from their classes. In Alabama, three little girls were killed in a church bombing. In Ohio, students were shot and killed by armed national guardsmen at Kent State University. A few years later, President Ronald Reagan was shot and President Gerald Ford escaped two assassination attempts. In 1980, Beatle John Lennon was gunned down right in front of his own apartment building.

Then came Oklahoma City and Timothy McVeigh and the Unabomber. Then came Columbine; then Virginia Tech (where many members of my own family went to school).

And after each one of these tragedies, we were all shocked, offended, devastated; we all talked and talked about what needed to be done. We all talked about how we needed to curb the number and use of firearms in this country, how we needed to curb the hate speech and vitriolic spewing of our talking heads, how we needed to take this action or that action.

But, of course, we never did anything. We never do. We never fix it.

I am no wiser than anyone else. I have no answers that you haven’t already heard coming from countless others. But when my numbness clears up a little and I start thinking a little, I realize that the things that could make it better are fairly simple.

It would be so nice to see the National Rifle Association’s lobbyists defeated. We need to recognize that their cause is not a cause that is helpful to anyone in an increasingly crowded, increasingly stressed, increasingly urban culture. It would be so very nice if the Glenn Beck’s and Rush Limbaugh’s of the world just quietly went away and never opened their hate-filled maws again. It would be so nice if the Sarah Palin’s and Michelle Bachman’s in this country would use language of togetherness, rather than the language of division, hatred, and targeting one’s enemies.

But we all know that none of that is going to happen. As after all the previous times before, we will talk about these things, we will deplore them, we will despair of them, and then, as time begins to heal our wounds (until the next horror occurs), we will gradually forget. Glenn Beck will preach fear and hatred again; Sarah Palin will reload again. And the NRA will tell us that we need to arm ourselves for the next great invasion of bad people who will try to murder us all in our beds.

My grandfather always said to me, “Kid, you are pissing in the wind.” And, of course, he was always right. He was a very smart, very wise, and very funny man. I need him right now.