Don’t Give Me A Gun Permit, Please . . .
Ruminant With A View
by Elizabeth Boleman-Herring
TEANECK, NJ—(Weekly Hubris)—1/12/11—. . .because the person I would be most likely to shoot would be myself.
I admit, openly, that were I to find myself on a deserted plain, faced with an equally well-armed Dick Cheney, George Bush, or Donald Rumsfeld, with no innocent bystanders (even jack rabbits or rattle snakes) in the vicinity, I’d be honor-bound to handle the situation à la Gary Cooper in “High Noon.”
I will always, always, always blame Cheney, Bush and Rumsfeld, among others somewhat less culpable, for the tens of thousands of senseless human murders in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But, unless you’re a drug-addicted burglar breaking violently into my house (and it happened last year), or a lunatic coming at me frothing at the mouth, you’d be safe in my presence, whether or not I were packing heat.
I still get angry on occasion, a fact to which frequent readers of this column may attest, and I’m a crack shot with 20/20 vision (or better), but violence terrifies me.
I am a person who usually (except in blizzards) relocates spiders and bees and shield bugs to the great outdoors rather than squash them.
However . . .
. . . all my life, from the time I was a tiny child, I have been seriously, clinically, depressed, and all the kings’ SSRI’s and all the queens’ St. John’s Wort and all the full-spectrum light, the consolations of philosophy and, finally, the love of a good man and the care of a brilliant psychopharmacologist have simply lightened, but not lifted, my load.
Give me a gun—and I could get one in a heartbeat (like every other ambulating-depress-ee I know of)—and, at some point, I’d blow my brains out.
Take a breath, why don’t you? I’ll do the same.
I’m composing this column the day after “The Shootings in Tucson.” At this writing, I still do not know whether the shooter will, finally, claim more victims, or whether those still in the hospital will recover. My prayers are with everyone who was there at the Tucson supermarket. Everyone. Everyone who touched a gun, or who was ripped apart by a bullet. Every soul exposed to the selfsame violence.
It is the only way I can approach these things. I gather all the souls—the deranged and the noble; the pacific and the violent; the dead and the living—up in my virtual arms, and I hold them out to The Universe for healing, for absolution, for justice, for sanctifying.
As Bob Herbert wrote on today’s New York Times editorial page: “Excluding the people killed in the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, more than 150,000 Americans have been murdered since the beginning of the 21st century. This endlessly proliferating parade of death, which does not spare women or children, ought to make our knees go weak. But we never even notice most of the killings. [And, pay attention: Here is Herbert’s main point, italics mine.] Homicide is the white noise in this society.”
Take another breath, please.
To my mind, homicide and serious mental illness (schizophrenia, uncontrolled bi-polar disorder, psychopathy and sociopathy, and recalcitrant depression) comprise the white noise in this society.
Some of us just walk around like bombs waiting to explode. Grenades with pins long-pulled.
And, guess what? We’re about to receive back, into our already disturbed fold, an enormous number of veterans so psychologically damaged by what they have seen and done “over there,” that the mayhem is about to go postal, not to put too fine a point on it. Bush’s and Cheney’s, and now Obama’s wounded chicks, armed and dangerous, are about to come home to roost.
Guns are as readily available as string cheese, licorice and light lattés in America. When I was living seven miles from another living soul on five acres of prime, Lake Hartwell real estate in South Carolina, I slept with a shotgun under my bed.
I was terrified of it, but the house had been broken into so many times by desperate souls feeding their drug habits that I really had no choice: die; or kill.
In South Carolina, too, at a major university, I taught Journalism for several years in the 1990’s. I always scheduled long, individual conferences with my students, one and all, keeping a bead on them in multiple ways; trying to hold them to the academic straight and narrow. I always wanted to know my students as persons, not names and GPA’s, and that compulsion of mine, one day, saved a great many lives.
A male student, a freshman, came in for his first Journalism 101 conference and, after the preliminary small talk, said he was dissatisfied with the university he’d chosen, just as he’d been dissatisfied with the Marines, which he’d just left.
I asked why and was surprised to hear him say that the Marines had been too soft for him, and college was just another sort of “joke.” He went on. “I have a bunch of weapons and, sometimes, I just want to go up on the water tower here and pick people off. One by one.”
After our meeting—blessedly, the last of the day—we were both due in my class. I walked the strapping young man over to the classroom, got him seated, and then went out into the hall and called the Campus Police, the Town Police and a friend (who is a paramedic captain and martial artist), and filled them in.
The police sent two men to my classroom and, along with my paramedic friend, they sat in the back, introduced to the freshmen as “visitors evaluating the journalism offerings at our university.” They had clipboards; they took notes.
Meanwhile, the Town Police were tossing the student’s dorm room. In it, they found an arsenal of guns.
At the end of a tense hour and a half—God knows what I found to say—the Campus Police detained my student and lead him away. I went back to my office and collapsed.
No one ever updated me on the outcome of this little three-act drama, either. I can simply surmise that, somehow, this youth, who disappeared like a shadow from our campus, was adequately “treated” somewhere, somehow, for his violent delusions.
But, you and I know better. Our health care system—especially our mental health care system—is as broken as our gun regulations. (Or our regulation of offshore drilling. Etc., etc.)
Tragically, I know I shouldn’t be given weaponry of any sort. Even my kitchen knives give me the heebie-jeebies on occasion. But I’m one of the “walking wounded,” one of those who knows she’s a danger to herself (if not, thank God, others) some days.
It’s the Tim McVeigh’s, the John Hinckley, Jr.’s, the Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme’s, the Jared Loughner’s who walk among us that we must find a way to locate, isolate, and remove from our midst.
In a society as violence-prone, as gun-studded, as verbally-vitriolic as our own, we cannot afford any longer to let the “sound of lunacy” pass for “white noise.”
Elizabeth Boleman-Herring
Elizabeth Boleman-Herring, Publishing-Editor of “Weekly Hubris,” considers herself an Outsider Artist (of Ink). The most recent of her 15-odd books is The Visitors’ Book (or Silva Rerum): An Erotic Fable, now available in a third edition on Kindle. Thirty years an academic, she has also worked steadily as a founding-editor of journals, magazines, and newspapers in her two homelands, Greece, and America. Three other hats Boleman-Herring has at times worn are those of a Traditional Usui Reiki Master, an Iyengar-Style Yoga teacher, a HuffPost columnist and, as “Bebe Herring,” a jazz lyricist for the likes of Thelonious Monk, Kenny Dorham, and Bill Evans. (Her online Greek travel guide is still accessible at www.GreeceTraveler.com, and her memoir, Greek Unorthodox: Bande a Part & A Farewell To Ikaros, is available through www.GreeceInPrint.com.) Boleman-Herring makes her home with the Rev. Robin White; jazz trumpeter Dean Pratt (leader of the eponymous Dean Pratt Big Band); Calliope; and Scout . . . in her beloved Up-Country South Carolina, the state James Louis Petigru opined was “too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum.” (Author Photos by Robin White. Author Head Shot Augment: René Laanen.)
9 Comments
Dean Pratt
Well said as always my love…
Mano Scritto
The “sound of lunacy” is sick, deviant behavior. “White noise” is a cacophony of sounds that fade into the background. While each is different, both bring to mind Munch’s painting “The Scream”. Unfortunately hands over ears cannot shield you from reality.
Shots fired in a shopping mall are no different from those in a class room, a post office, from a tower, a highway or dozens of other places that we hear about on television or read about in the newspapers. The scene of the incident varies but the impact of the bullet is always flesh entering to the victim and soul chilling to those not directly involved. How can we “locate, isolate, and remove from our midst” or in any way contain the very small percentage of our population that commit these heinous acts? Ferreting out a potential perpetrator is difficult. Short of a finding a person, as you did, who verbalizes evil, which in turn leads to the discovery of an arsenal, how do we identify the person? Profiling may help. Is this type of activity politically or ethically incorrect? If not, how do you implement it? I don’t want “Big Brother”, but I do want more security.
It comes back to weapons control. Less weapons and more control really is better. A crazy person with a knife might kill and injure less people than a person with a gun. Thank goodness we seem to limit hand grenades and rocket launchers. We do, don’t we? Guns seem to be an American Right, but somehow the excessive number of them seems like an American Wrong. Why are guns regulated on a state level? State lines won’t stop a bullet. It’s time for a unified Federal agency to coordinate a registry that tracks numbered weapons and ammunition with reasonable restrictions on ownership. There are registrations and/or restrictions on drivers licenses, practicing medicine, owning dogs and library cards. This does not trample rights. There are still automobile drivers, physicians, dog owners and book borrowers. There is a strong advocacy for an armed citizenry, to allow people to carry a gun to school, the store, the movies. Know this: I want to live in a peaceful village, not an armed camp. Whose rights would be trampled. With less mayhem, wouldn’t we all be better enabled to enjoy the fundamental rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?
Charles Donahue
Yes, homicide and the serious mental illnesses stated in your article do comprise the white noise in this society. Yet, how we as a nation define mental illness may be even a louder white noise.
I view Narcissism, (our collective narcissism) as a much more dangerous form of mental illness. The daily death toll it exacts is far greater than any potential damage from the legions of walking time-bombs. Cheney, Bush and Rumsfeld as well as their successors and predecessors, commit state-sanctioned mass murder for profit. Our acceptance and funding of these atrocities, justified by the material comforts they indirectly provide, makes us complicit in the crime. Our inability to confront our national murder-for-hire reality is a form of collective insanity or evil.
As Scott Peck wrote in ‘The People of the Lie’ “…While they (the narcissist) seem to lack any motivation to be good, they intensely desire to appear good. Their “goodness” is all on a level of pretense. It is, in effect, a lie. That is why they are the “people of the lie”. The wickedness of the evil is not committed directly, but indirectly as a part of this cover-up process.
Those who are evil are masters of disguise; they are not apt to wittingly disclose their true colors–either to others or to themselves. Because they are such experts at disguise, it is seldom possible to pinpoint the maliciousness of the evil. The disguise is usually impenetrable ….Naturally, since it is designed to hide its opposite, the pretense chosen by the evil is most commonly the pretense of love.”
eboleman-herring
@Mano: “Guns seem to be an American Right, but somehow the excessive number of them seems like an American Wrong.” Couldn’t have said it better, Mano!
eboleman-herring
@Charles: I’m so glad you wrote in, Charles. Scott Peck’s book was a soul-opener for me as well. As was Erich Fromm’s “An Anatomy of Human Destructiveness,” which takes on the psyches of Hitler and Stalin. Narcissistic Personality Disorder is a psychiatric diagnosis; and, as you say, cultures, themselves, can take on the hue of a particular psychiatric disorder. The question is, where is the line between “illness” and “evil”? That’s the hard thing to locate. Fortunately, how we RESPOND to psychopathic illness and evil is one and the same: remove the perpetrators from our midst, permanently.
Mark Sherwood
You write well and I hope your depression lifts. Not certain if the central focus is mental illness or the fact guns are easily obtained in America. As a responsible gun owner, I do not feel one’s second amendment rights would not be trampled with more control and more enforcement of laws already on the books.
The waiting period for a law abiding non mentally ill citizen to legally buy a gun should be increased, and the background check should be thorough.
Lake Hartwell, a great lake where I learned to ski!
Rock on, and be safe.
eboleman-herring
From Wikipedia, re suicide by firearm in the US, where 52 percent of suicides are accomplished by gun:
“Gun violence in the United States is an intensely debated political issue in the United States. Gun related violence is most common in poor urban areas and in conjunction with gang violence, often involving juveniles or young adults.[1][2] Gun violence is not new in the United States, with the assassinations of President Abraham Lincoln in 1865, and of Presidents James Garfield, William McKinley, and John F. Kennedy. High profile gun violence incidents, such as the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and, more recently, the Columbine High School massacre, the Beltway sniper attacks, the Virginia Tech massacre, and the 2011 Tucson shooting, have also fueled debate over gun policies.[3]
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated 52,447 deliberate and 23,237 accidental non-fatal gunshot injuries in the United States during 2000.[4] The majority of gun-related deaths in the United States are suicides,[5] with firearms used in 16,907 suicides in the United States during 2004.[6] Policies at the Federal, state, and local levels have attempted to address gun violence through a variety of methods, including restricting firearms purchasing by youths and other “at-risk” populations, setting waiting periods for firearm purchases, establishing gun “buy-back” programs, targeted law enforcement and policing strategies, stiff sentencing of gun law violators, education programs for parents and children, and community-outreach programs. Research has shown mixed results, finding some policies such as gun “buy-back” programs are ineffective, while Boston’s Operation Ceasefire (a gang violence abatement strategy) has been effective as an intervention strategy.[7] Gun policy in the United States is also highly influenced by debates over the interpretation of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, which states “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” In 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court took a position for the first time on this issue in District of Columbia v. Heller, holding that the second amendment secures an individual right to own firearms.[8]”
Wolf
So because you’re crazy, I shouldn’t have a gun? What kind of logic is that?
No wonder kids these days don’t know anything with folks like you teaching them.
Oh, and thanks for dragging the Marine Corps good name thru the mud because you happen to know one deranged idiot who probably got kicked out.
eboleman-herring
No, Wolf, YOU shouldn’t have a gun, not because I’M crazy, but because YOU are, Dude. What kind of an adult signs off “Wolf,” anyway? You give a noble creature a bad image.