Correspondence: Guns, cajones, & other disturbances

NRA-recommended weapons
for mass assault

Edited by Moristotle

[Items of correspondence are not attributed; they remain anonymous. They have been chosen for their inherent interest as journalism, story, or provocative opinion, which may or may not be shared by the editor or other members of the staff of Moristotle & Co.]

The Marine who wrote the article “I Was a Marine. I Don’t Want a Gun in My Classroom” [Anthony Swofford, NY Times, February 24] is now a classroom teacher. Excerpt:

Before the United States Marine Corps allowed me to carry a live M-16 assault rifle, I went through hundreds of hours of firearms training....
    The military issue M-16 is the model for the AR-15 assault rifle that the accused shooter used to kill 17 people this month at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla…There is no reason that any civilian, of any age, should possess this rifle.
    At the White House on Wednesday, President Trump suggested that if a football coach at the high school, Aaron Feis, had been armed, he would have saved even more lives than he did, perhaps even his own....
    This is absurd. More likely, had Mr. Feis been armed, he would not have been able to draw his weapon (a side arm, presumably) quickly enough to stop the shooter, who with an AR-15 would have had the coach outgunned....
    A few days ago, the lunacy of the suggestion to arm teachers was driven home to me as I prepared to teach my undergraduate creative writing class. I arrived uncharacteristically early and sat down with a few students to banter about this and that.
    Suddenly, there was a loud bang outside....
    ...I did not think about arming myself to protect my students. President Trump on Thursday specified that he wants only certain teachers — “highly adept people, people that understand weaponry” — to be armed. I will immodestly state that among professors in the United States, I am almost certainly one of the best shooters. But I would never bring a weapon into a classroom. The presence of a firearm is always an invitation to violence. Weapons have no place in a learning environment. [read more]

Trump said, “We’re going to have to start talking about mental institutions,” adding that there was a time when it was easier to have people who acted like a “boiler ready to explode” committed to mental institutions. I agree with Trump on this: it OUGHT to be easier to rush him into a mental institution. [“Trump Says He Would Have Rushed in Unarmed to Stop School Shooting,” Michael D. Shear, NY Times, February 26]

If there is yet another school shooting, I hope Trump will be there to demonstrate how he’d rush in unarmed.

I was startled by Paul Krugman’s poetic line, “the worst lack all conviction and the best are full of passionate intensity,” in his NY Times article “The Force of Decency Awakens” [February 26]. The line is an inversion of lines from W.B. Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming.” Will the emotional backwash of young and decent persons against the GOP’s sordid defense of assault firearms catch on? The killing of children in US schools seemed to cause little political response in the past. It pains me to see that with the lack of gun controls, the US has stepped out of the boundaries of the civilized world. Excerpt:

A funny thing is happening on the American scene: a powerful upwelling of decency. Suddenly, it seems as if the worst lack all conviction, while the best are filled with a passionate intensity. We don’t yet know whether this will translate into political change. But we may be in the midst of a transformative moment....
    You can see it in the reactions to the Parkland school massacre. For now, at least, the usual reaction to mass killings — a day or two of headlines, then a sort of collective shrug by the political class and a return to its normal obeisance to the gun lobby — isn’t playing out. Instead, the story is staying at the top of the news, and associating with the N.R.A. is starting to look like the political and business poison it should have been all along.
    And I’d argue that you can see it at the ballot box, where hard-right politicians in usually reliable Republican districts keep being defeated thanks to surging activism by ordinary citizens. [read more]

Gun lovers, of whom Krugman probably knows very few, are a key part of the base, not only of Trump, but of many, indeed most, politicians, even in relatively Democratic states like Pennsylvania, where it’s been a given that one cannot get elected to statewide office if you support gun control. This is not, on any level, a rational issue for the gun lovers. The gun lobby has purchased the loyalty of politicians in the states and in Washington. With hundreds of millions of dollars. I don’t see an Arab Spring uprising for gun control. The political toadies will instead fortify schools and say they did something. Protesters will get on with their lives and more weapons will be sold. The good people don't have the patience, passion, or staying power. Guns are a religion.

A lot of the supposed “gun nuts” are hobbyists, some of whom build up arsenals of older weapons or hunting rifles. I am a gun owner myself and even once belonged to the NRA. A good gun is a highly evolved beautiful piece of machinery. So there’s more to like about it than the ability to kill. I have always supported gun control but see it as a hopeless task. There are just too many guns in circulation to do much about it. And even if there were methods to clean it up, the opposition is too powerful.

Moristotle & Co.’s Loneliest Liberal is a Marine
& a member of the NRA; see his February 24
column, “We need to rebrand”

Gun conversations are so...male. Of all the gun owners I know (not many, admittedly), not one is a woman. Sadly, I hear that that’s changing as more women are buying guns.
    Why don’t we bring back the phrase “gun safety?” This expression gained traction a few short years ago, beginning to supplant “gun control,” but seems to be disappearing with all the renewed anger, on both sides. Safety is a value that can appeal to both extremes as well as to moderates and could be the justification for at least a few modest reforms.

I too am a pessimist on gun control. My favorite idea is to require every gun to have a GPS receiver so that it cannot be fired in certain areas. You could set no-fire areas, from the narrowness of a school to the entire inner part of a facility. You could make target ranges OK, but not the grocery store across the street. Farmers fields would be OK. And you could control by time of day or date: the could work during hunting season but not otherwise. Cops could make their weapons work when the bad guys could not do the same for theirs.

Guns should be set to not fire within a thousand yards of any living creature.

Grateful for correspondence, Moristotle