Americans and Guns: Ignorance or Lack of Common Sense?

There is probably little chance of congress actually developing any meaningful legislation regarding firearms or violence. The reasons are varied but most can be traced back to primary root causes.

There is the almighty dollar and it runs the engine of everything American. The gun makers and ammunition suppliers, while being quiet themselves, turn loose their hounds from hell in the form of the National Rifle Association (NRA) and a few other splinter groups who focus on being patriots protecting us from the evil government.

These groups use fear through false advertisements regarding crime in general, while at the same time preaching about the demons of  government taking away people’s rights. They also provide funding in large amounts to politicians, and then threaten them if they don’t support their position of “everyone should have a bunch of guns.” Although their support doesn’t seem to guarantee winning or losing, conservative, and a few liberal politicians jump when the NRA snaps its oily fingers.

This then leads to the next problem: the general public, which the mainstream media likes to call the “common people.” There is a total disconnect from rationality and logic when it comes to addressing the gun or violence problem [because of the traditional values] of Americans owning guns when meshed with fear tactic saturation. The tradition of having a gun, or several guns, in a citizen’s home for hunting and for protecting one’s ‘castle’ has long been a shotgun or a hunting type rifle along with perhaps a handgun or two. However, it is really hard for gun makers to make a lot of money unless they are enticing people to buy more guns by making different kinds.

They started to appeal to the militant factions, or perhaps to the military or bad guy wannabes. So now people who never had the courage or patriotism to actually join the military and serve their country could pretend they were actually military warriors.  But, they were just having fun. This was their hobby after all, and no one, even the government, should dare interfere with it.  As I pointed out, this became a disconnect between traditionally held values of America of a father and son going out and plunking cans with a .22 rifle or pistol or improving marksmanship or skeet shooting to practice bird hunting. Now  those “common people” are virtually foaming at the mouth because the government might dare put any limitations on the weapons they could possess.

They want a gun that has a flash suppressor, and a place to attach a bayonet, and a pistol grip possibly with a folding stock. Why, well hell, every body knows that if you shoot at a deer and miss he will see where the shot came from and come after you. Then you can attach your bayonet for some hand to antler combat, and, just in case more than one deer comes after you, you can flip down the stock to better use the rifle like a pistol, and quickly fire at the attacking deer. Yeah that’s Ted Nugent’s dream I suppose.

The issue here, is “a failure to communicate.”  Yes, the Second Amendment says citizen’s have the right to possess firearms. It does not say that citizen’s have the right to any firearm they wish to have, nor does it say that citizens can have them anywhere under any conditions.

By virtue of the fact that the government(s) have been allowed to take away this right from convicted felons, particularly the violent ones, indicates that Second Amendment rights are not absolute. Similarly, since the government has the right to limit or deny the possession or ownership of such things as machine guns, and anti tank weapons,  buttresses the argument that the Second Amendment is not absolute in its wording. The government does have the right to tell you, citizen, what firearms are permissible and which ones aren’t, and who can own one and who can’t.   To those who wish to echo Charlton Heston’s famous words, “from my cold dead hands” they will do that too. I have seen them do it, as did David Koresh and many others.

So the question then becomes, in terms of the “common people, ” what is bluster, ignorance or a lack of common sense? I would suggest that it is all of the above in some cases. As we have observed in the past, there is a large group of people in this country who simply listen to the right-wing talking points and never think for themselves. This would require they actually do some research and process it intellectually.  This requires too much brainpower for this group as they prefer the life of mushrooms; keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit.

Then there is the ‘just plain stupid’ group who puts their political and economic interests ahead of everything else.  They understand how dangerous the current situation is for the “common people,” especially those who are forced to live in less than desirable neighborhoods, but they just don’t give a damn. This is not only greedy stupidity, but a callous disregard of ordinary common sense. They have no desire to take steps toward controlling the problem, because it interferes with their agenda and who really cares if several thousand nobodies get killed off every year? They always get replaced after all, and those that get killed are usually from the wrong political party anyway.  Their ‘common sense’ point is to keep pushing the “everybody needs a few guns” theory.

If the gun pushers need a signal of how panicked these “common people” are they need only look so far as our schools and their “zero tolerance” policies toward kids. In an Associated Press article by Michael Rubinkam:

“Maryland father Stephen Grafton said common sense was in short supply in a case involving his 6-year-old son, who he said was suspended from White Marsh Elementary School in Trappe for using his hand as a “gun” during recess.”

Grafton, a staff sergeant in the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, said administrators were criminalizing play. He said he told his son he shouldn’t shoot pretend guns because it makes some children upset, “but it was a difficult conversation to have because he didn’t do anything wrong.”

The school lifted the suspension after a day and removed it from his record, Grafton said.

“It’s a very hypersensitive time,” he said. “But, still, common sense has to apply for something like this, and it looks like common sense just went completely out the window.”

The school principal did not respond to messages.

Zero tolerance traces its philosophical roots to the “broken windows” theory of policing, which argues that if petty crime is held in check, more serious crime and disorder are prevented. So it’s no accident that students are often harshly punished over relatively minor misbehavior, said Russell Skiba, a zero tolerance expert at Indiana University’s Center for Evaluation and Education Policy.”

As a professor and consultant in the criminal justice field, I am quite familiar with the Broken Window Theory as proposed by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling. Unfortunately it has been bastardized far beyond the empirical status proposed by its authors.

It initially referred to a study in which neighborhoods that were allowed to deteriorate, tend to support a rise in criminal behavior. If, instead of allowing cars to waste away on the street, and empty homes become decrepit, the neighborhoods were well maintained and crime tended to stay away from those areas.

This follows a long-held belief by Wilson, which makes sense, that if the people in a neighborhood were paying attention to their areas, keeping it clean, neat, and etc., that typical criminal behavior including drug sales on the street, prostitution, and other petty crimes would not start, and by stopping these petty crimes major crimes would not begin. The problem was that many people took the petty crime issue and tried to translate it to everything, which doesn’t always apply.

According to Rubinkam’s article “We’ve seen literally thousands of these kinds of episodes of zero tolerance since the early 1990s……that concluded zero tolerance has not improved school security.”

Thus, failing to recognize the damage that gun violence is causing amounts to political and legal malpractice by the president and every legislative body in the country. When the issue is not only children being used as targets on the street and in the schools, but also being criminalized for menial acts of playing, it is time for people to take notice that common sense needs to be the phrase of the day. The political power and money grabbers need to be put in their place and told to shut up.  It’s time reasonable adults take over.  A lot of damage has been done psychologically to a lot of people in this country because people aren’t doing their job. It’s now time to start doing something. Granted something won’t fix everything, but it’s at least something.

Many thanks to the AP and others for their contributions to this article.

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