Imagine a second American Revolution, not the colonists against the British this time but the sane against the insane. Imagine that the sane — you and me, and everyone balanced enough to pose no threat to themselves or the community — actually win this war. We imprison or deport every official connected to the gun lobby and the NRA (“One of the most evil organizations to exist in any nation, past or present” — novelist William Styron), along with thousands of craven, mercenary legislators who functioned as the lobby’s marionettes. We confiscate tens of thousands (millions?) of AR-15s and dump them down the throat of an active volcano. We outlaw bullets, at least all the bullets that couldn’t have been fired by guns that existed when the Founders passed the Second Amendment.
This is a ridiculous utopian fantasy, a fever dream of pathetic futility, because a revolution requires firearms and in this country the crazy people own all the guns. Because of that cruel truth, each of us, sooner or later, is bound to encounter that lone crazed gunman we read about in the paper every day. My wife and I came close — as close as we ever will, we hope — at the end of October. October 25, precisely. On our way home in the fall we always stay overnight with close friends in Bowdoinham, Maine. On the evening of Wednesday the 25th, we were eating lobsters with our friends while a deranged firearms instructor, Robert Card, was strafing a bar and a bowling alley in nearby Lewiston with his assault rifle. The body count was 18 dead and 13 wounded, the 10th most lethal mass shooting in US history.
We heard the news when we woke up in the morning, along with the announcement that people in most of Southern Maine were advised to “shelter in place” with their doors locked while the shooter was still at large. There were a couple of disturbing details. While the bowling alley in Lewiston is 20 miles from Bowdoinham where we were staying, the killer’s home was just two miles down the road that runs past my friend’s house. When last reported, he was heading in our direction. He had abandoned his car and was believed to be looking for another one. We were just a brief walk from his homeplace, and if he’d arrived on foot he might have noticed the last car parked in the driveway — ours.
It made for a paranoid morning. It turned out that Card had killed himself at a marina seven miles away, some time during the night. The Maine-New Hampshire border was shut down during the manhunt, but reopened in time for us to cross over and drive south. It was way too much excitement for our senior group. And back home in North Carolina, the first paper I picked up carried a story about a fatal shooting, apparently accidental, at the Youngsville Gun Club in Franklin County. It was the second fatality at a local shooting range in the month of November, the first one occurring at the Personal Defense & Handgun Safety Center near Raleigh. I relish the irony, as always. But irony is on life support in America, and satire is a case for the coroner. Donald Trump “hath murdered satire,” as surely as Shakespeare’s MacBeth “hath murdered sleep.”
There are some things, and some people, so outrageous that comic exaggeration can never touch them.
Americans and their guns. I’ve been beating this drum as long as I’ve been strong enough to grip the drumsticks. I’m glad I didn’t have to win my argument by taking a fatal bullet from Robert Card’s AR-15, but it would have made a great talking point for the next masochist who took up the gun control torch. There’s no conceivable defense for assault rifles, high-capacity magazines or “bump stocks.” No rational, even semi-civilized nation would allow civilians to buy and stockpile military weapons like the AR-15. The chief responsibilities of any government are to keep the peace and protect the lives of its citizens; allowing the peasantry to own weapons of war is just a simple recipe for anarchy and terrorism.
Assault rifles have no practical value. Only a bloodthirsty idiot would use one to kill large animals, and they’re pointless for “self-defense” unless you’re being attacked by a platoon of terrorists with guns as lethal as yours, a home invasion you’re unlikely to survive. AR-15s are strictly for warfare — and for deranged mass killers like Robert Card and the ones who murder schoolchildren. Yet these weapons have become iconic among the kind of belligerent Americans who might vote for Lauren Boebert or Donald Trump.
“It’s an icon, it’s a symbol of freedom,” one AR-15 owner told the New York Times. “To me, it’s America’s rifle.”
America’s indeed, and America’s only. Item, from the Raleigh, N.C., News and Observer: “On Thursday, Feb. 23, a juvenile brought an AR-15 rifle to a basketball game at Millbrook High School in Raleigh.” It brings a whole new meaning to “foul shooter.”
The Millbrook incident was one of a dozen reports of minors bringing guns to North Carolina schools — including one my daughter once attended—-in the month of February alone. From 2019 to 2021, the number of North Carolina minors killed by firearms more than doubled, to 121 deaths in all. In 2022 there were 46 school shootings in the USA, a new record, claiming 34 lives and exposing 43,000 schoolchildren to the lone gunman, mass killing experience. In 2022 a total of 48,000 Americans died by gun violence, one every 11 minutes. These ghastly statistics go on and on. I’ve been publishing and recycling them for years, to no obvious effect. But there’s one clipping on my desk that seems to seal, once and for all, America’s special place among the nations of the world when it comes to firearms.
It reads: “Last year, Shinzo Abe, the former prime minister, was assassinated by a gunman during a political speech. It was one of only four deaths by a firearm in Japan in all of 2022.”
FOUR? Compared to 48,000? If you’d like to think this means the Japanese are a much less violent, less dangerous race of people than Americans, you probably aren’t familiar with the samurai tradition, and you didn’t fight against them in the Pacific in World War II. The reason there are so few bullet holes in their bodies in 2023 is that Japan has made it almost impossible for civilians to buy firearms, with some of the strictest gun laws in the world. This can be done — it has been done, in nearly every modern democracy. It can’t be done here.
After a school shooting in Nashville in March, a headline read, “In Washington, a Shared Shrug at Gun Control Despite Mass Shootings.” After Robert Card’s bowling alley massacre, one read “Another Slaughter, Another Congresssional Nothingburger.” Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas dismissed President Biden’s plea for a new assault-rifle ban as “tired talking points.” A frustrated Democratic senator, Raphael Warnock of Georgia, said “We’ve got too many politicians in this town who work for the gun lobby. I’m still hoping against hope that somehow my colleagues will find enough courage to put the survival of five-year-olds ahead of their perceived political advantage.”
Another pipe dream, Senator. In the same edition of the New York Times with a column by Jamelle Bouie headlined, “Our Gun Fetish Is Killing Us” (figuratively and literally — gun violence is the No. 1 cause of death for Americans under 19), her colleague Mike McIntire published a detailed history of the bizarre three-cornered marriage between the NRA, the firearms industry and Congress. Newly released files from congressional archives revealed that legislators were not just greedy stooges for the gun lobby, but in many cases the brains and muscle behind the crazy rise of America’s gun culture. Rep. John Dingell of Michigan, a Democrat, was one of several congressmen who served on the NRA board of directors while they were in office. In his case, he outmaneuvered some of the gun club’s more moderate “sportsmen” to shape it into the uncompromising Second Amendment juggernaut it remains today.
I thought I was educated on these issues, but I learned a lot more from McIntire’s article, all of it sickening and depressing. But on this beat there’s always more, and worse. Did you know that the “active shooter defense industry,” as it’s described in the Times, is a multi-billion-dollar goldmine for scores of companies who promote themselves as our only protection against mass murder? “This is an entire industry that capitalizes on school shootings,” said Odis Johnson, a professor at Johns Hopkins. “However, there’s little evidence that what they are selling works.” For schools, they’re selling bulletproof glass, tables that can be used as bullet shields, special shooter-resistant locks for school doors, AI-linked security cameras, emergency drills for teachers and school nurses. When does a nation take a long hard look at itself and ask “Are we hemorrhaging brain cells? Are we hopelessly insane?”
The writer Stephen King, Maine’s most famous citizen, published an essay after the Lewiston massacre that seemed to answer those questions in the affirmative. King expressed feelings of helplessness and hopelessness over the “addiction” to guns that has created bloody horrors beyond any he imagines in his fiction. Ever since the Supreme Court’s District of Columbia vs. Heller decision in 2008, essentially dismissing “a well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state” as the operating clause of the Second Amendment (as our legal system assumed for 200 years), the unregulated ownership of deadly firearms has become an almost psychotic commitment for a huge minority of sick Americans.
What, if anything, can we do? A program in Chicago called CRED, which focuses on re-educating the young men most likely to be involved in gun violence, has reported promising results. But it’s a modest response to the grotesque mixture of paranoia, machismo and diabolically manipulated class resentment that nourishes the gun cult — not to mention the MAGA-polluted moral and ideological septic tank that currently passes for the Republican Party. When cupidity joins hands with stupidity, they create an almost irresistible force. The weapons manufacturers and the gun dealers prosper, the captive legislators pad their campaign funds, and the slack-jawed, self-deceived Second Amendment true believers repeat their mantra, “We are the safe and free ones, the patriots, the real Americans.” And the body count — 300,000 wounded, half of them fatally, in the last decade — continues to astonish the world.
You don’t need to meet Robert Card to end up in the morgue. If you have any gun in your home, you’ve already multiplied the chances that you or one of your family members will die of gun violence. Suicides in America have reached all-time record levels — 50,000 in 2022 — and half of all gun deaths are now suicides. Gun sales soared all during the pandemic. With the new vaccines, the deadliest viruses are much less likely to kill you than your own trusty six-shooter. Everytown For Gun Safety claims that 93% of American voters support strict background checks for all gun sales, laws the NRA still opposes. This means that the gun lobby has imposed its legislative will on a helpless, disenfranchised majority, along with its threat to our lives — an anti-democratic atrocity. And only 12 states, Gail Collins points out, prohibit loaded open- or-concealed-carry firearms at the polling place. Many people who call themselves Christians now enshrine the Second Amendment and dishonor the Sixth Commandment (or Fifth Commandment if you’re counting sins in Catholic or Lutheran Bibles).
Along with irony and satire, another cultural delicacy the Republican Right and its NRA commandos have pushed to the edge of extinction is that honorable emotion we used to call shame. The Lewiston tragedy inspired many warnings and tormented outcries like Stephen King’s, but it inspired no apparent shame and no meaningful change in the direction of gun control. The bullet brigade in Congress mumbled things like “criminals will be criminals” (Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett after the Nashville school murders) and the usual nonsense about mental health. Not even the massed corpses of schoolchildren seem to soften these hearts or defrost these brains. The most appropriate words spoken on Capitol Hill came from Senate chaplain Barry Black, in a prayer: “Deliver our senators from the paralysis of analysis. When babies die at a church school, it is time for us to move beyond thought and prayers.” “If kids dying didn’t do it,” echoed a distraught Maine parent, “I don’t know what will.”
We’ll not soon forget our near encounter with the 10th-most-deadly mass murderer in American history. We hope you’re not next. But we didn’t need to travel to New England to smell gunsmoke. The rancid “supermajority” of rightwing Republicans currently dismantling North Carolina had been moving the needle on gun control while we were out of state. In the wrong direction, of course. On Dec.1, a new law went into effect, passed over Gov. Cooper’s veto. It eliminates the state’s requirement for a permit to buy a handgun. Keep your head down, avoid crowds, home-school your children and keep them indoors. If you believe in prayer, say one for all of us.
Hal Crowther is a longtime journalist whose latest essay collection, “Freedom Fighters and Hellraisers: A Gallery of Memorable Southerners” (Blair, 2018) won the gold medal for nonfiction at the Independent Press Awards, as well as the gold medal for essays at the Foreword Review Awards. A winner of the Baltimore Sun’s H.L, Mencken Writing Award, he is the author of “An Infuriating American: The Incendiary Arts of H.L. Mencken” (Iowa, 2015) and four previous collections of essays. Email delennis1@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, January 1-15, 2024
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