Guns Don't Kill People, People Kill People

Here we go again. Another horrific episode of a uniquely American experience. And once again, a political leader stating the obvious that there is something wrong in a person's heart that would lead them to engaging in such a despicable act; essentially making the argument that guns don't kill people, people kill people.

This statement is true. People are the one's ultimately responsible for the act. If I take my .270 out and kill an elk illegally, the game warden isn't going to arrest my .270, right? No. He's going to issue me the citation and I'm going to have to pay the fine and most likely, lose my hunting privileges for a period of time. I may also have to give up the .270 because it was used in the act of breaking the law. But the gun isn't at fault. I am. And this all makes sense, right? So, the gun didn't kill the elk, I did. 

I want to lean into another hunting analogy for a bit. Back in the day, wild ducks were sold on the commercial market so people would go out and harvest them with increasingly effective technologies. Boats with punt guns mounted on the bow, floated up on rafts of canvasbacks decimated huge populations of these ducks. The invention of semi-auto loading shotguns holding 5 and even 7 shells helped to wipe out entire flights of waterfowl. As populations of ducks and geese plummeted, the Federal Government decided to protect waterfowl by passing the Weeks-Mclean Act in 1913, which would eventually get shot down by some states as being unconstitutional. However, in 1918, the U.S. entered an agreement with England, (because they needed to coordinate with Canada, which was a commonwealth of England,) and with that, enacted a Supremacy Claus where another bill with similar restrictions would be upheld by the Supreme Court. As a result, one of the restrictions still being enforced, is a limit on how many shells a person can load in their shotgun while hunting waterfowl. You only get three because any more than that would create an unfair advantage to the hunter that would ultimately result in too many ducks and geese dying. Most of us hunters just accept the reality that we only get three shots and don't have a problem with it. 

I think you know where I'm going with this. The irony here is that our Federal Government found a way to limit the capacity of a weapon that a person could use to hunt for ducks and geese but somehow can't limit the capacity of a weapon a person can use to kill humans.

Guns don't kill people, people kill people. Those people who kill people are obviously either careless, criminal or crazy, right? So, all we have to do is identify those people, eliminate them from the equation and the problem is solved...Right? 

Let's start with the careless. I think we can agree that dozens of kids die every year in this country from accidental shootings and that is dozens too many. Some are from hunting accidents, but far more are from mishandling of weapons that are left unsecured or simply not locked up. So, guns don't kill people, careless people kill people. And by careless I'm not just talking about kids; I'm also talking about the gun owners who refuse to lock their guns up. 

Criminals with guns, kill people. A significant amount of gun violence is committed during other criminal behavior, and this is a huge problem--a problem that has to be addressed on a multitude of fronts including economics, racism, white nationalism, and on and on and on. But because criminality is so complicated, does that mean we can't chip away at gun violence in other areas while also addressing crime? We tend to point out this fact that there are criminals out there killing people and that's the real problem, suggesting that we can't also identify other problems with gun violence and address those problems at the same time. 

Guns don't kill people, crazy people with guns, kill people, i.e., it's not a gun issues, it's a mental health issue. Wouldn't it be cool if we could take a simple test to identify folks that would eventually snap, purchase a weapon, and then go on a killing spree? We could then round all those people up, put them on an island, and isolate them from the rest of us "sane" folk and eliminate any risk of someone going off the rails and shooting a bunch of people. 

Let's be real. First of all, we want people going through mental health episodes to get help. As much as I support "red flag laws," the inherent problem is if people experiencing health issues know they will lose privileges or rights because they seek out help, fewer people are going to get help. That doesn't include folks that are charged with domestic violence or other violent crimes but the majority of shooters, experiencing mental health problems, haven't committed a crime to begin with and because of that, are able to purchase weapons capable of mass destruction. That, my friends, seems crazy to me. 

I know what you're thinking; there were signs! This latest incident could have been avoided if the police would have just enacted the "yellow flag laws" that are available to them by the State of Maine. Robert Card had told people he was hearing voices telling him to do violent things. He was institutionalized after an incident with his unit in the Reserves. There were signs and yet, no-one did anything. Why?

That's a great question. Why don't we act? Why don't we use the resources available to us to keep our children, our parishioners, our families and friends who are just going about their daily lives safe? 

Let's lean into that. What we should do or what we say we would do and what we actually do, are rarely consistent. I can speak from personal experience.  A few years ago, I went through my own crisis. I lost my home, my family, and my entire world was flipped upside down. I had to move three times in thirteen months. I had a roommate in that time, who was stealing from me. I remember walking around in the mountains that hunting season almost wishing to encounter a grizzly. I was angry and depressed and while drunk one night I got into an argument with a friend and told him I thought I would be better off dead.

I don't blame this person or anyone else for that matter, for not doing anything; any more than I would have blamed them for taking action like potentially taking my guns for a while and here's why. We all want to do the right thing, but we don't always know what that is, not to mention the fear that escalating something like this to the level of publicly humiliating a friend and taking what is dear to them away inflicting even more pain is real. And then, the thought of losing that person as a friend because of just trying to do the right thing can be paralyzing. Rationally, we can say what we ought to do but being put in the situation where emotions are involved, our actions are often very different. 

It's like this discussion over carrying bear spray or a handgun for bear protection. Some people think you're better off with the gun. My intention with a handgun would be to draw it, focus my sights on the animal, and pull the trigger. I have even practiced this on the range. What I can't simulate on the range, however, is the emotion and adrenaline that will inevitably be present during an attack and because of that, I will never know how I will react when or if it ever does happen, so I choose the bear spray. I know a five-foot spray radius is going to be much more likely to hit the bear in the heat of the moment. Only a few people have personal experience with a grizzly encounter and know how they might act when confronted with a 600-pound animal charging them at 35 mph. Regardless, we all just hope we have the intestinal fortitude to do the right thing if the time comes but we really don't know. 

And this doesn't just parallel the decision to report a friend. This idea that we put a bunch of ill-trained folks in schools with weapons, expecting them to do the "right thing" while staring down the end of a semi-auto, .223 holding 30 rounds held by a crazy man ready to turn them into hamburger is ridiculous. You want to put all your eggs in Ms. Hanson's basket of being a hero that day to protect your children? As much as I loved my third-grade teacher, I wouldn't want to rely on her mastery of a 9 mill to protect me against a shooter with an AR. 

We are hardwired to protect ourselves. When confronted with crisis, we react with what our bodies tell us to do either by fleeing the situation, fighting the threat, or freezing in the hopes it resolves itself without putting us more at risk. Unless we train ourselves to resist the inherited reaction of self-preservation and engage, much like a fire fighter running into a burning building, the chance we do the "right thing" is unpredictable. In short, we often fail to act because we fear the consequences of getting involved or the reality that our lives are in parrel, which just opens the door for tragedies like what happened in Maine and so many other shootings over the past decades. 

We also have a unique ability to down-play the situation. We engage in cognitive dissonance. We know what we feel is the right thing to do, but we convince ourselves we are either over-reacting or that it's not really that big of a deal. "He's just venting..." or "he's not really serious, it can't be that bad..." and most of the time it's not. And because these tragedies rarely come to fruition in our own lives, we are ultimately rewarded for down-playing idol threats and not acting. But sometimes these things do happen, and we can never really predict when someone is really serious about those threats of either hurting themselves or others. Should we report more? Probably. But we don't and again, we are left with this idea that someone else is going to be the hero that protects us.

As for this particular incident where police could have enacted the laws in Maine that would have taken the gun out of Card's hands, they may find that the department failed in their duties and should be held somewhat responsible. However, on a broader level, think of how many people police come in contact on a daily basis and how many times they are confronted with potentially dangerous people. Realistically, do we honestly believe that police have the time or the resources to adequately enact a yellow flag law every time it would seem appropriate? And hindsight is twenty-twenty. It's easy to look back at the cues and determine what should have been done differently. 

Here's the bottom line for me; guns don't kill people, people with access to guns wielding the potential to kill people, kill people. And furthermore, people who have access to guns with the potential to kill dozens of people in a matter of seconds, kill way more people than we should tolerate. And I know this for sure; an angry person shooting a 60 to 140 grain bullet that fragments on impact at 2800 fps with 30 rounds in a magazine and 3 or 4 extra loaded magazines has a lot more chance of doling out a lot more carnage than someone with a hunting rifle that only holds 4 rounds. We can address this reality and as a gun owner myself, I feel it is my responsibility to advocate for laws that keep my community safer. If we as gun owners don't lead the charge on this, we stand the chance of losing many of our rights and privileges. We can thump our chests. We can erroneously call on the Second Amendment or this idea that it's God's given right for us to own these weapons, but in the end, people are fed up with watching their children, friends, and neighbors die.

People in other countries experience depression and have mental health issues as well. Kids from around the world play violent video games. Other countries have criminals and evil exists in every corner of the globe. What other countries comparable to ours don't have is the amount of gun violence we have and certainly don't experience these mass shootings. Why? This is a fair question. The simple answer is gun ownership and the types of guns we have. I don't think it's that simple though. We live in a violent society where I believe, conflict and strife are met with a very different and often a much more violent response than what I've seen with other cultures. Did our obsession over guns create that? Or, is it some other external factors that has made us more violent and because of the ease of access to guns, violence is manifested through gun violence? Or is it both? 

And please don't respond to this by telling me AR-15s and military style assault weapons only make up a small percentage of the gun violence. I know that is true. Less than 4 percent of gun deaths in 2020 were from mass shootings and about 3% of murders involving guns were from military style rifles. The majority of mass shooting deaths, however, do involved assault style rifles. Almost 60% of gun murders are from handguns. I get that, but you have to look at the victims when looking at this data where 60 concert goers died or 47 people at a night club or 32 college students or 27 grade schoolers...what the actual fuck are we talking about?!! Any one of these incidences should have us demanding change. But we aren't talking about one--not even one such incident per year. This year alone we've had 11 such shootings in public places where at least five innocent people died--people that were just going about their business trying to live their lives. This is appalling but what's even more disturbing is that we could actually just shrug all of this off and justify our complacency with statements like, "well, people die in pools. Are we going to outlaw them too?" 

I purposefully have not discussed solutions in this post for a reason. There's no point until we all recognize that we have a problem that needs to be fixed. I propose we start there. Then let's have rational discussions over potential solutions. And let's believe that we can actually fix the problem, but it is going to take some acknowledgement of facts, the realization that there is a lot of grey, and above all, there is never going to be a unilateral solution. 

I'm also doing my best to stay away from pointing fingers. All that does is leads us further into the weeds and further away from finding solutions. We know what we are doing isn't working. We know what the role of our political leaders are. We know what we want and what we demand from them. They have their reasons for making the decisions to act or not to act. If they aren't representing our best interests, find someone who will. 

Keep 'em where they live...