TONS O’GUNS

  It feels like something’s shifted in our national debate on guns. I say “debate,” though I’m not sure that’s quite exactly what we have on our hands. As usual, I have a naive idealist’s notion of what a debate is— I think of debates as honorable situations where people are expected to avoid logical fallacies, rely upon facts and reason, etc. 

  Increasingly, the anti-gun control line feels like a chutney of “common sense” rationalizations, deflection, ignorance of the world outside America, and petulance. Helping keep all of this dubious rhetoric alive is a mountain of cash, the life’s blood of American democracy. 

  Thus, “debate” feels inapt. It’s more like a hostage standoff, where all of us outside the house have to tiptoe around, because while we might be correct, they have a gun. 

  Let us examine, casually, an argument we’ve enjoyed hearing in recent years. 

  “Gun control won’t stop these shootings.” 

This one, I fear, is one of the strongest, but not for the reasons generally implied. Our country already owns an appalling percentage of the world’s guns. Even if gun manufacture ended today, our stockpile of weapons would remain brobdingnagian for generations— for it is one of the few things in this world truly deserving of the adjective  “awesome.” Amazingly, our gun control debate hinges to a great extent on the notion that this unholy number, large enough that few living people can even process it, is not nearly high enough. It’s like a guy looking at the multitude of grains of sand on a beach, and getting his dander up because it’s only ONE multitude. This is the kind of weird anger that I associate with Billy Joel, a man who could look at an unfathomable integer representing his worldwide fan base, but still be frustrated that the number wasn’t even higher.

  And of course, it’s true that on top of that, we keep hearing that even the few restrictions and watchdog policies our political system HAS been willing to tolerate have failed again and again. As far as I can tell, this is because people don’t do their jobs, more than any flaws in the actual rules, but whichever it is, it’s unaccountably odd to hear the right eagerly waving away any solution involving laws, or law enforcement. Conservatives never shrink from ratcheting up the existing laws to stop something they don’t like, and putting more cops on the street with bigger clubs never seems to bother them when the villain is black or brown people. Nor does the ineffectiveness of a solution give them pause, much of the time. Taxpayer-funded abstinence programs for teens are defended despite a track record comparable to Vanilla Ice’s attempt to rebrand himself as a “gangsta.” The drug “war” has been both floperoo and money pit for decades; it’s as if the musical version of “Carrie” had continued to be bankrolled year after year, despite its hard-to-overlook marriage of blood spilling and lack of profit. 

    But allow me to state, tritely, that arguing that a solution is unacceptable unless it absolutely positively fixes every situation is dubious. I don’t recall that sort of thinking when the Iraq War was being “debated,” before we decided to go ahead and do it. 

  I sense a shift, and others do as well, but I also suspect that the shift doesn’t really fundamentally change our situation. At least, not today. 

  The new level of anger and (one hopes) determination on the left is good for us, I think, but in the short term it won’t convince anyone frothing on the right. Frothing on the gun control issue is generally found in the camp of people who like guns, but now we’re seeing some froth from teens and moms too. This is all well and good, but while some conservatives are thawing slightly, the immediate result I’ve seen is mostly the usual doubling down from the other side. Until recently I didn’t see a lot of the patriotic argument that loyal Americans need weapons of war in case of tyranny from our government; this has long been an idea that the GOP and NRA suppress. Or, to be more clear— they’ve managed to make it seem as if that way of thinking barely exists out there, and isn’t what’s driving our policies and our gun sales and our electoral process. 

  Now I’ve been seeing it on Facebook. I’ve seen memes quoting George Washington, and memes quoting William S. Burroughs, both in the service of this idea. The Burroughs quote was more about him just liking guns, I imagine, but as usual he framed it as the perspective of the individual against all the assholes who run the world. 

Let me say that Burroughs is one of my favorite writers, and one of my favorite artists in any medium. And I’m entirely on board with the notion that he’s a quintessential American. But there is a limit. As the Burroughs fans posting this meme must know, William drunkenly shot his wife in the face once. She died. He’s not exactly the best guy to be dictating gun policy. 

  Regarding General Washington— I don’t have the energy today to go into my whole ambivalent take on the USA origin story, but the glib version is that a bunch of wealthy white guys stirred up the rabble into waging a guerilla war against a king who was taxing them more than they wanted to be taxed. I love this country, but I don’t feel the need to romanticize it. Everything ugly that’s happening today in America is connected intimately to what our country is all about, what it’s always been all about. It’s to the credit of our system that we’ve been able to improve it to some extent, but it’s been really really hard, every step of the way. If history teaches us anything, it’s that improving America is nearly impossible. Electing an unqualified fraud is much easier than extending the vote to women was, for example, or the civil rights era. Or that whole Civil War business you may have heard about, if you watch PBS. 

  So, while liberals shift into frothing mode, the right doubles down with their idea that teachers need to be armed. It’s my contention that teachers shouldn’t even discuss this, and should do a little doubling down of their own. But I suspect it will be taken seriously by many, and may even happen in some schools. Some of you seem to think shaming Republicans will help turn this ship around, and I expect that some will point out to me that I appear to be everywhere on this. One minute I’m arguing for civility, the next minute I’m saying we’re in a battle for the soul of this country, and a beat away from armed takeover. I actually think both are true, and here’s my latest attempt to thread this needle. 

  It comes to this— right wing anger is dangerous. I don’t pretend for one moment that we should ignore it. But I don’t think provoking gun nuts, or gun nut apologists, is a wise strategy. That way lies madness, it seems to me— on par with arming English teachers. 

  The solution to this problem, which skates eerily close to civil war a bit more each day, is democracy. This is what many on the right have known for a long time, and it’s the reason they’ve been quietly taking over state houses, and why they’re now quietly remaking the judiciary by stocking it like a fish pond with white guys who pretend that the founders would be in favor of people walking around Walmart with assault rifles. 

   Our demographic glacier has been slowly inching away from white guys for some time now, and it’s more and more clear that the fooferaw about illegal immigration is really about legal immigration. The GOP doesn’t want a USA where nonwhites slap them down again and again, and they’re doing everything they can do to forestall that. There’s less lying about that now from the right, and that’s the bellwether to take note of. It’s about time liberals figure out that if they don’t start seeing the electoral process as the real place to take up the fight, instead of mobilizing on Facebook to insult rubes, all their paranoid fantasies about our nation turning into another Nazi Germany may come true. 

  The smart way out of this requires Democrats to handle things very carefully, without crowing about it. They should work harder than they’ve ever worked to win elections at every level, stop riling up white supremacists, and then put policies in place that demonstrate that they give a damn about all Americans, even the ignorant white ones in the flyover states. 

  If enough white (mentally use your preferred slur here)s get decent jobs, and can feed their kids, we might have a chance of surviving this. It’s up to the Democrats, and will basically mean they have to suppress their urge to be self-righteous, and devote their energy toward effective policy. If I had to choose between trusting the Democrats to handle this task, and trusting a drunk William Burroughs with a gun in my living room, it would be a toss-up.