Tell Me Why

OK, so you are the proud owner of an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. I don’t think you’re evil. I just don’t understand why this is so important in your life. So you have to help me out a little here.

Maybe you’re a collector. That I get. I was in the news business and used to listen to police scanner radios at work. It then became a hobby with me, and when the latest radio came out, I was the first to get it. I didn’t own every radio made, but I was good at picking out the classic ones, which I still have. They are not just decoration. It’s important to me that each one functions. So if you own a gun, I can see that it’s more than just something for a display case – it has to work.

Maybe you just like testing the limits of the gun, what it can do, how accurate it is. Maybe it’s target practice, hitting a bull’s eye, or maybe mowing down empty cans or bottles on a stone fence. Maybe it’s your release, your way of relaxing.

Maybe you’re a hunter. I won’t think ill of you if you’re hunting un-endangered animals, maybe to help thin out a herd or get rid of real pests. It’s not something I would do, but I’m not you. I wasn’t raised with it, maybe you were. You do have to ‘splain to me, however, why you need an AR-15 for that purpose, I don’t see the sport in it, and it doesn’t seem fair to the animal somehow.

I’m having a little more trouble with the other potential reasons. Perhaps you own the gun because it makes you feel safer and gives you the assurance that you can protect yourself and your family. Fine, but against what, exactly? Somebody breaking into your house with evil intent? Wouldn’t a simple handgun work for that? Do you envision multiple people breaking in, is that it? Or do you need it for the time after the earthquake when the ravenous hordes threaten you? So how many hordes must you hold off? 

Do you have the weapon just in case your government goes bad and it might want to disarm and enslave you? Or some other government’s army invades the country, and as a patriot, you have to defend your homeland? I like war movies too…but, really?

It’s some of the personal reasons that worry me the most. Do you secretly think of yourself as weak, and the gun makes you feel more powerful? Do you want to be respected, and perhaps even a little bit feared, like nobody better f*** with you? Or, do you just want to be noticed and remembered, make a splash, so the world will know you were here, that you counted for something?

Maybe all this is none of my damn business. OK. But if you don’t want to answer these questions for me, at least answer them honestly for yourself, and please think long and hard about why your answers make sense.

Running With the Ball

I would like to impress you with some game-changing profundity about school shootings, but I can’t. Those more eloquent than I have long since covered that ground. And we are all repeating ourselves anyway. The only thing that’s significantly different now is the timing. The Parkland, Florida tragedy has presented those concerned about guns with an opportunity.

Maybe some of us are a little tired of the idea that guns represent an insoluble problem and that the NRA has an unbreakable stranglehold on the electoral process. But it’s still only February, and the congressional election, along with the ones for many state and local offices, are months away – plenty of time to start identifying legislators who have taken campaign money from the NRA and putting up candidates against them who refuse to do so. Single-issue politics? More like football. It’s about running with the ball that’s been thrown and caught. Football is about focusing on a single objective: getting the ball across the goal line.

We also hear the refrain that mass shootings are the new normal, that the repetition of these events has forced us to numb ourselves to the pain because there is no other choice. I believe the opposite, that the cumulative effect of shooting after shooting has finally reached a tipping point. Now, it’s school kids themselves accusing their government of failing them. Can they energize a movement where no one else could?

In football, most passes are not touchdown runs. The term “rushing” is a little curious, as most drives to the goal consist not of those big forward pushes but of many little advances -- and the movement is not always forward. Why did the FBI drop the ball on warnings about the Florida shooter?  But life, like football, is about seeing opportunities, taking advantage of them, and persevering until the ball is carried into the end zone, so to speak.

How many of us can remember when it seemed that everyone smoked? I did, most of my friends did, and most everyone in movies and TV did. Now, smokers, of tobacco at least, are a dwindling number. Smoking is thought of as not only unhealthy but inconsiderate of others, and smokers find it more and more difficult to indulge their habit, as venues for it disappear and the prices for cigarettes shoot through the roof. Smoking is still legal, but it’s no longer celebrated, just tolerated. Who would have foreseen that in 1960? This is how it has to be with guns in this country, for change to happen. Will today’s teenagers – the ones who will grow up to be tomorrow’s legislators -- be our ball-carriers on this drive?

Start 'Em Young

The #metoo and #timesup movements caused a strange leap in my mind. I thought of Emily Post, the iconic American author best known for her books on manners. I know this is going to sound like gross trivialization of a very serious subject. But stay with me.

When we hear the word “manners,” we typically think of little things that apply to family mealtimes: not putting elbows on the table, passing the dinner rolls to others before we take one for ourselves, or to make it current, not texting our friends after we sit down.

At their core, manners are about respect for others. The child at the dinner table takes his smartphone out of his pocket to text. He thinks he’s entitled to use it. Maybe you are a parent who happens to have an instinctively empathetic kid who knows not to do that because of the disrespect to others at the table. More likely, though, you don’t, and you have to teach him that there is a time and a place for texting, and the dinner table isn’t one of them.

So here’s the connection. Men in positions of power may come to believe they are entitled to certain behavior when it comes to women over whom they have authority, as in the workplace. Where did they learn this? I submit that it’s more about what they didn’t learn growing up, or perhaps forgot. I heard part of a radio series last week called Beyond #metoo. One of the segments featured a program in a Northern California middle school to teach boys about respecting girls. It is run by athletic coaches, as these are the figures many boys relate to as mentors. The boys are taught not only to respect girls themselves, but to intervene if they see other boys disrespecting them.

The shaming of abusive men in power is just the beginning of what needs to happen. Males must be taught as children what respect for women is. And the other part of this is that girls must be taught to respect themselves, to learn the power of the word NO, when to use it, and the remedies available it a male in their life doesn’t hear it.

Some half a century before women were granted the right to vote in this country, a noted female religious writer weighed in on the issue women’s suffrage. She said she hoped it would be granted someday. But in the meantime, she said, society should put its efforts into raising what she called a “nobler race for legislation” with “higher aims and motives.” By “race,” I believe she meant those who would create and administer our laws. I think we can all agree that we are badly in need of noble legislators -- noble male and female leaders. Parents and mentors had better get to the business of raising them.