For the companion Skunk Podcast episode for this article, click here.
As I write this sentence, America is turning the corner on COVID-19, with hundreds of millions of vaccine doses expected to be administered into the arms of its citizens by the end of next month. It's a feat of modern science and production streamlining that, even for its flaws, astounds me. But this article is about a different pandemic entirely. Over the last week, as we slowly wake from our year-long quarantine slumber, we've gotten back into our favorite national pastime: entering public places with AR-15s and gunning down everyone in sight. Ah, I can hear that mighty eagle cry as it soars over purple mountains majesty: America's back, baby.
It's not something to make light of, and I don't mean to be insensitive about mass killings. But we have entered the territory of the absurd with this topic, and satire is sometimes the clearest language one can speak in that dark and confusing country. So here we go: this is the Trash Skunk Guide to America's Gun Debate.
"I'll only ask this one more time: Where. Is. The. Applebees."
Thoughts 'n Prayers
The only issue more hotly contested than gun rights in the United States is abortion, and even then it's not by much. What's interesting about this is that often the same people who are ultra-concerned about the life of an unborn embryo are seemingly bored to tears by mass-casualty events. They'll dedicate enormous efforts to the "pro-life" cause in utero, but then yawn and pour a martini when someone murders 15 people in a grocery store.
This is beyond strange to me, considering an embryo doesn't have friends, a job, kids of its own, or anyone in the world that depends on it. But the dozen or so people killed in your average mass shooting leave behind orphans, widows, broken families, and unimaginable grief. It seems to me that if one is interested in being "pro-life", one should start by caring about the people who are, you know, already fucking alive.
Yet we are met with exactly the opposite attitude: thoughts and prayers, let's move on. Ah yes, a mother of three was shot to death while examining a cantaloupe in Trader Joe's. "Well, darlin', I'm gonna have to do some real praying on that. But the one thing I won't entertain is examining how her killer acquired a 30-round semi-automatic rifle and whether he should even have access to such a thing to begin with. It would be crazy to pose that question - I think the more rational approach here is to just do some praying on it."
I know I'm not alone in finding that attitude a little more than frustrating. Yet just last night, the writhing assemblage of worms and maggots zipped up in a skin suit named "Ted Cruz" went on Sean Hannity's show to defend thoughts and prayers. I shouldn't have to mention that anything taking place on Sean Hannity's program is an intentional demagogic distraction intended to deceive its audience (read Trash Skunk's take on that here), so keep in mind the dubious arena in which this conversation took place. In fact, I'll save you from having to watch it by summing up Ted's comments for you.
Senator Cruz told Sean Hannity that "leftists" don't accept" thoughts and prayers" in the wake of shootings because they "hate god". He opined that in his view it's normal to offer up thoughts and prayers when someone loses a loved one, and that anyone who has a problem with this is the real enemy.
Leave it to Ted Cruz and Sean Hannity to turn themselves into the real victims of a mass killing (while subtly suggesting that gun control is an attack on Christianity).
To be clear: the reason people like myself have contempt for "thoughts and prayers" isn't because I disagree that it's a nice thing to say when someone loses a loved one. Of course it is. I have contempt for it because it's a meaningless platitude that requires no effort on the side of the person offering it, and it is not an actionable solution for addressing the plague of mass shootings we have been enduring for decades.
How many hundreds of people need to be gunned down before someone answers your prayers, Ted? Maybe God's inbox is a little backed up with Covid-related spam at the moment? Cut him some slack - the guy's in management, he's got a lot on his plate.
I dislike "thoughts and prayers" because it's just something people say before shrugging and moving on. You might as well say "in the aftermath of this tragedy, I will, as always, solemnly eat a turkey sandwich in my darkened garage". This accomplishes nothing, and next week when a new mass shooting happens, you'll be eating another turkey sandwich wondering "how could this happen? I just ate one of these fucking things last week!"
Imagine a serial arsonist set fire to your house once a week, returning over and over again to commit the same act, but when you call the police and the fire department, they just say"we hear your concerns, we are deeply troubled, and we want to assure you that we are going to blog about it. Thank you."
You would be livid, because these two entities have the power to both put out the fire and arrest the arsonist. But instead, they are promising to devote an insignificant amount of attention to your problem without ever actually doing anything. This is the problem with thoughts and prayers.
But this much is obvious, I'm not blowing anyone's mind with that revelation. So why do people keep defending "thoughts and prayers" as the best way to deal with mass shootings? Well, it's simple: Americans love their guns more than they care about solving this problem. It's a simple equation for them: gun rights > lives.
In other words, "thoughts and prayers" is a way to say "I'm sorry that every week people are mowed down by maniacs with more impressive arsenals than a third world military, but not sorry enough to consider banning certain weapons or endorsing high bars of entry for gun ownership."
The right to own firearms is so deeply, thoroughly, and fundamentally American that people seem to have trouble pulling apart its threads to re-examine the nuance of the situation. Is a hunting rifle the same thing as owning a high-capacity semi-automatic rifle designed for war? Can we perhaps discuss limiting access to the latter, whose sole purpose isn't hunting or sport, but efficient human killing? Maybe not even making it illegal, but just implementing more extensive background checks, or a licensing program, or mandatory psych evaluations, or something of actual substance?
No, apparently. This is not a welcome conversation. "Mah rights are mah rights! It sez so in the constitution, now fuck off, ya hippie!"
Mah Rights
As I said, the second amendment allows us to own firearms in the United States. This is a broad and sweeping right, and plenty of people take advantage of it. I've even owned a few guns myself. I bought them in my early 20s, and I have to say that I never found much use for them. They were fun to shoot when they were new, but like any gadget, the shine wears off rather quickly, and soon they're just more shit taking up space in my house. Honestly, I only kept them for one, solitary reason: because I live in a country where everyone else is armed to the teeth, and that atmosphere engenders the feeling that one should arm themselves, as well.
Which is severely dystopian, if you think about it.
I kept these guns even knowing that most arguments in favor of them fall apart when you look at the reality of the situation. Statistically, people who confront intruders are more likely to be shot themselves than become the hero. I kept them even knowing that the presence of guns in a home dramatically increases the likelihood of homicides, suicides, and accidents. I kept them even knowing that, if an active shooter situation were to take place on my street, I would not be the person to run out there and try to stop it - because those guys get killed.
Let me get to the core of my argument here: I don't think gun ownership itself is necessarily the problem. I think the problem is that we have an unhealthy obsession with guns in this country, and we've cultivated an unassailable, fanatical culture centered around an instrument of death, to the point where we can't even have nuanced conversations about what types of guns should be legal, and what measures should be taken to prevent them from falling into the wrong hands.
That's the problem - it's our unwillingness to even have the conversation. Any attempt at discourse is met by some guy in camo overalls screaming "second amendment!" until he's red in the face. These attempts at dialogue go nowhere, and the level of anger conjured by even asking to have such a conversation is on par with slapping someone across the face and telling them their kids are ugly.
But why this severe overreaction to something that so obviously needs to be discussed? Cars, airplanes, and drugs kill a lot of people every year, but no one gets upset when we talk about airline safety or seatbelts. No, there is something much deeper going on when we talk about guns.
"Come and take" my KFC order.
Now I Am Become Gun, Destroyer of Worlds
Here's where I think we go off the deep end: people craft their entire identities around guns, and attacks on guns become attacks on them. Look, it's nice to have a hobby, but what's up with the all-consuming obsession with an instrument whose sole purpose is to exterminate human life? It seems like kind of an odd thing to make the centerpiece of your persona, an inherently negative and threatening object that is the cause of unquantifiable misery to so many people.
To me, a gun is just a tool, like a hammer or a drill. Guns serve two very specific purposes: target shooting, and a last ditch effort to defend oneself at home. It seems weird to me that anyone would let this niche tool be the most important thing in their lives, the ownership of which is placed higher on the list of priorities than compassion for the victims of violent crime. I've used my hammer and drill way more often than I've ever even thought about my guns, but you don't see me walking around in hammer themed t-shirts or attending drill shows at the County Fairplex every weekend. Get a fucking life.
And although I admit I find the gun fetish weird, I can't pretend that I do not understand it. A gun is an object of power, perhaps the ultimate one. It draws people in the same way that fast cars do, it represents an overwhelming and awe-inducing force. The ownership of a gun gives you control over life and death, and provides the comfort (however false) of knowing that you have a lethal tool to defend yourself.
Firearms just feel powerful. They are heavy. They are loud. They kick when you fire them, and that kinetic force impresses upon you just how much power you hold in your hands. Human beings are inherently scared and weak, but the gun fills these voids in our psyche. It's no wonder people are drawn to them, I understand it completely.
But just because gun ownership offers individuals all of these perks, are they doing any good for society as a whole? We hear talk from passionate gun advocates that the solution to shootings isn't gun control, it's more guns. Because, in a logical calculation that would short-circuit a supercomputer, bad guys don't commit crimes if they think someone else might have a gun. Therefore we need guns in schools, on planes, in hospitals, during sex, folded into sandwiches, guns with driver's licenses, dogs armed with guns, guns for toothbrushing, guns as dildos, guns with wigs and lipstick that want to live with me and think I'm really good looking, etc.
The idea that our gun violence problem is because we don't have enough guns laying around is like telling a drug addict they're only addicted to meth because they aren't smoking enough of it. What the fuck are you talking about? We live in America - everyone already has a gun, and criminals still commit crimes with impunity. It isn't stopping anyone.
More importantly, many of the most often cited studies in favor of "self-defense via gun" have been debunked or otherwise undermined by more rigorous and contradictory studies (for a more thorough explanation, check out this Scientific American article). Gun violence in self-defense occupies a minuscule percentage of shootings, dwarfed significantly by gun violence that has nothing to do with a self-defense at all. When a gun goes off and a person dies in America, it is usually a suicide, an accident, or a criminal homicide. It is far, far less common for someone to actually use a gun to defend themselves.
It begs the question: is the juice worth the squeeze? Are we willing to let 100 people die from suicide, homicide, and accident so that one person can fend off a burglar in the middle of the night? Tough trade, if you ask me.
Look at this info from the Violence Policy Center regarding homicides alone (not even counting suicides and accidents):
In 2017, the FBI reports there were only 298 justifiable homicides involving a private citizen using a firearm. That same year, there were 10,380 criminal gun homicides. Guns were used in 35 criminal homicides for every justifiable homicide.
Intended victims of violent crimes engaged in self-protective behavior that involved a firearm in 1.1 percent of attempted and completed incidents between 2014 and 2016.
Intended victims of property crimes engaged in self-protective behavior that involved a firearm in 0.3 percent of attempted and completed incidents between 2014 and 2016.
So we can see that the "good guy with a gun is the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun" argument is kind of tired and sad. I think it's hard to argue with the fact that the best way to stop a bad guy with a gun is not letting him get his hands on one in the first place. It's being proactive vs reactive.
Yet, even after everything I've laid out here, I have to say that I am in favor of gun ownership on the whole, mostly because I don't think it can reasonably be erased at this point, and we need to find a way to live with it. The toothpaste is out of the tube in America, there are more guns than people and many of them aren't traceable or registered in any database. The idea that we can "un-gun" ourselves is false, and both the right and the left need to get used to this sobering fact. Conservatives, nobody is capable of taking your guns. Liberals, you couldn't take them even if you wanted to - and many of you don't. The only conversation we can have going forward is about what kinds of guns should be legal to sell, and how do we restrict access to the ones that pose the highest risks in civilian hands?
I don't have all the answers here, but the one thing I always return to is that we need to treat owning high-capacity, semi-automatic weapons like having a pilot's license, or a license to practice law or medicine. The ownership of such an efficient killing tool should have a bar for entry that is at least as high as those things, because the responsibility for human life is on par with them. We're talking about something that can kill 30 people as fast as you can pull its trigger, and then 30 more after a two-second reload. This is not what the founding fathers envisioned in every American home.
The ownership of these types of guns should come with periodic psych evaluations, a recurring licensing fee and mandatory "good standing" status (like the Bar) to continue ownership. Pilots and surgeons don't get do-overs on plane crashes or malpractice because they threaten (or take) lives. The same level of scrutiny should apply to owning certain guns that are quite obviously for war. And as someone who has owned an AR-15, put me first in line - I'd be happy to go through all of this if I knew everyone else had to.
This is so easily fixable if we can just be honest with ourselves and stop crowing about the second amendment. But instead, we see something quite different from gun culture's brightest stars.
Many of the gun world's most prominent advocates - the people you would think are trying to set a positive example of gun ownership - demonstrate remarkably childish and irresponsible ways of interacting with their firearms. Congresswoman Lauren Boebert famously wants to bring her Glock into the chambers of Congress. Why? "Because it's her right". Lost on her, apparently, is the idea of exercising your rights responsibly. Simply having them is an excuse to abuse them. This is why we can't have nice things.
This is the problem, I think. We have let one of our most burdensome and adult rights fall into the hands of immature morons. Gun ownership has stopped being some sacred and serious thing, and become a sort of Tijuana donkey show, wherein the most exploitive among us use this right to provoke, antagonize, or otherwise degrade society as a whole. A mass-casualty shooting is no longer a moment to grieve and get serious about fixing the issue, it's a moment to own the libs and post pictures of our guns with captions like "you'll never take this from me". It's disheartening, to say the least.
This seems like an unforced error on the part of the pro-gun crowd. If second amendment people took these opportunities to say "hey, let's get real here and figure out where we're missing the mark on gun control so these weekly massacres stop", I think we'd all be able to respect that. If I haven't made it clear already, this is the approach I am trying to take as a someone who has owned guns. It is the responsible, grown-up, and compassionate thing to do. My right to an AR-15 is nothing compared to someone's right to go to the grocery store and come home alive.
The all-or-nothing"the government is taking our guns" response to someone wanting to have a reasonable conversation about this is extremely unhelpful. This is fear-mongering at its best - we've been hearing about how Democrats are going to "take all of your guns" since at least the 1980s. But can anyone point to the day Obama came to your house to collect your firearms?
We deserve to have this conversation. It isn't something that should be shouted down by the mere existence of the second amendment, which is frustratingly vague considering the vast variety of modern weaponry that its authors could not possibly have imagined. But I fear that as polarized and reactionary as America is, there's just no way this is getting figured out any time soon. After all, gun rights > lives, and as long as that equation remains true, we're stuck in this rut.
Which means we're going to have three familiar items on the menu for the foreseeable future: mass shootings, thoughts, and prayers.
Who's hungry?
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