Can We Talk About Guns Now?

If you were at the Route 91 Harvest Festival Concert in Las Vegas, inside the barriers erected to keep out the non paying customers, and heard the rapid pop of machine gun fire, seconds before people began dropping around you, bleeding and dying, in a sort of hell pit of death, it would have been natural I imagine to look around for the shooter, for the source of the death and destruction taking place yet again in America.  But who would have imagined it was coming from a hotel 32 floors up, 400 yards away?

Senseless and mass American gun deaths have been, up to now, up close and personal.  A gunman stalking down a school hallway, a killer in a dark movie theater, a man in a college classroom with a powerful weapon, a co-worker at an employer training, a man seated at a table at a church meeting, armed to the teeth with powerful fast firing guns and lethal ammunition.  Up to now your killer has been in front of you.  You are unsuspecting, minding your own business, living in America when your life is taken from you.  You are a soft target of someone’s what?  Rage?  Hate?  Mental illness?  Most often we don’t know. 

In Las Vegas the formula for death changed.  It was long distance, rapid fire, and seemingly anonymous.  I can’t imagine the victims were specifically targeted, that the victims represented anything to the shooter other than a gathering of helpless humans in a vulnerable setting.  Country music fans?  People of all ages, primarily white?  Attacked and killed by a rich white 64 year old male accountant, who made big money in real estate and enjoyed high stakes gambling?  Was he trying to make a point?  Are we missing it?  Was there a point?

We learned today that same man, the alleged shooter, rented rooms at the Blackstone Hotel in July overlooking Chicago’s Lollapalooza.  My sister in law, staying with us for a few days, looked at me with genuine fear in her eyes.

“My grandchildren go to that.” 

She was incredulous.  Is there no end to the widespread fear we experience for the safety of and our loved ones and ourselves in the course of simply living in America? 

Prior to the Las Vegas tragedy, after the death of 20 children between six and seven years old, as well as six adult school staff at Sandy Hook school in Connecticut, spokespersons for the National Rifle Association argued that the answer to preventing mass slayings and saving lives lies not in less guns in America but more.  Ideas for arming teachers, anonymously supplied with guns, carefully trained, situated throughout the school and able to take down shooters quickly, were touted.  Not less guns but more.  Wait till the killer appears and kill the killer.  More guns in the hands of the good guys.  I have often heard such a proposal calmly and earnestly laid out.  That argument doesn’t work very well in the Las Vegas case.

Had there been armed concert goers carrying concealed weapons among the 22,000 persons listening to country music that night, and quite possibly there were, they were rightfully reluctant to draw them lest they be mistaken for a shooter and would have been powerless to take down this killer anyway.  Shoot a man 400 yards away spraying bullets at you with a high powered rifle on a tripod?  I doubt any sharpshooter in the world could have located and calmly taken out the shooter standing in the chaos of that killing field.  You would have needed a hand-held rocket launcher and I don’t believe we’re allowed to have them.  As far as I know the NRA has not yet advocated the purchase or open carry of rocket launchers.

The NRA has been quiet since the shooting, as has Congress.  I did hear a gun rights advocate suggesting in the media they might barter the abolition of bump stocks, the little accessory that in effect turned Stephen Paddock’s semi-automatic rifle into a automatic machine gun, in exchange for silencers and the expansion of both concealed and open carry laws, tit for tat.  But mostly there is silence on both sides.  The Onion, a satiric media presence, suggests “we are all just hoping these terrible shootings will stop once and for all without circumstances changing in any way or any of us taking even a slight amount of action in response.”

The NRA has stopped saying much actually.  It is now more of political organization, funding sympathetic candidates on the state and federal level and ruining the careers of others who oppose them in even the smallest way by running primary candidates against them.  After shootings they have by and large stopped issuing statements.  Rather they sit back and count their votes.  There have been no votes either by the way.   Nothing to vote on.  Don’t you think it’s strangely quiet?

I believe we will find in the end that the shooter in Las Vegas broke no laws aside from murder.  Preliminarily it appears the guns, the ammunition, the device which essentially turned his semi-automatic rifle into an automatic rifle, were all legal.  He bought at least some of his guns from licensed dealers who found him not unusual, who report he stood out not at all from other gun buyers.  He was a guy in America amassing weapons and ammunition, and apparently that is not rare.  I think we will find him to have no known mental illness, no criminal background, no red flags that could have called our attention to him.  Stopping him by screening or background check would most likely have been fruitless.  The purported perpetrator of America’s largest mass shooting may well be in hindsight a person who offered no hints, no apparent means to identify him, to predict his behavior, to stop his actions.  I could be wrong. 

Ironically in Las Vegas, where what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, there are a number of entertainment themed shooting ranges.  The glitziest, it looks to me, is The Range 702 http://www.therange702.com, closely rivaled by Machine Guns Vegas https://machinegunsvegas.com.  At both you can book a time for you or your group (corporate events are encouraged) to experience what some call the ultimate adrenaline rush of shooting an automatic weapon.  Check out their websites.  They’re nicely done, complete with video of happy customers blasting away to rock music, then enjoying wine later in the VIP suite, laughing with friends recalling the day.

Turns out the penultimate rush may have taken place in the mind of the man on the 32^nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel, when the shooting moved from the range, where bullets blast through paper targets and fall harmlessly, deflected into sand to real life, where those bullets tear through the bone, muscle, soft tissue of innocent human beings.  Sometimes they pass through one victim and strike another.   58 human beings were killed you know.  36 women and 22 men aged 20-67.  Additionally, 527 were wounded or otherwise injured. 

Former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly in a blog post following the shooting called what occurred in Las Vegas “the price of freedom.”  He went on to say that “Public safety demands logical gun laws but the issue is so polarizing and emotional…little will be accomplished as there is no common ground.”

Do you believe that?  Do you think that because we are free under the second amendment to purchase and own guns in America the possibility of senseless death erupting from the barrels of those guns, at the hands of American gun owners exercising that freedom, cannot be avoided?

I don’t.

Nor do I believe that debating, designing, and implementing common-sense gun control policy will result in government agents in jack boots kicking in our doors and seizing our guns.  I don’t accept the paranoid stance that enacting even one new law curbing our right to bear arms will cause the rest of our government’s gun policies protecting gun rights to topple like dominoes.  I don’t think that slope is slippery, that we are hopelessly of two minds on the subject, and cannot fashion a logical legislative response to mounting mass gun violence.

Let’s be realistic and clear.  America will never be England.  We have a different history and a different culture.  Long after my kids and I have passed from this earth Americans will be buying guns, hunting, keeping them in their homes for sport, recreation and protection.  I accept that.  Americans at some level will continue to be shot both accidentally and wrongfully, suicide and homicide rates higher than needed, because of our  heritage, our history, and our policies around gun use, chiefly the second amendment to the constitution. But for God’s sake must we accept this  current level of carnage?

I don’t for a minute believe that firearms possessed by the American citizenry are all that stands in the way of being dominated by our government.  I don’t accept loony arguments about the absolute need for unfettered freedom of gun ownership. 

And neither do most Americans by the way.  It’s not our guns that matter, it is our votes. We need sensible gun control laws.  Let’s take a deep breath and demand them from those we elect.  We’re Americans.  Government is there for us.  Do you want this record number of innocent civilian deaths at the hands of our fellow citizens to continue to climb?  Do you truly believe there is nothing we can do to prevent it?

I don’t.  I bet you don’t either.  Let’s begin by talking about it.  Loudly.  To each other, to our legislators.  We owe it to the victims of gun violence and their families across the country to do nothing less.