Gun lobbies have our legislature of
cowardly lions in their teeth.
By Donald Kaul
Yes,
I know I said I wasn’t going to write any more columns on gun control, largely
because the exercise is:
- Futile.
- A waste of time.
- Unproductive.
But
with Congress taking up the issue again and Washington awash with hypocrisy
amid rumors of progress, it is a time that cries out for comment.
That’s
pathetic.
The
gun lobbies have our legislature of cowardly lions in their teeth and are
shaking them like ragdolls. God, it must be awful to be a politician,
particularly a Republican, these days — afraid of your own shadow, being forced
by bullying lobbyists to stand there and smile while they shove beans up your
nose.
Our
government has reached a stage of dysfunction not seen since the 1850s, when
Congress was guiding us toward civil war.
When
the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Soviet Union followed suit, we became the
most powerful nation on earth, virtually unchallenged in our supremacy.
And
how did we use that power? To become stupid. We gave ourselves over to greed,
jingoistic militarism, and anti-intellectualism. Now, far from being the most
powerful nation on earth, we’re unable to do anything.
We
can’t regulate gun sales, we can’t do anything about unemployment, we can’t
even decide whether to pay our bills. And as far as building roads and bridges,
investing in our kids, providing people with health care…fuhgeddaboudit.
There
was a time, not so long ago, when you could say “People shouldn’t be allowed to
own machine guns” and not start a riot over what constitutes a machine gun. You
could say “People should be required to obtain licenses in order to own a gun”
and get nods of encouragement rather than abusive mail.
No
more. We’re paralyzed by the ersatz arguments you’re hearing from the Senate
right now.
My
least favorite among them is the “Cars kill a lot more people than guns. Are
you going to ban those too?”
No,
we’ll simply continue to license them and make people pass a test before they
can use them — as we should be doing with guns.
My
second-least favorite argument: The mythical little old lady who would be left
defenseless before an intruder climbing in through her bedroom window. Do we
want to leave her to her fate?
No,
but she’s an unusual little old lady indeed if she shoots the miscreant with an
AK-47. Say “assault weapons ban” to a gun nut and he or she immediately
switches the debate to handguns.
Not
that handguns are all they’re cracked up to be.
Joe
Nocera of The New York Times publishes a “gun report” on his
blog, each day listing the previous day’s shootings throughout the nation.
A
six-year-old boy is shot to death by his four-year-old neighbor in New Jersey,
a three-year-old in South Carolina finds a gun in his home and manages to kill
himself, a 20-year-old shoots and kills his sister’s boyfriend while showing
him a gun, a 44-year-old man is fatally shot by his son while sitting on his
front porch in Texas, a 21-year-old shoots his five-month-old son with a rifle
in Utah, a 13-year-old is executed gangland style by a bullet in the back of
the head in Texas. On and on it goes, children shooting their parents, parents
their children, innocent bystanders cut down by crossfire, suicides, murders,
accidents…all in the name of the right to bear arms.
Very,
very, very few anybodies who shoot intruders coming through their windows are
mentioned. And none of those intruders use assault rifles.
OtherWords columnist
Donald Kaul lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. OtherWords.org