GUNSENSE

RANDOM ACTS OF SENTENCE-VIOLENCE: LOOKING AT GUN LANGUAGE, AND THEN LOOKING AWAY

 

Wayne LaPierre

The discussion on gun control lacks even the basic civilities now.  The major chord we hear in these discussions was sounded by Senator Mitch McConnell who declared over three years ago on October 23, 2010 that "the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama  to be a one-term President."  

And so the phraseology of no retreat, no compromise—phrases you find everywhere in the gun lobby's lexicon—reappeared as part of the GOP's national rhetoric, and it wasn't directed at a policy nor was it aimed at a bill.  President Obama was the target.  If our President sponsored it, if he endorsed, if he even nodded his head in agreement, no matter what the issue on the table, the Republicans and members of the Tea Party united in opposition.

This, of course, isn't productive government, and when this kind of partisanship controls Congress, nothing gets done.  When nothing gets done, the American people suffer.  The GOP has become, for the moment, the party of political dogmatism, and nothing is getting done.  

Now this dogmatism has surfaced in the gun debate, and while we wait for common sense to gain the upper hand—as it will: 90% of the American public support universal background checks—innocent people are dying.  That's the problem.  And the culture of violence that we have created and nourished in this country continues to claim its victims.

But the violence we associate with the misuse of guns also shows up in the language used by the radical gun activists.  It's like gun-violence has somehow given them a word-hoard, a way of describing reality that is tied to vengeance, anger, blood, and paranoia.

Paradoxically, these extreme groups ultimately become tied to their dystopian rhetoric—as opposed to a set of comphrehensible ideas—and their rhetoric then directs their thinking.  When this happens, they leave themselves no choice but to depict the major gun-control groups in false and deceptive ways.  They have no choice but to concoct targets that might seem deserving of their bizarrely enraged language.  But they've written themselves into a box, and it's a crazy box, and they don't know how to get out.

Take one of their favorite targets, for example, Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, an organization started by Shannon Watts in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting.  The organization supports six basic reforms, none of which involve confiscating weapons or repealing the Second Amendment, or denying the right to protect your home, and all of which would work toward securing the American public from the gun violence that currently plagues our country.  Still, organizations like—I'll choose one—1 Million Moms against Gun Control are obsessed not only by Ms. Watts's work, but by Ms. Watts herself.  And to justify their extreme rhetoric, they must create an equally extreme set of positions that Ms. Watts extremely holds.

Except, of course, Ms. Watts doesn't occupy the positions that many gun-radicals ascribe to her. 

And so we saw the image recently of Ms. Watts with a knife plunged into her blood-covered head, a simple and repulsing case of visual terrorism.  Her family and her life and her health are regularly threatened in words that seem distinctly sub-human both in intelligence and standard language usage.

Taking hard, uncompromising stands against fictional enemies that stalk the fictional environments they have created for themselves—this is what the gun-radicals have left.  It's an old proverb, but it's apropos here:  the dreamer creates castles in the sky, but the severely deluded create those castles in the sky, and then move in.  

The gun radicals have moved into those castles, and they're generating the rhetoric to justify their move.  That's why it sounds unstable and enraged.  Their language is attempting to justify the unjustifiable.  And standard English doesn't want to do that.  Hence, this bizarre mutation of violence and illiteracy.

You can read a representative sample of this castle-building here, from 1 Million Moms against Gun Control.  And if that's not enough, you can find more—not for the faint of heart—here.

And please note:  these so-called "patriots" often call on the likes of Madison and Jefferson to justify their extreme positions.  

But Madison and Jefferson weren't as challenged by the English language as the gun radicals are, and Madison and Jefferson's prose reflects the deliberation and reason handed down to them by the classical rhetoric and syntax that characterized the eighteenth century.

So as a result, even when Jefferson takes radical positions, he does so with reason and logic.  That's partly intellectual, but it's partly grammatical too because certain syntactical structures—and those that dominated their century were of this sort—encourage us to use reason and logic as we put our sentences together.

But a reasonable mind attracts a reasonable sentence—whatever the century—even if our reason leads us to be forceful and aggressive.  So have a look at the random acts of sentence-violence I've cited above.  And after you've recognized it for what it is, it's best simply to ignore it.  

They don't know what they're doing, these gun-radicals, because they can't monitor what they're saying.  And vice versa, which is the really troubling part.

 

OPEN CARRY: MILITARY SOLUTIONS TO CIVIL DISAGREEMENTS

Albert Camus

Accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, the French writer, Albert Camus, said that "a writer cannot serve today those who make history; he must serve those who are subject to it."  

It's a very French thing to say, of course, particularly in the Fifties, and I admire Camus for having said it.  Human suffering matters, and while we can all find ways to lessen this suffering, Camus suggests that writers make this world a better, more humane place by revealing to their readers the many ways that we are "subject" to history.

For "subject to" read "oppressed by."  Or "bullied by."  Or "run over by."

In his essay, "Reflections on the Guillotine," Camus addressed capital punishment—an essay, by the way, that influenced Sister Helen Prejean's thinking on the subject—and he made one observation that is relevant to the open-carry movement in this country.  

"Bloodthirsty laws," Camus remarked, "make bloodthirsty customs."  He's speaking specifically about state-sponsored executions.  Like this:  once the citizens of the state allow their government to discipline its citizens by killing them, then killing citizens becomes a custom; the punishment becomes, then, customary, in Camus' sense of the word.  

The laws rise from the consent of the governed, and once in place, they start to do their job:  determine the culture of the country.  The state's custom then becomes a little more bloodthirsty because the state's laws allow us to slake our thirst for blood.

 It's not complicated.

The taking of human life, beyond the provinces of declared war, assumes its place in the government's repertoire of possible actions.  

 We see it over and over, though, in other countries where capital punishment is illegal—the thirst for blood, if ignored or outlawed, gradually decreases.

I had another look at the pictures of the forty or so open-carry demonstrators who had gathered outside of the Blue Mesa Grill in Arlington, Texas, and I thought of Camus. Inside the Blue Mesa were four—count 'em, four—women who had gathered to discuss gun-control issues related to the Moms Demand Action group.  

The Open Carry Texas group that converged outside of the restaurant broke no laws. No one was shot. No one was injured. A group photograph was taken, of course, with the American flag and children and guns. This particular optics—guns, men, women, children, flag, public place—has become a meme now for the open-carry enthusiasts, and an image of great hilarity for the gun-control folks. I suspect Open Carry Texas will reconsider future actions of this sort—it's continually mentioned as a kind of social-media gaffe.

But these images, and the actions that give rise to them, are part of the gradual militarization of our culture, and when you militarize a culture, you must expect military solutions to civil disagreements.  

That in a nutshell is the problem.  

Carrying weapons openly into public places where they are not needed, but where it is legal to do so, exercises a right without understanding the far-reaching implications of having exercised that right.  

Once we recognize weapons as part of the cultural apparatus—along with petitions, speeches, letters, tweets, marches, demonstrations, conversations, and ballots—that we bring to our debates, then weapons and debates become customary—think Camus—partners.  

This, in my opinion, is a dangerous partnership, a bloodthirsty partnership, and one that all of us, whatever our views on guns, will live to regret.  Some of us have already moved well beyond regret.

I wondered this morning how I might explain this to my daughter, who is four. How do I tell her that  weapons and disagreements in this country have become, in some states, an inevitable and countenanced team? How do I constructively talk to her about the open-carry laws that allowed those members of Open Carry Texas to bring weapons to a lunch meeting of four women who held different opinions on gun-control? How do I explain those optics, and avoid the words that embarrass and weaken a culture?  Words like intolerance, aggression, irresponsibility?

I realize, of course, that the militarization of a culture takes more than a few dozen open-carry extremists in Texas obsessed with a lunch meeting of four gun-control advocates. Violent cultures—and we all seem to agree that ours is a violent one—grow their violence in many fields and cultivate it in many ways.  It takes a village, of course.

Not one of us, in my opinion, escapes this massacre unscarred. But some have acknowledged the massacre, others have seen it and work to relieve the rest of us from it, and still others have refused inexplicably to recognize it.  

Those are the lines that I have drawn now. Others will draw other lines, but my hope is that one day all of them will go away.

The lines, I mean.

TRANSFORMATION: THOUGHTS ON VIOLENCE

I read the news today. O boy.

According to Slate's gun-death tracker, over 10,000 people have perished through gun violence since December 14, 2012, the day that twenty-seven people were murdered in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, by Adam Lanza.  Add Lanza to the list too.  Twenty-eight.

Joe Nocera, at The Gun Report, lists over thirty shootings for the fifth day of November.

Both of these numbers, of course, from Nocera and Slate, are low.

I note this for the record too: I attended the funeral recently of a three-month old boy. He wasn't a victim of gun violence. He just died.  Probably the flu. 

Everyone gathered graveside under a blue sky to wonder why this had happened.  No one offered credible answers. But we came together, and together, by standing there, we confessed our ignorance.  Graveside.  Under very blue skies.

But I do know that when we struggle to understand the senseless reaping of human life, we come away from that struggle either exhausted and defeated, or exhausted and recommitted.

But always exhausted.  

And if recommitted, then recommitted first to understand the nature of violence and the loss that always attends it, to know its way of walking through our lives without concern for our convenience or our preparation. 

And second, to know the full spectrum of violence: to understand it from its subtlest manifestation, glimpsed in a misbegotten eyeblink, to its grossest eruption in the latest gun-slaughter.

To know that some of this violence we can stop, and some of it we can't.

And this, finally:  If we stare impermanence and sorrow in the face, we will see two things clearly: first, we learn that we crowd our days with diversions—often blessed diversions—that encourage us not to consider for long either impermanence or the sorrow that comes of it; and second, we sense that the only way to comprehend the world's passing away and our sorrow at seeing it do so is to withdraw for periods of time, according to our capacities for solitude, and to engage those debilitating forces until we are able to return to our daily lives, loving more deeply and understanding more clearly, our fellow human beings.

By which I mean loving more deeply and understanding more clearly every single one of them, without exception.

Then, we might transform impermanence and sorrow—two of the many the faces of violence—into the kind of restorative energy that we bring back to the public arena, where there are more guns than we can count and more violence than we can monitor.

Related articles

Joe Nocera Blog: The Gun Report: November 5, 2013