I don’t remember the first time I shot a gun. I was raised around guns. I remember my grandfather telling me to hold a rifle pointed toward the ground, to make sure the safety was on. I remember my uncle laughing out loud when I refused to shoot right-handed. (It seems I’m left-eye dominant.) I remember my dad and uncles and older cousins shooting mistletoe out of tall trees. My mother used to work for Wild Hare, a sporting goods manufacturer that specializes in clay pigeons.
I make all these points because, at first glance, I might look like someone who has a blanket distaste for firearms because I’m unfamiliar with them. That couldn’t be further from the truth. But we have a national obsession with guns, and it’s killing us.
On May 14th, an 18-year-old white supremacist man shot and killed 10 people in a grocery store in Buffalo, New York. On May 24th, an 18-year-old shot and killed 19 young children and two teachers in an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. It was the deadliest school shooting since Sandy Hook in December 2012. It’s been 10 years, and nothing has changed, except that some states have implemented permitless carry laws.
There are obviously multiple factors at work. The shooting in Buffalo was motivated by a poisonous racist ideology, which we know because the perpetrator left behind a racist screed. Racism is one of this country’s most horrible diseases, one we often refuse to acknowledge. But we don’t have to allow violent, racist individuals access to military weaponry. We certainly don’t have to glorify such weapons, treating them as though they’re avatars of freedom, or, as former state Rep. Andy Holt used to do, giving them away as part of campaign events.
There are multiple factors that contribute to the United States’ ongoing legacy of gun violence. But we would be fools not to admit that one of them is the sheer number of guns here. According to the most recent Small Arms Survey, the United States has the highest rate of civilian gun ownership in the world. We also face an epidemic of gun violence, and mass shootings here have become the norm. There is a link, and to deny it is madness.
Last Saturday, six people were shot in Chattanooga, Tennessee. There is no time to grieve from one mass shooting before the next happens. The publication date for this issue of the Flyer is June 2nd, nine days after the shooting in Uvalde, practically an eternity in the news world. But the people in Uvalde and Buffalo face the rest of their lives without loved ones. That’s the real eternity. So I believe we cannot let the fury and hurt die down. We cannot move on.
I am choosing here not to engage with many of the usual arguments around gun control or to acknowledge them only in the most cursory way. The concerns about the Second Amendment are spurious — an individual with a closet full of AR-15 rifles is not a well-regulated militia. Even the most well-armed individual has no hope of standing their ground against the entire military. No one really believes that “too many doors” in schools is the root of the problem. Mental illness, violent video games, those things are not unique to the United States. But we have a warped fascination with death, a fetish for armament, and a strange impulse to believe that freedom means never making compromises with the rest of society.
Everyone should have the freedom to go to school, church, the grocery store, a concert, a dance club, or the mall without fear of death. I have almost had this job as the Flyer’s editor for a year, and I’ve already written about gun violence twice. Not because it’s a particular hobby horse of mine, but because it’s a sickness that plagues our nation and I believe I have a duty to acknowledge that. I believe we all do, because most Americans believe in common sense gun laws, in background checks, that no individual should be able to buy a weapon that will let them fill a room with bullets in seconds.
There is a small minority that believes this constant parade of death is the price we must all pay for their freedom to own weapons of war. And they and the NRA and the elected officials who take campaign donations from them are holding the rest of us at gunpoint.
Jesse Davis
jesse@memphisflyer.com
