When I was a kid, I played Cowboys and Indians, or Yankees and Confederates (I was always a Confederate, by the way, even though blue is my favorite color), and I'll admit that it was hella fun to re-enact all the bloody( or -less) death scenes I'd seen in movies, the ones that featured shoot-outs between bad guys and good guys. I grew up in the Eighties, when Bruce Willis came out with Die Hard (still my favorite Christmas movie ever), and action movies were the rage. It was mindless fun, harmless as a shotgun blast to your imaginary stomach.
I think about that now, when kids are growing up with way more explicit depictions of said violence not just in movies but in video games and on TV shows, and I'm perfectly fine with it because, disagreeable as I find a lot of it, I don't think anyone's ever been killed by a violent video game. I could be wrong, but the statistics back me up on that one.
For months now, the gun-control debate has been raging, and what once was merely a human response to the tragedy of Newtown has, inevitably, become politicized, with both sides sidling up to get their message across. In the interest of full disclosure, I'm pro whichever side doesn't want to see more dead kids piled up because some nutcase decides he has to die but he has to take a lot of people with him. But I can see where the other side has their reasons.
Let's face it, the people who own guns (lots of guns, lots and lots of guns) are people that you don't want to piss off. Because they might just solve their issues with you with a bullet to the head (or. if they have an AR-15, a lot of bullets to what once was your head). And I understand that, as a nation born of violence (not just the Revolution, but going back to the first time settlers and the natives decided to fight over territory), we can't just say "no more guns" and be done with it. Guns are merely tools, to be fair. But they can be awfully lethal tools.
No one who "needs" to own an AR-15 or an assault rifle probably should own one. If your penis size is that worrisome to you, take a Viagra and throw a football through the tire swing a while. Will all the measures being proposed cut down on all gun violence? Probably not. But we need to have a dialog about what we can do to make sure that the likelihood of another Newtown, or Columbine, or Aurora is lessened. We don't need people automatically jumping to conclusions based on their particular political persuasions or whatever lobby is paying them off the most wants them to do.
I've avoided writing anything about this because, obviously, I don't like the idea of kids being gunned down, and I get emotional about it. I know that it's easier to blame violence in our media than the violence in our society, because you can regulate the violence in media. And there will never be a day when someone doesn't use a gun to solve their problems, no matter how many laws are on the books. But to say that we can't do anything, for fear that we'd piss off the portion of this country that values guns over lives, that lives in fear of a hypothetical government tyranny that so far has not been visited upon our shores and likely never will be, is obscene. It's a disgrace to the very nature of our country, that all men are created equal with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Sure, those words were written by a slave-owner, but the fact is that this country is always, and has always been, an attempt to bring ourselves closer to that ideal than we actually are. And all the gun enthusiasts in the world can't convince me that military-style weapons in the hands of ordinary citizens is the only bulwark we have against a homegrown Hitler. We're better than that, dammit. And our children deserve better than to be told "well, we'll put armed guards in your schools, that'll help."
Like I said, I've avoided writing about this for a while, and I'll admit that mine are not well-thought-out arguments per se. But that's why we need to stop playing politics and stop appealing to the worst instincts in the hornet's nest that is our political fringes. I would ask this of any NRA supporters I meet: how many more kids have to die before you concede that maybe you don't need all that firepower?
Just asking...
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