Midnight Mutterings | Guns (again)

||| MIDNIGHT MUTTERINGS by JACKIE BATES |||

On April 28, 2023, we heard there was another mass shooting in the US, this time in Texas. Five people died including one nine year old child, allegedly by a neighbor who objected to being asked to stop shooting his weapon in his own yard and responded by shooting his neighbors inside their house.  (The informal definition of a mass shooting is when four or more people are injured or killed in a single incident.) It got me to thinking, once again about gun registration.

We register many things, some required by law and some voluntary. We register to vote and to get licenses to marry and to drive our cars. We register our children in school and our real estate transactions and our cars if they are to be driven on public roads. We register for a chance to win prizes sometimes if we’re feeling lucky. (I once won a dishwasher from an appliance store, which was given to my husband, though he had never been in that store. When I questioned why it was given to him, the store manager said he looked up my address in the phone book and found my husband’s name and notified him he had won. Well, that was a long time ago and not really part of this column even though I still think it’s odd.)

So I was wondering if, why and how we register guns. After consulting Google, PhD, I still don’t know. I don’t have a gun, and I guess I assumed if I bought a gun, maybe I would register it at the same time. I didn’t find much about gun registration on the web, but I did find a lot of fairly shocking information about guns and shootings. I heard on the radio (I think, though I couldn’t find it on the web).

Senator Warnock, of Georgia, said that none of us is safe from gunshot and we need to do something about it. ‘If we don’t (I think he said) ‘we should be ashamed of ourselves.’ I couldn’t agree more. Here’s something I did find on the internet that Senator Warnock apparently said after the deadly shooting at a medical facility in Atlanta this week: ‘Thoughts and prayers are not enough,’ adding that ‘doing nothing is to make a mockery of prayer and trivializes faith.’

Here are some of the other things I did find about guns from the web:

• The US comes in first of the highest ten countries in gun ownership at 120.5 guns/100 residents. I think ‘residents’ includes babies.
• Canada comes in sixth at 34.7 firearms/100 residents
• Finland comes in eighth at 32.4/100 residents.
• No other ‘western’ countries made the top ten.

Then when I looked at the website ‘Gun Violence Archive 2033,’ I read that as of April 17, 2023, there were 160 mass shootings in so far 2023 in the US. There have been 14,539 deaths due to gunshot, of which 8,316 were from suicide, and 6,223 firearm deaths from homicide, murder and unintentional causes. (I’m not entirely clear about the difference between homicide and murder, except that there’s maybe a legal difference.)

Anyway, that’s a lot of dead people who used to be alive except for ending up shot. And if that’s how many people already killed by guns, in 2023, we may exceed the 2021 record. What I have recorded here does not include the shootings that resulted ‘only’ in injury.

So one more thing gleaned for the internet: that is the relationship between stricter gun laws and gunshot fatalities. Well, the states with the strictest gun laws have the fewest gunshot fatalities. California is the leader with the strictest laws and fewest fatalities and earns a grade of A. Washington got a B+.

We think we are safe here in Paradise, but I well recall that even Orcas had a shooting in 2020 that resulted in two young men injured, one of whom is permanently damaged. And that’s just the one shooting I personally know about.

So here’s an idea: What if we asked everyone to voluntarily register their guns? If we can’t get the government to require it, then could some organization offer the opportunity. I can imagine a time when people who have guns and aren’t planning to use them to hurt other people would be willing to register their guns as an example. Because I am so old, I recall a time when how parents punished their children was their own business, even if the child died or nearly starved. Then, eventually, the winds changed, and child protection services, legally sanctioned and paid for, arrived on the scene. Was it, is it perfect? No. Not at all. But is it better? I think so, at least for some children. Then in the eighties, a group of women formed MADD. Mothers Against Drunk Driving. They were laughed at at first, but eventually changed the social norm.

I was in Ireland in 1999, when I could barely walk past on the street past a pub without gagging on the smoke coming out of the door. By 2004 pubs were ‘no smoking’ zones. Somehow public attitudes forced the laws to change and the laws changed attitudes. If enough of us agreed that we have too many guns and did what we could to influence others, maybe we could change the gun culture. Would it be fast? Easy? No. But I remember in an early Michael Moore film, that some banks in the Midwest gave guns (rifles? shotguns—I don’t remember) as prizes for opening an account. I haven’t heard that was happening any more, but I always wondered if a woman opened an account, did her husband get the gun?

Domestic violence is no longer always a private family matter. Is it gone? No. But it’s been a lot of years since I heard a man bragging about it in public. Women are no longer keeping quiet (or not as quiet) about sexual threat and violence. And some are getting heard. Even years later. At least once, even after a man did publicly brag about sexually engaging with women without consent, and still got elected President.    

I think we all want our children safe at school, at the movies, on college campuses, at home. Can we not insist that people who choose to own guns at least keep them locked up where they can’t be accessed. Can’t we vote for stricter gun laws, support our elected officials who are trying to make the changes we need? Can’t we discourage our families from voting for someone who brags he can shoot someone on Fifth Ave. and not lose a single vote. And have him be correct about it?

I once taught in a public school in Seattle where the principal spanked small children (and it seemed to me more often Black students). I don’t know whether the culture or the laws changed, but the principal stopped. After that he ‘talked’ to them. At length. Until sometimes they fell asleep. And, no, I don’t think they would have preferred a spanking, even if it took less time.

In North Carolina, when I was growing up, there was a law on the books that a husband could not hit his wife with a stick that was longer than his arm or larger around than his thumb.

And here’s a quote from the NC Health website regarding non-consent sterilization of girls with developmental disabilities: “Although the state eugenics program was shuttered in the 1970s, the state did not officially outlaw involuntary sterilization until 2003, after groundbreaking research by Johanna Schoen, now a professor at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey and an investigative series by the Winston-Salem Journal called ‘Against their Will.’”

Maybe someday, with our help, the rules and mores about gun ownership and use can change.