I try to keep politics out of Less on the Floor. Because this is a blog about family and family is universal.
Except guns. I feel super super really super deeply strongly about guns. This morning, watching the news at the gym, I had a vague inclination to throw a weight through the television, because I literally cannot, for one more minute, listen to one more person lament how “tragic” and “all-too-familiar” these events are.
WHY ARE WE NOT DOING SOMETHING ABOUT THIS?
I mean, WHY?
In my humble opinion, this is so completely NOT a debate about the 2nd Amendment. If you want to own a gun and hunt or shoot at a range, whatever, more power to you. That’s fine. If you are storing your gun where your children cannot ever reach it without supervision, if you are educating the young people around you about gun safety, if you are following the hunting laws: that is 100% your right. You go do you. I have no opinion on that. Let me say it again: this is NOT a debate about anyone’s right to responsibly and legally procure firearms for safe, recreational use.
This is a debate about our right to amass an ARSENAL of military-caliber weaponry with the intent to murder innocent people.
This is a debate about background checks. A debate about keeping guns away from people with mental illness (for their own safety — suicide is a tragedy not often discussed in this context — as well as the safety of others), or people with criminal records.
This is a debate about anyone’s right (or need, really) to procure lots and lots of guns, and it’s a debate about the types of guns people really need to be collecting. I mean, does our 2nd Amendment right really extend to machine guns, hand grenades, and other weapons that were literally designed specifically to snuff out life on a grand and rapid scale? Is that what the Founding Fathers had in mind?
This is a debate about our lawmakers’ responsibility to the innocent people of this country — of which I am one, of which you are one, of which my friend who is the proud owner of a Civil War-era rifle is one and my friend who goes grouse hunting with her family every Thanksgiving is one — to protect them.
Deep breath.
Okay, in the spirit of balanced debate, let’s say that gun control is a slippery slope, that it’s hard to draw distinctions along fine lines, and even harder to legislate those distinctions on a grand scale. Let’s say that “mental illness” is too broad a term, and that trying to define who can and can’t buy a gun lays the groundwork for discrimination. Let’s say that if you give an inch on government control on a civil rights issue, you risk a mile.
Okay, let’s say those things.
The fact remains: WE HAVE TO TRY SOMETHING. This “debate everything, try nothing” approach is clearly not working. This country has more guns per capita and more murders and suicides by gun per capita than any other country in the Western world. This is not a random correlation: we are doing something wrong. And I am so, so, SO tired of the hand-wringing and the grandstanding…And I am so, so, so tired of watching the news and then coming home and holding my happy children and fighting the urge to sob into their soft hair because this world I have brought them into makes no sense sometimes, and I don’t know what to tell them.
I wish I knew what to do. I wish I knew what to do besides write and rage and wonder. I wish that all the internet petitions and hashtags and memes actually mattered. I wish that the body count actually spurred meaningful change. I wish I wasn’t scared to hit publish on this, because it opens me up to all the absurdity. I wish our government worked better…for so many reasons but today, right now, for this one.
p.s. I’m editing this post to add a link to a very thoughtful Op-Ed in the NY Times that echoes a lot of my feelings on this topic.
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