Guns Are Different (Pow! Pow! Pow! Part 2)

Some thoughts I have had:

General

The gun safety issue is huge for me as the parent of two small children, one of whom has Down syndrome. I'm trying to tackle one small specific issue at a time. Thoughtful comments are welcome. Ugly ones won't be published, period, so if you send me any I have no choice but to strongly dislike you.

Part Five: Lots has been written already about Treyvon Martin's death and the recent "not guilty" verdict for George Zimmerman. Here is what I think: For lack of a more mature phrase, Zimmerman started it. He started it. He approached an unarmed teenager, a child, who was doing absolutely nothing wrong, challenged him, and now that child is dead. I don't care if that child previously smoked marijuana. I don't care if there are some pictures of that child looking like a punk, I don't care if that child had academic or behavioral or any type of issues whatsoever, ever. That child is dead because he was walking down the street in a place where he was 100% entitled to be, and now he's dead. Some folks have said Zimmerman demonstrated poor judgement but did not commit a crime; I disagree. Bad judgement is when you are intoxicated and tweet something about your boss that ends up getting back to him/her. This is something different.

I don't know to what degree George Zimmerman individually harbors purposeful racist attitudes, and to what degree he has simply internalized a social message that young black men are not to be trusted. That they have no place in a nice neighborhood, that they must be up to something. I think I understand the outrage expressed at the verdict, that it sends a message that the life of a young black man does not have any value, does not have any worth, can be cut down with no consequence. Another message seems to be: You, Random Black Youth, are on your own. You have no right to do anything, to be anywhere, to walk down the street without being a suspect. When a stranger approaches and confronts you, you have no right to respond, you have no right to fight back, and when that stranger shoots you your family has no right to expect justice. And when that "no justice" occurs, your family and community have no right to express outrage and anger - they are told to shift to focusing on lessons learned and what we can do in the future.

One of many things that bothered me about the trial was the brouhaha over the testimony of Treyvon's friend Rachel Jeantel. I was dismayed. Not by her grammar, her "attitude," or the fact that she can't read cursive. Whatever. She's 19. I was dismayed at how she, and her testimony, were portrayed. I agree with one Slate columnist that the overall message in instances like this is, You Don't Belong Here. Go back where you came from - the same message sent to Treyvon as he's walking along. You Don't Belong Here. There is something wrong with you being here. To me it is a very short leap from You Don't Belong Here to You Don't Count, You Don't Matter.

Now the gun part: It seems a little overly-obvious to say that if Zimmerman did not have a gun, this wouldn't have happened because obviously no one gets shot without a gun. But I really wonder to what degree Zimmerman would've chosen to confront Treyvon, and with what attitude he would have done so, were he not armed. When the 911 operator told him not to follow Treyvon, would he have listened?    When the verbal confrontation heated up, would he have backed up and waited for the police to handle it? This is one of my main themes with gun control issues - even if the 2nd Amendment does in fact totally cover your right to own and carry as many firearms as you wish, that doesn't mean you should. Passing whatever requirements get you a permit, doesn't mean you are ready to walk around armed. You are not a law enforcement officer, you are not in the military, it is not your job to stalk children, and confront them. If you are worried, call the cops. If while waiting for the cops you are suddenly in fear for your life, leave. Hide. Something. It is not your job to run into a situation, judge the good guys and the bad, and address/resolve the situation with a gun in your hand. It's not it's not it's not. 

You got to be careful of what you do, 

you got to think through what might happen 

if you come at somebody like that, 

and you got to remember that 

whenever there's a gun around, 

somebody might get shot.

Just because you can do something,

 just because you have the right to do something,

that doesn't mean you should do it. 

Side note: If you are someone who used one of the photos above to twist it around 

in your head that Treyvon was a little punk and he probably did take the first swing and 

whatnot, (a) HE WASN'T DOING ANYTHING when this all started, (b) think about all the

stupid crap your own teenage children have done - and if they have a cell phone and 

Internet access and you think there aren't any equally damning and stupid photos of them

out there, you are too naive to live - and ask yourself if any of that means they

get to get shot when they're walking home from the store. 

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Part Four

I experienced a new feeling the night before last, one that is difficult to capture in just a couple of words. This is what happened:

Background: Joanna is a voracious reader, but not of works of fiction. This makes Joanna feel somewhat un-read, which she realizes is not accurate, because she has read plenty of great works of literature in the past. But she has not been interested in reading too much of that lately, and finds reading about real life interesting enough. And serious enough, which is why when she reads fiction, it tends to be light lifting, and among her favorites are the Robert B. Parker Spenser detective novels. One such novel is School Days, which is about a school shooting. Spenser is hired by the grandmother of one of the accused shooters to establish his innocence. 

Current: I've read this book twice, I think, and picked it up the other day as a time-filler. I only finished the first couple of chapters and then put it down, realizing that while I've read it twice, that hasn't been lately, and it hasn't been since Sandy Hook. In the first chapter Spenser is flipping through the collection of newspaper articles, police reports, and other information provided by the grandmother, and he comes across a diagram of the school building, marked with the location of the bodies of the people who were killed, students and faculty.

This particular image stuck with me through the next chapter or so, and finally I couldn't stand it and gave up on the book. What I kept thinking about was the afternoon and night of the Sandy Hook shooting, when at some point the news people reported that the bodies of the children and staff who had been killed were still in the school, they had not yet been removed. And the earlier report of how some of the parents had been notified that their child had not made it out - that there was such confusion, and they herded all the parents into a nearby fire station or something, and one by one the parents were reunited with their children, until the only parents who were left were those that had no child to pick up anymore.

This struck me as a very time-specific feeling, one (I hope) unique to our particular time - I couldn't finish reading a work of fiction because the memories of an actual recent school shooting were too fresh. I guess the other times I'd read the book, I'd thought about Columbine and whatnot, but not too much I would guess because that was so long ago. Even Virginia Tech seems a long time ago, and it's almost as if that doesn't even count  in light of Sandy Hook, you know? Yes, those were young college students in the prime of their lives, the professors were distinguished academics who dedicated their careers to engaging and stimulating young minds. But they were also all full-grown adults - they had time to go to high school and finish high school and take advantage of the opportunity of a higher education in the glorious United States of America. I know their parents and siblings and colleagues still miss them terribly and I'm sure if I knew any of them I would not be "over it." But they're all grown-ups. 

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Part Three  

I'm thinking of starting yet another blog, about gun violence and gun control issues, but (a) it seems a bit vain to assume that enough people care about what I think to justify a whole additional website, and (b) how in the world am I going to have the time? But I do want to continue to follow up on the issue, so I'm still thinking about how I could do that most effectively.

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Part Two 

Our older son Simon has officially begun his hands-on gun safety education. I have put part of this responsibility into the hands of my Dad, who owned several guns throughout our childhoods and they were never locked up, just hung up on a rack out of reach, and whatever he told us, we knew better than to ever touch them.  I'm not sure how sure I am about the chosen approach, of how to handle guns safely (I'd rather he not handle them, period, I'd rather he simply report to an adult), though my general thought in life is, knowledge is better than ignorance.

Oh, hell, I don't know what the best way is to do this. There are many parenting issues about which this is true, of course, and as with many issues we are feeling our way along, researching and talking and trusting our instincts but also making it up as we go along. 

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Part One

So this was really discouraging:

A couple of weeks ago I read this article, and I have to say that of all the "dismaying comment threads" I've seen at the end of various online articles, this is the one that left me feeling the most unsettled. To spare you from reading all of them, I'll say that the folks posting comments seem to view being asked if they have firearms in their home and if they are properly secured, as a gigantic invasion of Big Brother into their privacy, some saying they do not even want the kid of such a parent playing with their child. … I regularly swear off reading Comments, and I succeed for awhile and then relapse; I just can't seem to help myself. In discussing this with Matt he agreed with this approach, saying the chance for any enlightenment is totally destroyed by all the negativity. And I realize this is this certain site with this certain readership, a readership that might not be inclined to think the same way I think, and also a lot of them may be totally reasonable nice people when confronted with this situation in Real Life (vs. anonymous Internet), but … Good Lord, if there are actually more than a couple of folks who really think and feel this, my children are never going to be able to go over to anyone else's house again.

Again I'd love to hear from gun owners who have actually dealt with this situation; I am going to give the benefit of the doubt and assume they are not the Huge A**holes they seem to be. It is a difficult subject to broach, because especially right now the issue is so polarizing, and for their information I do hesitate to ask and I don't ask as often as I should, which kills me to think about - I don't ask about something I am really concerned about, that could be a life-and-death issue, because I don't want to piss anyone off. That sucks. 

I have tried throughout all my thinking about this issue, especially since Sandy Hook, to be careful about any comparisons I make, and to try to make as few of them as possible. I've also tried to consider what it is folks are actually concerned about/scared of other than physical existence of firearms. There were lots of comparisons in this  piece, some of which I consider to be legitimate and some I find to be utterly ridiculous. 

On the latter note, I guess I understand they don't like to be asked about guns because what it seems you are really saying is, "I do not trust you to keep my child safe. I don't think the 2nd Amendment guarantees your personal right to own 864 guns if you so choose, and even if it clearly did I don't think you should own one." And perhaps also, "I am smarter than you and I understand this whole issue better than you, and furthermore I love my child more than you love yours, obviously." On the former note, about the only other thing I consider to be on the same scale of guns is swimming pools, and you better believe that once I know someone has a pool, I will ask them as many questions about gates and latches and supervision and everything as I'm asking you about this gun. All the other comparisons - that this is some hideous invasion of privacy and that they should in turn be able to ask us if we've had an abortion or if we have sex toys in the house or if knives and rat poison are locked up- some are semi-legitimate and others make me want to throw up. If my child is going to the home of a same-age friend, I trust that those parents have taken reasonable precautions and have cabinet locks and knives out of reach. And if I'm at the home of someone who does not have small children, I check, because hey, you might not know. Pornography and sex toys and abortions - that's just stupid, both because (a) I just think it's stupid and (b) because these super-angry folks do not seem to understand that NONE OF THOSE THINGS IS THE SAME AS A LOADED HANDGUN. Really, nothing is the same as a loaded gun. Guns.are.different. 

A four year old shoots and kills his Dad, with a gun he grabbed in the space of a few seconds. A 6-year-old shoots and kills a 4 y.o. neighbor/playmate, with a gun that was supposedly stored out of reach but obviously wasn't. A brother shoots and kills his younger sister, with a gun that was initially described as "stored safely" but it turns out was rested in a corner. A young boy shoots and kills the wife of a deputy sheriff with adults STANDING RIGHT THERE. There is ZERO ROOM FOR ERROR with a handgun. There is unlimited potential for harm - anyone in the same room (or an adjoining room) is susceptible to life-changing and life-ending events, in a matter of seconds. It's not a matter of psychological trauma or damage, or your so-called Constitutional rights. It is a matter of whether my child or your child (or you or one of your other children or hell, me when I come inside to pick the kid up) live through a play date. So yes, I am going to ask you. I may even ask to make a visual inspection of what precautions you have, since evidently the understanding of "safe storage of firearms" varies quite a bit. And "Oh, they're safe" is not an acceptable answer. I'm sorry if that implies, or directly means, I don't trust you to do the right thing for my kid or yours. I only want him to live. It's my job to help him live. 

And, Five Injured in Accidental Shootings at Gun Shows on "Gun Appreciation Day" Jan. 20, 2013

And, Two More Kids Were Shot With Their Relatives' Guns. We Need to Pass Laws to Punish the Relatives. June 24, 2013 

And, Before Playdates, More Parents Asking about Guns

And, a possible solution? Could This Technology Be the Key to Preventing Accidental Child Shooting Deaths? July 12, 2013  

Yes, plenty of kids die every year of other causes - drowning, car accidents, accidental poisonings, falling out of trees (heck, not a kid client but a kid relative of a client, choked to death on a piece of plastic about a year after I met him). And each of those issues has their own public safety and education program/movement, and you as a parent and a human being should follow those directions - every summer you see PSAs about supervising kids in the water, every baby care book I've ever read tells you to never leave them alone in a bath, not even for a second. The "Back to Sleep" campaign, of which I was a part when I worked for the Health Department and for Child Welfare, to reduce your newborn's risk of SIDS. Posters urging you to get your car seat checked at the local fire department, to make sure they're installed correctly. Cabinet locks and drawer latches, PSAs about making sure Grandma's purse is out of reach when she comes over with her 32 prescriptions in tow. 

You see what I mean, right? You are right, there are multiple dangers to our young children at every turn (and on everyone except this gun thing, people seem to be pretty reasonable), and there are guidelines for each one of those including firearms, and a big part of that is checking about firearms in the homes our kids visit. Other parts include education about what to do if you find a gun, and we're working on that, we educate whenever there's an opportunity. And we're following our pediatrician's advice to let him fire one of my Dad's guns, to see how powerful it is. But you know what? My six year old is generally brilliant but regularly does about the dumbest shit you can imagine, because he is six. He does not have good judgment or decision-making skills, and he does not understand the permanency of the consequences of his actions. I don't trust him to know that the gun you have, which looks totally different from whatever ones he's seen, is the real thing, because he's six. And you know what else? My three year old has Down syndrome, and I will just go ahead and say, he will never be allowed to visit or play in a home where I'm not 100% confident of his safety, on multiple (pool, rat poison, especially supervision) fronts. And if that means my kid can't visit, then that's too bad, but your child is welcome any time at our home, and you can ask any question you want, really. And if that means our two kids can't be buddies, then that sucks, but I do feel comfortable saying I love my kid more than you do, and it is ultimately my job to make sure he's safe. And, if you assure me your guns are safe and then one of my children dies as a result of an "accidental" shooting in your home, I am going to immediately shoot you in the head for allowing it to happen. Yes that'll be sad because then your child will be without a parent but hey, I will be minus one son so yours can just come live with us and nothing like that will ever happen to him in my home.

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