Under The Gun

             The shooting by a police officer of an unarmed black youth in Ferguson, Mo. may have less to do with racism and more to do with what appears to have become the American way of handling things – “shoot first, ask questions later.”

 Just one of many examples: A 47-year-old Florida man shoots and kills a 17-year-old black youth because the teenager was playing his car radio too loud. The shooter later told police he felt threatened. A jury recently decided he was the threat and he was given life in prison. Two lives destroyed, needlessly. Why?  In another Florida incident in which a whole series of peaceable actions could have been taken to resolve a traffic dispute, a gun was used. Although no one was killed, a man went to jail, and lives were disrupted.

In Ferguson, after the St. Louis grand jury decided not to file charges against the police officer, protestors responded by shooting police officers. Meanwhile, a group of “volunteers” armed with guns and led by a weapons engineer took to the rooftops in Ferguson to protect businesses from looting by the protestors.

Just days before the protests began in Ferguson, two Cleveland police officers arrived at a park, where someone reported a youth wielding a gun. They were warned the weapon might be a fake. Two seconds on the scene and one of the officers shot a 12-year-old-boy whose pellet gun was missing the orange tab that indicates it’s not a real gun.

            It appears we are substituting a civil society built on enlightenment and justice to a land where the individual is the law unto himself. A Pennsylvania state lawmaker recently took that approach during a holdup near the state Capitol. (See Harrisburg lawmaker exchanges gunfire with would-be robbers). The governor of Pennsylvania, Tom Corbett, seems to endorse the idea. He recently signed a law that allows gun owners to sue cities that adopt laws to protect the public from gun violence.

America is a culture of guns. Fear mongering is used to fight any effort to regulate guns for safe communities. There are those of us who still believe in the preamble of the Constitution and Abraham Lincoln’s consecration of the words “We the People” in his Gettysburg Address: “This nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from this earth.” Funny, the words almost sound fanciful. 

 

                                           Photo by Oleg Volk

The Declaration of Independence, the foundation on which the Constitution was drafted, establishes that we are endowed with certain unalienable rights: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. People do have a right to own guns, but should that right infringe on those who don’t own guns or on the right of the society at large to live without fear of firearms? The challenge is finding a balance, which today is clearly lacking. Gun carnage appears to be unfolding across the land.

Allowing people to carry guns as weapons for protection seems to have opened a Pandora’s Box for anarchy. Last June, two Las Vegas police officers and a civilian were killed by a young couple whose motive was they hated the government. The couple took their own lives, but not before shouting “this is a revolution!” and covering the bodies of the officers in a Gadsden flag, the traditional American flag with the coiled snake and the words “Don’t Tread on Me.”

            Gun violence has long been out of control in America. How can we not say something is wrong when 20 elementary school children are shot dead sitting at their desks because an emotionally disturbed young man was allowed easy access to an array of powerful firearms? The irony is we do say something is wrong, but we do nothing to address it. 

            Gun violence is so pervasive that it has become matter-of-fact in our lives. We are numb. We do nothing. We choose to live under the gun.