Our collective right to live in a safe society trumps everything else. Is the insanity ever going to end?
It has taken a few days for the enormity of what happened in Orlando to hit me. I have worked on gun violence prevention for years, but this time it was personal: 49 of my brothers and sisters were gunned down, and at least another 53 were injured.
Despite reading and sharing hundreds of social media posts in the last 72 hours, what made me finally lose control last night was this Huffington Post blog post, from a mother who lost her 6 year-old daughter in the Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012, only four months after they moved to the US from Canada. I lost it, because, as she writes to the Orlando survivors: “I am sorry that our tragedy here in Sandy Hook wasn’t enough to save your loved ones.”
I look at that last sentence and I cannot breathe. The murder of 20 first-graders and 6 adults at Sandy Hook was not enough to cause our f*ked up society to act to prevent it from happening again. What act more depraved than that would be enough to cause change?
Is it too much to hope that the deaths of 49 of my brothers and sisters in Orlando will not have been in vain, but instead mark a turning point? Why should we embrace hope and expect this time to be any different? We have all been so thoroughly disgusted and enraged by Congress’ inaction before.
When I first came out as a young gay man in the mid-1980’s, bars really were the only safe haven for GLBT people — and they still play that role in many parts of this country. The vibrant gay culture that exists in major cities today — community centers, religious organizations, rugby teams, choruses, bookstores, film festivals — were all pretty uncommon then. The AIDS epidemic was emerging, and my friends were starting to die, one by one. We were all terrified.
Until you have felt the fear of holding someone’s hand in public, I don’t think you can fully understand the role that bars played — and still do play. We went to the bars despite their being in sketchy neighborhoods and despite our being afraid of harassment or worse (because we never knew who might be waiting for us outside the bar with a lead pipe). Much has changed in the years since, and the LGBT community has seen amazing social and political progress. Then the Orlando massacre happened on Sunday, and it shattered our sense of safety again.
I was so desperate to find a place to channel my rage after the Newtown massacre in 2012 that I launched a gun violence prevention advocacy organization with a gun violence survivor, Eddie Weingart, also a gay man, who has since become a good friend. Eddie’s mother was murdered in front of him, when he was two years old, by her ex-husband, who used a gun. We organize, we share information, we work hard — and sometimes we can’t help but worry that the effort is futile because of the longstanding intractability of this issue. I think that’s really what made me lose it after reading the Huffington Post piece.
How do we begin to comprehend the scope of the destruction that the widespread availability of unregulated, lethal guns in the United States has caused to the fabric of our society? Entire neighborhoods terrorized. Children and adults murdered where they play, worship, go to school, work. Families ripped apart, lives cut short too early, survivors wracked with guilt and forever altered by the experience that nearly killed them.
Over and over and over and over and over again, it happens. And our legislature does nothing. Nothing except offer hypocrisy, inaction, empty “thoughts and prayers”, and moments of silence — silence which is killing us.
As a society, we heavily regulate everything else that’s unsafe — things far less dangerous than AR-15s. We lowered traffic fatalities by adding seat belts and air bags to cars and by implementing speed limits. No, we didn’t get rid of all traffic accidents by doing that — nor did we take everyone’s cars away — but we did succeed in lowering deaths and injuries, and I’m willing to call that “success”. Eliminating all accidents would be ridiculously unattainable (human behavior is involved, after all) — but that’s certainly not a reason to not try to reduce them. In 1964, the Surgeon General issued the first report on smoking and health, and people said, then, that behavior could never be changed. But that didn’t stop us from trying…and 50 years later, we have substantially changed our culture and improved our health. Cigarettes aren’t totally banned, and some people still smoke — but we made great strides in reducing lung cancer and other deaths associated with smoking and second-hand smoke. Changing culture and behavior isn’t impossible, but it does take strategic planning, hard work, and sustained effort.
On the gun violence prevention issue, instead of making progress, we allow ourselves to be immobilized by a gun industry and its powerful lobbyists (NRA), who want to waste our time distracting us with ridiculous and futile arguments over whether or not gun violence is a “public health emergency” that should be addressed or even named that, a battle which has interfered with the appointment of at least one of our nation’s Surgeons General. We struggle under a research ban — one that was ordered lifted by President Obama and yet continues to be enforced because of intimidation by Congress — that prohibits the mere collection of data and conduct of studies that could help us figure out what to do.
We allow ourselves to debate with people who monstrously abuse the Second Amendment, with logic so childish that we end up going around and around in circles about meaningless pedantic issues like: whether a weapon is an “assault” weapon or not; what other objects are capable of killing (as if that’s an excuse not to regulate guns); whether it’s guns or people that do the shooting; whether criminals obey laws or not; why more “good” guys need guns; and why we should all buy into the ludicrous delusion that one can play John Wayne, just like in a movie, and actually differentiate a “good” guy from a “bad” guy in an active shooter situation. The nightclub in Orlando was dark. People were panicked. All that actually would have happened in that situation — with more people armed — would have been more deaths. Any 6 year-old can figure that out. (And indeed, the “good” guys who had guns, an off-duty police officer working as the club’s security guard, and two other officers outside the club, were unable to stop the “bad” guy.)
Instead of being distracted by such uninformed futility, why aren’t we focusing on the real questions that will save lives? Guns are lethal, and they have one purpose: to kill efficiently…so why the f*ck aren’t we regulating them? We need regulations for our own safety. More often than not, humans cannot be trusted to make safe choices on our own — and that’s especially true in this case. Hypocritical arguments about how government shouldn’t be involved, and free will shouldn’t be impeded, are a waste of everyone’s time. One needs to pass a test to get a driver’s license. One needs a license to fly a plane; a license to practice medicine; a permit to build a house or open a restaurant or operate a swimming pool. When someone rides a motorcycle without a helmet and gets a head injury, their irresponsible actions increase all of our health care costs — and often cost taxpayers directly (Medicare/Medicaid) — so many States have done what was needed and enacted mandatory helmet laws.
Nowhere is the need for safety more immeasurably and obviously true than as regards the presence of guns in our society. No one has a right — it is not written anywhere in the Second Amendment — to privately own a military-grade weapon capable of firing up to 900 rounds per minute. The words “well regulated” are right there, in the text of the Second Amendment. Spare me the empty arguments about “private rights”. What about the rights of all of the rest of us to live in a safe society? Our collective rights to live without harm — life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — absolutely trump a gun fetishist’s right to put the rest of us at risk from a violent manifestation of his racial hatred, anger issues, marital issues, employment issues, internalized homophobia, fundamentalist religious fervor, connection to international terrorism networks, mental illness, playing too many violent video games, unresolved penis issues, or whatever other truly unrelated excuses one wants to put into that list to take guns off the hook. At the end of the day, the rest of us are at risk for one reason only: because someone has a lethal killing machine in their possession. That person should not be allowed to do so in civil society. Would we let a 6 year-old drive a car? Absolutely not. Yet, for some reason, we allow people who are using a 6 year-old’s logic to terrorize the rest of us with military-grade weapons.
Currently, in the United States, 115,000 people are being shot per year. Of those, nearly 34,000 people are being killed per year from firearms-related causes (homicide, suicide, and accidental injury) — that’s over 90 people a day (source: 2013 CDC data). Over 81,000 people per year -- that's over 222 people per day, on average -- experience non-fatal firearms-related injuries (source: 2014 CDC data).
Since the Sandy Hook massacre in December 2012, there have been 1,002 mass shootings in the US (1,135 killed and 3,953 wounded in these mass shootings, through 6/14/2016; source: Gun Violence Archive), including the massacre in Orlando this past Sunday. The Orlando massacre has been the worst — so far. Unless we do something differently, you can count on there being more massacres.
We get the government we elect. Currently, we tolerate a Congress that places the value of campaign financing from the gun industry above our and our loved ones’ lives, and allows childish and futile arguments to get in the way of constructive discourse that could actually lead us to solutions. We, and the Congress that we elect, choose to do nothing — and it is a choice. Until we elect legislators who have the guts to stand up to the gun manufacturers’ lobby (the NRA), more people will die — and their blood will be on all of our hands.