Idiotic Platitudes Don’t Kill People…

…people who speak idiotic platitudes kill people.

Friends, it’s time to have a serious conversation about how to reduce gun violence in this country. The level of gun violence in the USA is the highest in the developed world, and is comparable to that of nations like Somalia or the drug cartel-controlled counties of Mexico.

Some paranoiacs are already getting ready to accuse me of wanting to ban guns or “take their guns away.” So let me state right here at the outset:

1) I do not want to ban all guns.
2) Unless you are a criminal, a lunatic, or an untrained child, I do not want to take away your gun.
3) I love the USA and support the Constitution.

We’ve been talking about this for a long time, so there are certain arguments that the rabid crazies like Messrs. LaPierre and Jones can be counted on to make. Over the next several days, I will be eviscerating refuting these arguments.

The first and most cliched argument is the classic, “Guns don’t kill people: people kill people.” The idea behind this argument is that any form of gun regulation is inherently misguided because a gun by itself, as an inanimate object, is neither evil nor good: it is the gun owner that uses the gun for an evil or good purpose.

Of course, this argument is completely bogus. We could replace “guns” in the statement with the following:

“Nuclear bombs don’t kill people: people who drop nuclear bombs kill people.”

After all, if you believe the first statement, you have to believe the second one, right? So why can’t just anyone own a nuclear warhead? It’s an inanimate object: not inherently good or bad. The answer, of course, is that the destruction that could be unleashed by the misuse of said object is enough to justify not letting just anybody own one. The same could be said of certain guns.

Let’s do another replacement, shall we?

“Collapsing bridges and tunnels don’t kill people: people who design and build bridges and tunnels that collapse kill people.”

In other words, why have safety standards for bridges and tunnels? After all, a poorly-designed or constructed bridge isn’t inherently bad: it’s an inanimate object. Well, we have safety standards to protect people from the consequences of a poorly-designed or constructed bridge or tunnel. We ought to have similar standards to protect us from the consequences of a poorly-used gun.

Last one:

“Cars don’t kill people. People who drive cars kill people.”

Yes, and we have lots and lots of regulations on cars and their drivers. Cars must meet rigorous safety standards, and when they don’t, the manufacturer must pay to take them away from their owners and fix them before returning them. We don’t let certain people drive cars if they don’t meet minimum requirements. We even can hold a bartender liable if they sell alcohol to someone who is already obviously intoxicated who then drives off and hurts someone with their car. We even have laws about where a car can go, how fast it can go, etc.

So regardless of a gun’s lack of criminal intent, we can clearly see that in other areas, items without criminal intent are banned, prohibited, restricted, held to certain safety standards, and regulated. I don’t think anybody would argue to eliminate traffic laws, safety standards for bridges, or restrictions on citizens owning a nuke. So why try to make this argument regarding guns?

Again, not saying that guns should necessarily be banned, prohibited, restricted, held to certain safety standards, or regulated in any particular way, but this argument is just dumb.

Tragedy

I am always hesitant to brand something a “tragedy.” Like using the word, “literally” when you actually mean, “figuratively,” or like Alanis Morrisette labeling things “ironic” when she really means “unfortunate,” the word “tragic” has been misapplied to any event that is actually just “sad.”

According to Aristotle, who literally wrote the book on tragedy (okay, figuratively: he literally gave the first recorded lecture on tragedy in The Poetics that someone else copied down), any sad event does not qualify as “tragedy.” There are several elements that must be present in order for a story to be truly “tragic.” These include:

– The tragic hero (i.e. the person to whom the tragedy is happening) must be someone of high status who has a lot to lose. Classically speaking, if Oedipus had been a bachelor shepherd who owned nothing but one coat and his hut, his fall in which he lost everything wouldn’t have been tragic. However, for Oedipus the King, a beloved ruler with wealth, power, a hot wife and (spoiler alert) eyesight, his fall into oblivion is truly a tragedy.

– The fall must be inevitable. In the classical sense, this usually meant that an oracle had foretold the events of the tragedy in advance (Oedipus was told by an oracle that he would kill his father and marry his mother), but today I look at it as meaning that it could have been seen coming.

So when there is a car accident resulting in a death, it’s sad but it isn’t really tragic: there was no inevitability there (yes, yes, unless there’s additional context like the driver had already been arrested 21 times for driving without a license but was never sent to jail, for example).

Of course, everyone called Newtown a tragedy. Was it really?

In this case, I say yes. Maybe a shooting at that particular school wasn’t inevitable, but given our national obsession with guns (we Americans own one gun for every man, woman, and child in the country…to say nothing of illegally-owned guns not on the books or guns sitting in Walmart waiting to be bought), our medieval policy on gun control and gun ownership, our politicians’ unwillingness to challenge the NRA’s radical stance on the issue, and our head-in-the-sand attitude towards mental health, yes, I think 20 children killed in an elementary school was inevitable. It was going to happen sooner or later.

But what about the tragic hero? Who is it in this tragedy? Was it the rich suburban parents? The young children who had their whole lives ahead of them? The gun owner with the mentally challenged son? The shooter himself who could have been helped, maybe, with some intervention?

All of these and more. I think in this story, the tragic hero is us. All of us: America.

We need to act now to prevent these sorts of tragedies from recurring. When Oedipus fell, all of his people paid the price. We’re reaping the harvest of our political inaction with every victim of gun violence we eulogize. Let’s end the tragedy now. In subsequent posts, I’ll talk about ways we can do it.