“We do not know why this happened. We do not know how this happened. But again, to confirm, 13 are dead in rural southwest Oregon.” – CBS News

Now the local anchor is speculating that this might be the greatest number of people killed in one event in the state of Oregon. True or not, that’s still 13 bodies, and while that’s a drop in the bucket globally speaking, it’s worth having a conversation about.

A real conversation. You know, the kind where people listen to each other before they respond. The kind where we at least pretend to be interested in the other side’s perspective before we explode like a hydrogen bomb of self-righteousness and vitriol. Without even looking at Twitter – intentionally, I might add – I know for a fact that there are folks on both sides of the gun control debate screaming through their keyboards that the other side are idiots, monsters, and evil bastards.

But with a few exceptions, that’s bullshit. Evil is an idea, not a reality. Granted, it’s an idea that influences reality, and there are those who apparently let that idea so deeply infiltrate their worldview that it becomes a part of who they are. Was this shooter evil? Chances are, he was crazy as a shithouse rat, lonely to the point of being suicidal, and totally devoid of empathy. He was scum. And he had a gun. Or guns. Or a goddamn arsenal.

That will be at the crux of the public’s outrage. Guns will be blamed. People will be blamed. They’re both right. Would this have happened if we had tougher gun laws as a country? Could it have been avoided if the campus security guard was armed? Ask away.

Just stop shouting at each other. Just stop shooting at each other.

Now a student being interviewed at Umpqua Community College is saying that, from a young age, we’re taught what to do in an active shooter situation. That’s pretty fucked.

Like every red-blooded male with whom I grew up, I played with toy guns as a kid. We played at war, and we set up our G.I. JOE guys in elaborate tableaus of impending fake violence. I went on to listen to gangster rap and watch John Woo movies, and even fantasized about busting a cap in a sucker’s ass on multiple occasions. There were guns in my house growing up, though they were dusty and locked in a cabinet in the basement. Never did I consider taking them out and using them.

Granted, I was raised in a loving home, and had plenty of friends. Can’t say I was ever bullied, though I got in my fair share of fights. I’ve had moments in my life where I felt utterly alone and hated the world, but even in my darkest nadirs of misanthropy, I only wished for a global pandemic, alien invasion, or zombie-pocalypse – you know, like in the movies.

For whatever reason, I never found myself at a true breaking point. I never considered actually taking the steps to end somebody else’s life. I never connected the guns in the basement with the world outside. They were abstractions, completely unrelated to the hate in my gut. I may be a lot of unpleasant things, but I’m not a murderer.

In 1995, when I graduated high school, I didn’t know of any mass shootings in schools, except those that had been perpetrated at Kent State by the government and Charles Whitman’s clock-tower massacre at the University of Texas at Austin. Kip Kinkel’s rampage at Thurston was three years away, and the Columbine shootings were four.

That’s no longer the case. Seems like there’s a new shooting every few months now, if not a few new shootings every month. There’s some serious disconnection going on in America. Is it because we view the world through the lens of social networks and video games, where individuals are no more than pixels and strings of exclamation marks? Is it because there are more of us than ever before battling for fewer resources? Just asking questions. Willing to listen to your responses.

I don’t personally own a gun, and I have no plans to do so. I do have a lot of friends who own guns, ranging from handguns to shotguns, and not one of them has ever killed someone. They are responsible gun owners, and I think they should be able to own guns. I’ve never been one to believe that the rights of smart, well-adjusted people should be limited by the weakness of stupid, crazy, racist, or violent people. Once we go down that road, we’re all living in a grade-school cafeteria where everyone has to stay in at lunch because one kid was horsing around. I don’t want to live in a world where the lowest common denominator sets the bar under which we all must stoop to crawl.

Having said that, there are a lot more important issues in this world than whether or not you get to keep your guns. People are struggling to feed their families and save their homes. Around the world, warlords and despots are using rape as a weapon to control entire populations. There’s an island of plastic and sludge floating in the Pacific that’s at least the size of Texas. A bunch of people were just killed in Roseburg. Your guns are some unimportant shit in the big scheme of things. If you live in the wilderness, and actually use your rifle to hunt, and the meat you harvest is your primary form of sustenance, then your gun might actually be considered vital. If you’re so moronic and deluded that you think you have a chance of defending yourself against the U.S. government with your paltry pantry of puny popguns, then the availability of psychological services is a bigger issue for you than the second amendment.

Those two paragraphs likely angered some of you. I won’t apologize, but my intention isn’t to inflame. I don’t believe in drastic gun control, but I do believe in consistently applied background checks. I don’t believe that good people should have their rights infringed upon because of bad people, but I also believe that there are more important rights than to bear arms. I also believe that exploring options isn’t the same thing as a conspiracy to take away your firearms. Either I’m just covering my ass, or I’m like a lot of other people out there in that I’m not an extremist.

We need to stop choosing sides and arming ourselves: With the titles of Republican or Democrat, Liberal or Conservative; with words meant to incite rather than exchange ideas and move toward consensus; with distrust of anyone who thinks differently than us and the desire to control them and force them to live their lives, or end their lives, in the ways we think righteous.

This is a hot take. I don’t know all the facts. What I do know is that I’d rather write something that attempts to get a conversation going than funnel my anger and frustration into a diatribe against anyone. It’s that kind of reactive, lashing-out mentality that undermines the potentially great country in which we live. Feel free to tell me I fucked up, my perspective is bullshit, or that I’m a gun-defending/gun-attacking asshole. My hope is that you, too, will avoid that impulse. The next time somebody flings that dookie in your direction, smile, imagine whatever medieval revenge scenario makes you giggle, and then DON’T DO SHIT ABOUT IT. Instead, ask them to explain, try to listen, and politely offer your perspective. If all else fails, go home, pet your dogs or cats, and try to remember that it’s mostly good to be alive.

5 Comments

  1. Bronze

    Man, I think about the insane rise in mass shootings over the course of my adult life, and all I ultimately come up with is that it is a symptom of a sick nation and culture. Look at our nation and the core elements that make up the stories we tell about ourselves. We are a nation of rebels, willing to take up arms and cast off the yoke of an empire. We are a nation of frontiersmen and cowboys, conquering and taming savage Indians and wild country. A nation of Doughboys, GI Liberators, Delta Force terrorist hunters and general all around Ass Kickers. We are and have always been a violent nation, and obsessed with guns. I know this because I grew up steeped in the legends and I still can’t help but buy into them. Damn right we’re rebels! Damn right we’re cowboys! And hell yeah I love guns and own a ton of them and no way am I turning them in.

    Look at the stories and characters we obsess over. How many hit shows are about assassins, hit men, mobsters, and killers? Men who trade in violence? We eat that shit up. Look at the video games we produce and consume (myself included). You would have to be a complete numbskull NOT to see that a million teens spending an entire day sitting isolated on a couch taking headshots at virtual people, is going to produce one mass killer per month with a mere .0012% loony rate. America was born from, steeped in, and made great through violence. Our national anthem sings about exploding bombs and rockets for fuck’s sake!

    I am well aware that I have not proposed any solutions, because indeed I have none. I just feel like the problem is so much much deeper than guns, mental health issues, violence in the media, or whatever your pet issue happens to be. We as a culture need to look deeper than these symptoms, need to look in the mirror and make an honest assessment of what we see there. National cultures are not graven in stone. When the will is there, change can happen. Look at Germany in the last 50 years. Look at Japan. The poisonous elements of their cultures brought such shame and misery upon them that they both undertook a collective remaking of their national character. If the Japanese can jettison a thousand years of religious political tradition, I don’t see why we can’t own up to our own twisted mythology and give it the heave too. Of course it took millions of their dead to open their eyes. How many dead Americans will it take to open ours?

    Reply
    1. jake.tenpas@gmail.com Author

      Shit, man. You need a blog of your own, and not one dedicated solely to trekking the PCT with a mule and moccasins, kayaking the mighty Mississippi or the undeniable splendor of your messiah child. No, the above is pure Peckinpah poetry, and I’m willing to follow your lead.

      Reply
  2. Beth Gentle

    Excellent piece with excellent thoughts! I will be sharing it with my Facebook friends. I grew up in a home in a rural area, with guns in the gun cabinet on the back porch. I’m not anti-gun, although, no guns = no shootings. Why do people who live in a city need guns? Why is it OK for a person who is of questionable mental stability/capacity to buy a gun? Why is it OK for just anyone to sell guns? I’m hoping that we can now, somehow, begin to find a way to get folks to understand how much money the NRA provides to many of our representatives. It needs to be understood that this is why we haven’t made any progress toward gun laws that make sense.
    I also believe that violent video games are a danger to those who spend the bulk of their time on them, as they provide no real consequences. This makes those video games a danger to the rest of us, as well.
    Of course, then we also have to look at what’s happening with the way we are raising children in this country. Too many kids are not being raised with any structure or moral guidance, which affects not only them but also their friends and ultimately the community as a whole.
    We can’t count out the importance of mental health. Mental health treatment should receive no less attention than the treatment for heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes. The shaming of people who have a mental illness needs to be treated in the same way that we treat bullying. An investment in proper support systems for those with mental health diagnoses would go a long way in preventing some of the tragedies we’ve experienced in our society.
    It does give me hope when young people such as yourself take the time to write about the condition of our society. Maybe things can change for the better.

    Reply
  3. Devin

    I feel you Jake. Part of the conversation I think everyone is missing is that almost all, if not all, of the shooters are, or were, on SSRI medication. Guns have been in America for a long time. Mass shootings are a recent phenomenon.

    Reply

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