As an atheist, anti-consumerist Jew, I’ve generally felt that Christmas isn’t “my holiday”. I feel a little different this year.
I know that New Year’s is usually the “resolution” holiday, but honestly, it seems to me that if you’re going to pick a day to model your year after, it should be one built around family and giving instead of booze and hollering (as fond as I am of all four).
The rolling toll of gun-fueled violence this past year in our country, culminating (but sadly, not ending) in the Sandy Hook massacre, moved me deeply. When I first heard about what happened in Newtown, I just broke down sobbing, thinking about those children in their startled, confused last minutes and the incomprehensible grief of their parents.
But it’s Christmas morning, I don’t want to drag you back there right now.
Instead, just contrast that with the sense of tranquility and contentment that wrapped me, walking with my wife, Michelle and our son Zev through the neighborhood last night. We sucked in the air, crisp as an apple, and murmured about our year as the soft sparkle of the lights on the trees in the houses floated by, made all the more twinkly by starbursts and halos left by my late 90’s LASIK surgery.
Meridian Park was dark, but not too dark to push a swing, nor to recognize our friend Harley and his dog-bear Ziggy out for an evening amble. We exchanged news and gossip, including the update on his 1 Blink Equals Yes project, where a group of friends has created custom software for a terminally ill friend to DJ one last blow-out party using only his eyes. Hats off.
Finally, we made our way back down an uncharacteristically quiet 45th Street towards home, where, final blessing on the evening, we eased our sleeping child out of his stroller and into bed.
If a holiday has the power to sooth a troubled mind with such simplicity, it’s alright by me.
So this year, this Jew is making a Christmas resolution: I’m going to work this year to abate gun violence. It’s going to be an uphill battle, but if ever there were a time when the stranglehold of the gun lobby on congress might be broken, it’s now. I’m not aiming for, or even wishing for, the abolishment of guns, just the same sensible regulation we apply to cars, food and the rest of daily life: no drunk drivers on our roads, no dangerous chemicals in our food, no easy access to semi-automatic, high-capacity man-hunting weapons anywhere in our land.
Whatever your stance on this particular issue, I hope that you’ll join me in dedicating this next year to making the world a more peaceful place.
Merry Christmas, Wallingford.
Just a fact to keep in mind;
Drivers are required to be trained, licensed, and insured. Vehicles are required to be inspected and licensed. A yet even with all these regulations and laws, still more people are killed by drunk “DRIVERS” than by “PEOPLE” with guns.
Steve
moar laws. moar regulations. in the end you’re only going to punish and tax responsibility, as per usual the good guy pays. good luck.
the guy who died in bellevue the other night was likely at the hands of a prior killer (tuba man), I am pretty sure that kid (btw what is a 19 year old doing in a club?) shouldn’t have owned or didn’t legally have a firearm.
the issue is a cultural one in most cases of gun violence in this country. chicago has strict gun laws and look how that’s working out for them.
the wackos that mass kill are wackos and nothing short of unicorns and angels taking all the guns away is going stop these sort of incidents from occuring.
there are plenty of laws and regulations in place already, it’s a responsibilty and people issue.
Reason’s Greetings, Jordan (Michelle and Zev). Thank you for the thoughtful piece. I want to hear every idea there is in a non-black-and-white exchange. It was very hard for me to NOT imagine the Newtown carnage at our local elementary and very difficult to attempt to be in the shoes of the community members.
Perhaps not teaching war no more would be a start . . .
Interesting piece in this morning’s paper, about the marketing ties between assault rifles etc., and violent video games. The gun lobby points at the video games as a culprit, but the industry that funds that lobby seems to see the connection in a more positive light.
I really miss Edward Scott McMichael, “Tuba Man.” He was a wonderful neighbor and daily presence on the sidewalk or the bus. As I recall, he was beaten, beaten, beaten, not shot; violence is the common denominator.
Hi there,
Last Sunday I volunteered my living room for a meeting of people who wanted to “do something”. Next Sunday, the 30th, will be the meeting wherein we decide what to do. I started a Facebook group (it’s called the Densmore Working Group) for folks to toss up ideas and start dialogues and I’ve been talking with all sorts of people from Washington Ceasefire to professors to activists, legislators and other parents.
If you’re interested in “doing something” with a bunch of other folks, instead of going it alone, we’ll be going forward as CHAI, the Come Home Alive Initiative.
My living room will be open every other Sunday at 3pm until we’re done. All are welcome, folks (like me) who’d prefer a gun-free world and gun enthusiasts who want to do the work to make our community safer. We’re not limiting our conversation to “change the culture” or “change the law” – we’re talking about both. This won’t get better until we all start talking to each other and making change together.
Merry Christmas to you, Wallyhood, and all the rest of you.
xo,
Jessica (jtrupin at comcast dot net)
@E30 Memorial, I don’t expect gun deaths to vanish entirely, only to reduce them. Likewise, I don’t think laws against drunk driving eliminated drunk driving deaths, but they inarguably reduced them.
@neighbor: The US has twenty times the gun deaths per capita vs all other developed countries (http://wapo.st/Wco9A5). Do you think the United States is just more murderous as a culture than all other developed countries? I think more of our national culture than that. And before you say that it’s just “bad” cities, be sure to take a look at where those deaths are happening: http://bit.ly/hrfyNh. Turns out, that, while there are a number of factors, areas with tighter gun control laws see fewer gun deaths, even in the US.
Side note: how come the intentional misspelling of “moar”? Is it a sort of shibboleth of the right?
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=moar
No, moar’s just moar. Like lol and tl;dr.
Moar is less.
thanks for the call out on our friend at http://www.1blinkequalsyes.org
I forgot to mention that there is a local angle (in addition to me being a lead on the project). David, Margit and their daughter Grace lived in Wallyhood for a year in 2006 on 44th and Meridian. David is our friend with ALS for whom we are creating the custom hardware and software to help him DJ again using his eyes. They now reside in minneapolis.
For those of you that haven’t you should check out the website above and take the 6 minutes to watch the video. Very inspiring stuff.
Thank you, Jordan, for the very insightful and thoughtful editorial.
Jessica, I will contact you.
Excellent. If folks are interested, you can also friend me on FB (I’m the only Jessica Trupin) (I BETTER be the only Jessica Trupin!) and I’ll add you to the group. I expect I’ll have to create a listserv and a blog/site soon, but I’m hoping someone steps out of the woodwork really excited to do that for me.
As disturbing as the massacre of children was, I have found this link to be even more chilling:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2012/12/gun_death_tally_every_american_gun_death_since_newtown_sandy_hook_shooting.html
It is an interactive site that tallies the gun deaths in America since Sandy Hook. It identifies individual victims by name, age, and city. Two firefighters in New York? Try making sense of 190 people since Dec 14th.
Our country also sent trainers and weapons to other countries, El Salvador in the 1980s to name only one. So there is a lot to do. Start with home. I will come to JTs if I can manage. Certainly love the name, Life in Hebrew.
I would have gone to Meridian Park with Lev if I had known you and Harley and Ziggy were there. Lev and Zig were puppy playmates.
But on a less serious note, what about the Chinese dinner? I was stuck with another estimable ethnic feast, but it wasn’t the same.
@Terri,
Not to discount the issue or numbers, but the numbers noted also include legal justified shootings. Unless we want to allow criminals free reign to do as they please and also take away all firearms from law enforcement, not all these numbers should be prevented.
Steve
The only legitimate purpose for having an assault/semi-automatic rifle with a large capacity clip (more than about 10 rounds, arguably less) is for shooting targets (lots of fun!) or shooting people (military, police, etc.). I can’t think of any good reason why ANYONE would want these types of weapons in the hands of ordinary citizens.
Go ahead and keep your hunting rifle, your (small capacity) handgun, your shotgun, etc. Go ahead and hunt, keep your handgun where it can protect you, and shoot at the target range, but don’t tell me that you need a high-capacity semi-automatic weapon. That is ridiculous.
I personally think we should strictly interpret the 2nd amendment on this and only allow the kinds of “arms” available at the time of its writing; those are the only types of “arms” the founding fathers could have imagined.
What if the owners of guns–any and all guns–became as accountable as car or business owners? what would happen if all gun owners of had to be prepared to show proof upon request by ANY law enforcement officer that the weapon in their possession is registered, licensed and insured–just like their car? Fail to do it more than the law allows and your gun gets impounded until you fix the problem. Wouldn’t police officers finally have a prayer of enforcing the existing laws in a meaningful way?
As it is now, all the costs related to gun ownership are downstreamed to everyone in our society. A gun owners accountability for his weapon begins and ends when they pay for their gun and the ammunition unless they’re proven guilty of commiting a crime with it. There’s not even anything forcing them to report that it’s gone missing if they don’t want to!
We already have the beginnings of the infrastructure, it’s called the Department of Licensing. Olympia would likely be all over the new revenue stream! But this time the majority would actually benefit.
This is an interesting discussion, good to see different perspectives represented.
One thing I wonder about is the increasing separation in the minds of Americans between “laws” and “rights.” As in, “Well, if thus-and-so law is inconvenient for me or counter to my personal view of my rights, I am free (and morally justified) in disregarding it.” By extension, any increased restriction constitutes a loss of individual rights, and that’s intolerable regardless of the benefit to the community.
So while I would like to see changes in the availability of assault rifles, I can’t shake the notion that those who view that their “rights” ultimately trump the laws will prevail on this issue, as they do in a variety of others. I want to have faith that change is possible, but at the same time, it’s hard for me to believe that changing the laws regarding firearms would be very effective.
I wanted to get the word out about a rally and march on January 13 organized by Washington Ceasefire:
Show your support Sunday January 13th at 1:30pm as we march from Westlake Park to the Seattle Center. Together with our partners Washington CeaseFire invites you to join us for StandUp Washington : Turning Anger in to Action. For more details visit: http://www.standupwa.org.
According to a post on another community blog, the event will include a wide swath of students, parents, religious leaders, educators, and business and civic leaders. The march will include signs, speeches and perhaps some high profile musical entertainment. The core focus in the speeches and at the rally will be on moving our legislators to support a ban on semi-automatic weapons.
Hope Wallingford will be well-represented at this important event!
I would be curious to see some statistics on how many people are actually unjustly killed by semi-automatic weapons, or whether this just another attempt at further loss of Constitutional rights and not holding people personally accountable.
I know this posting is focused on taking away guns, but because Wally touched on drunk drivers I’m going to touch on it as well. I find it really sad that Wallingford residents are so adamantly against guns instead accountability for them, but yet drunk driving is so much more socially acceptable.
Steve
Steve, if memory serves, your nom d’Internet is an homage to your son, who you lost to a drunk driver. If so, please accept my deepest sympathies. As a father, I find the pain incomprehensible.
Drunk driving accounts for about 10,000 deaths per year (according to the CDC). I didn’t find any for automatic weapons specifically. I can only imagine it is dwarfed by the number of people that die due to drunk driving. However, gun homicides overall are at about the same level (around 10,000 per year). Suicides by gun are about double that, at around 17,000 per year.
I hope we can all grab a cause that moves us and try to advance it. I agree it’s remarkable that the social reaction to drunk driving is so different than gun violence, despite their similar impacts. Perhaps because it’s less intentional?
Drunk driving is illegal. Weapons whose clear and only purpose is to kill people at a distance, are not illegal. That’s why he mentioned drunk driving, as an example of the laws the we enact reflecting our interest in a safe and wholesome community.
If you’re troubled by the amount of drunk driving that goes on anyway, you have a lot of company there. But if your point is that because we haven’t managed a completely satisfactory solution to that problem, we can’t in fairness do anything about assault rifles …? More logically, you should complain that it isn’t fair to make drunk driving illegal while assault rifles are legal. But drunk driving has been a much more pressing problem, just because people drive a lot, and our settlement patterns grow up around that to the point that we “need” to drive. And of course we get drunk a lot.
Not much of this makes an interesting analogy with the gun problem – except when it comes to the notion of “personal responsibility”. With drunk driving, we take the position that it’s an accident waiting to happen, so you’re punished for just having put yourself in that position. With guns, we’ve been forced by a well funded gun lobby to take the position that arming yourself with an assault rifle is fine, it’s only a problem when you start using it, so we have some laws but they’re small consolation for the person on the other end of the assault rifle who is already dead.
Donn
Your comparison really isn’t valid. You state:
Drunk driving is illegal.
Weapons … are not illegal.
In one case you’re comparing the action of a person with an object. The other case is simply an object.
If you want to compare cars and firearms, then you are not correct since both cars and firearms are both legal. How each of those objects are handled by the user determines whether either becomes a weapon.
Plus, I’m pretty sure handling a firearm while drunk is illegal.
The objects in question, and the way we use them, are so different that an analysis like that doesn’t add up for me. I could see a gun as `simply an object’ when it’s in its shipping crate at the warehouse or something, but not when it’s in your pocket. Note that what we call “drunk driving” is usually “control of a motor vehicle” – technically, action isn’t required, it’s enough to have the potential and apparent intention to act.
I think one reason we have too ambiguous a reaction to drunk driving is that we understand it too well – even if you’re the rare person who hasn’t done it, you know how how easily you could end up being that drunk driver. It’s harder to put yourself in the shoes of a murderer or a suicide. Whether insight makes it easier or harder to solve a problem, I don’t know.
The really hard problem with effective gun control, it seems to me, is that what seems like an obvious category of guns designed to kill people is really huge grey area. Tobin’s idea of construing the 2nd amendment to apply to 18th century weapons might be more practical than it sounds. Black powder muzzle loading guns are still used today for hunting and target competitions, they’re practical and really quite fun for those applications, and there’s no way to make an effective assault rifle out of one. It would be a very hard sell, but I just wanted to point out that there’s some logic to it.