GELFAND’S WORLD-May 26, 2014. I've been trying to write something about the proper function of neighborhood councils, but I can't get it out of my head that nineteen is a dangerous age. It was the age of one of the Isla Vista victims, and it was the age of both the shooter and one of his victims at a theater on Fairfax Ave in 1997.
I should be doing a column about how we can become effective peoples' lobbyists, but there's all that blood on the ground, just like the blood that was spreading out all over the floor back in 1997.
And of course there have been hundreds of other floors and sidewalks over the intervening years. So often, it has been a young man making use of a pistol to right some perceived wrong or to make a few dollars.
On Fairfax, the 19 year old male first killed an elderly male, a friend of mine, with a single gun shot, and then shot a 19 year old female in the chest with a .357 magnum hollow point round. In Isla Vista, near a street where I used to live, there were a couple of dozen rounds fired, resulting in 3 deaths and several serious injuries. This was in addition to 3 other stabbing murders.
Unlike the simple mercenary motive working in the Fairfax Ave case, the Isla Vista case seems to have come from something between insane jealousy and just plain insanity. You have to be seriously deranged to decide to spend the evening by killing your roommates and then killing random strangers who happen to inhabit your neighborhood.
When I looked at the bloody floor and the deceased body of my friend back then in 1997, and we were entrusted by accident or fate with caring for the wounded, it looked like a robbery gone wrong. It seemed to me that this was the American Nightmare.
Some random nobody with just enough sense to get hold of a pistol and some indefensible need, chose to damage my life and the lives of numerous other people just because he could. It later turned out to be a killing for hire, but at the moment when you are confronting the dead and the possibly dying, waiting for the police and help, it's easy to think of this, our American nightmare.
Whether it be a simple robbery or something more planned, gunshot killings are the American sickness.
The Isla Vista killings were psychologically different than simple robberies, but the immediately precipitating cause was not. The easy availability of concealable firearms was that cause. Not just easy availability, but availability with anonymity.
In the murder on Fairfax Ave, the shooter was given a pistol by a man who wanted somebody dead and was willing to pay for the murder. In the Isla Vista killings, the shooter just bought his guns through legal channels.
The 1997 killer was a needy kid with a desire to make some money, and being none too bright, fell for the pitch made by a smarter guy who wanted to stay away from pulling the trigger himself. The other killer, this week's CNN nonstop story, was probably of average smarts, but in emotional turmoil.
So I'm going to skip the academic political discussion about the neighborhood council system because it keeps coming back to me like a bad song that 19 is a dangerous age.
Here's a little secret that many of you won't have heard, but others of you will already know. Murder is entirely different from the natural process of death. Most of us have had relatives, even parents, pass on. It's usually painful and it takes time to get past it, but there is eventually some sense of closure. Death by natural causes has a certain sense of appropriateness, if that is the word. We know that it happens and we understand that it is part of the natural order of things.
But going to the funeral of a murdered person is a whole different world. There is a sense that it is not a part of the natural order, that it could and should have been averted, and that our knowledge of the passing came too abruptly and too directly. The parents and brothers and sisters of this week's dead will have to deal with that realization, deal with it somehow, and try to get on with their lives, as difficult as that will be.
I'm going to go out on slippery ground here and think about the political differences in this country that come out every time there is a particularly grim mass killing. The survivors point out that something should be done, and the pro-gun advocates point out that there are other dangerous things besides pistols. The former is a reasonable sounding, but largely impossible wish. The latter is a cheap rationalization for the most inconvenient of facts, that bullets fired from guns held by people kill a lot of people in this country, mostly for no good reason at all.
Let me cut to the chase, as they used to say, and point out that we are stuck with our problem, and that there is nothing that any of us can do to really change things. Certainly not for now.
But that doesn't mean that the firearms industry is entitled to feel no guilt, or that the more crazed firearms supporters shouldn't feel just a bit uneasy. After all, if this country were more like Switzerland or Britain or Japan, we wouldn't have had these killings over the weekend, and probably wouldn't have had that murder on Fairfax in 1997.
But in the US, the political climate is too impacted for real change to happen. Some people find that a good thing, even as parents of high school and college students have reason to fear for their childrens' safety.
At one time, there were proposals to control semiautomatic pistol sales, and we even had some federal controls over sales of particularly scary looking semiautomatic rifles. Since that time, sales have gone through the roof, and there are now tens of millions more of these weapons in drawers and closets all over the country. We can't go back to a nation that lacked semiautomatic weapons.
We are at about three hundred million firearms in the possession of the American people, and they are not going away. Oh, you can fantasize about putting restrictions on ammunition, but how much does it take? Four rounds in the case of the Fairfax shootings, plus another two shots fired at us, the audience. It's hard to imagine any law that would limit ammunition sales to less than a few dozen rounds.
Survivors of these shootings have every right to feel bitter, particularly after being forced to arrange services and burials for their children. You might ask why those survivors, by now numbering in the tens of thousands, don't respond with their own violent anger, the way the gun hoarders do.
I think there is an answer. This kind of loss is devastating for the survivors. They have other things to think about than trying to ban semiautomatic hand guns. A few of them will, and they will join the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence or its equivalent. But they are, by and large, normal people who have suffered a terrible loss, and they generally lack the paranoia and fear that the true gun obsessed individuals have.
Putting it more bluntly, the killers, the politically active gun hoarders, and the average parents, now victims of gun violence, are really three different kinds of people. The vast majority of Americans, many of whom are at least indirectly connected to victims of gun violence, have not been politically effective in getting gun control enacted, and we probably won't see any such movement anytime soon.
It's a strange thing, but there was a time when many Americans, myself included, worried about having someone pull a gun on us on the street. Armed robberies and muggings were at a high point sometime in the 70s or 80s, and we might have thought about how it would be a good thing to be able to carry a gun legally.
But times have changed, and the dangers in American cities have changed. I don't much think about the dangers of walking the streets anymore. Whatever the reasons, and there are probably several, armed robberies of strangers, once so prevalent, are now way down. I think that at the time, it was this random sort of gun violence that inspired a generation to ask for their own right to defend themselves, and if a gun was what it took then it should be a gun.
Survival training, marksmanship training, and the wide sale of guns became the pattern. Gun buyers could be all but invisible in their purchases. Sure, the law requires a waiting period and identification, but there are so many gun purchases, and so many under the table transfers, that it sometimes seems pointless.
There are almost as many guns in this country as there are people. Confiscation is not a likely scenario, as much as the far right wing likes to trumpet the possibility. If gun sales were to stop today, and no guns were imported into this country, we would probably be looking at half a century before the numbers of guns had dwindled significantly.
We're not going to get rid of guns through confiscation, shaming, or social movements. About all we can do is regulate some of the more obnoxious patterns of display. Just this week, the "open carry" folks decided that it was injudicious to carry assault weapons ("long guns" they call them) into restaurants.
Apparently this behavior freaks out the patrons because faced with half a dozen young men armed like jihadists, restaurant patrons don't know whether they are being visited by patriotic young Americans or are about to be taken hostage. So the open carry folks have requested that their supporters moderate things just a bit.
Perhaps this is about all that we can achieve in regard to gun control nowadays. We'll leave it to the private sector like Chipotle, and hope that this generates some useful societal motion.
It would help if the majority of gun owners, the hunters and target shooters, would join the rest of us in calling for a little moderation.
(Bob Gelfand writes about culture and politics for CityWatch.)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 43
Pub: May 27, 2014