Midlife Meditation

Mid-twentieth century students practicing for the apocalypse. No, I'm not that  old. Duck and cover drills ended before I started school. I did get a heavy dose of "Your Chance to Live" lessons, courtesy of the Defense Civil Preparedness Agency (formerly the Office of Civil Defense), during my middle school years. This lessons took the forms of films and filmstrips about a variety of disasters: earthquakes, hurricanes, tornados, floods and, yes, nuclear war, the existence of which made the whole series necessary. Curiously, I don't remember any of those lessons taking place once I started high school, which leads me to wonder if having them be such a large part of public school was just an Idaho thing. (My family moved to Oregon the summer before my freshman year.) Whatever the reason for exposing impressionable young students to so many ways we could all die, the result was probably not what the preparers of the curriculum intended. Being prepared didn't...

Students at a memorial service in Parkland, Florida If he hadn't had the gun, those seventeen people would still be alive. I can't say that truth will get lost in the pointless ritual that follows every school shooting. There are always commentators making this point, and plenty of people--the majority of Americans, in fact--who agree with it. And yet, I know that in the end, it will be ignored. How do I know this? Let's start with the responder-in-chief, the President of the United States, who, for once, spoke with measured, careful tones about what had happened at that Florida high school as an angry antisocial ex-student smuggled an assault rifle on campus and indiscriminately picked off students and teachers, then disappeared into the crowd of terrified fleeing teens. Trump didn't mention guns once in his speech. He's not alone: most politicians treat the truth at the heart of America's gun problem--that it involves guns--as a third rail. Fr...

Pieta, Michelangelo It's one of the most affecting images in Christian iconography: a seated woman holding the body of a nearly-naked man in her lap. The woman is Mary, the man is her son Jesus. He has just been brought down from the cross. It takes another iconic image--Mary holding her infant son--and alters the scale in a way that might seem absurd, if it were not so poignant, so archetypal in ways that go far beyond its theological foundations. Centuries before the first Christians told the story of Mary standing at the foot of the cross, watching her son die, the prophet Jeremiah wrote of this same fundamental experience with these words: "A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel is weeping for her children; she refuses to be comforted...because they are no more." (Jeremiah 31:15) You don't have to be a Christian to feel the anguish in Michelangelo's Pieta, or a Jew to ache for the grief in Jeremiah's description. Is th...

The SIG SAUER MCX, the gun used to take 49 lives June 12 in Orlando. This graph tells a story: It comes from an article in The Economist  dated August 10, 2015, so it lacks data from the Santa Barbara and Orlando shootings; but even without those numbers, the statistics are stunning: the number of people killed or wounded in mass shootings has increased significantly since 2004, when the Assault Weapon Ban was permitted to expire. Here's another graph that tells a parallel story: Since the election of Barack Obama, gun sales have gone up while, simultaneously, the number of gun owners has gone down. A minority of Americans is amassing personal arsenals. From time to time, one of those gun owners opens fire in a crowded place, and these weapons of mass homicide carry out the function for which they were designed: quickly, efficiently slaughtering multiple innocents. In the wake of the Orlando shooting, anyone with a constituency has been making pronouncements....

Catherine Cawood is as tough a cop as you'll meet on any American crime drama--and she does it without packing iron. The world keeps forcing us to think about the unthinkable. Yesterday in Orlando, Florida, a young man carrying an AR-15, the same assault rifle used in the Sandy Hook massacre, single-handedly killed at least 49 people at a gay night club. As always, this incident of gun violence raised a flurry of "thoughts and prayers" from legislators in the pockets of the NRA, and of resigned frustration from less gun-lobbied politicians appealing for minor restrictions on gun sales, knowing that such measures will get nowhere in Congress, no matter how desperately the American people want them. It's as if the minority of Americans who insist on absolute libertarianism with respect to gun ownership have a louder voice than the blood of the victims. I'm not going to spend any time here arguing about whether this was an incident of international or ...

"The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun." --Wayne LaPierre, Vice President and CEO of the National Rifle Association, after the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting. And what if the bad guy with a gun is wearing body armor? Mass shootings have become so frequent in the United States that the aftermaths are utterly predictable. Speculative news reporting, Democratic hand-wringing, empty Republican platitudes, and rapid-response gun lobby spin flood the media. By the time accurate reporting is possible, the nation has moved on--all to frequently to the next shooting. Numb, shell-shocked, unable to process the sheer magnitude of the national gun pathology, our minds seize on distractions, flail about for something, anything that will keep us from imagining our friends, our families, our children on the receiving end of the next barrage. The most recent of these shootings appears to have had a connection to ISIS, the most recent i...

I was scrolling through Slate  headlines on my phone last Thursday, as I often do while eating lunch in the staff room. I typically start at the bottom, and work my way up the menu to the most recent story, clicking on those that catch my attention. The last thing I saw, at the very top, was this: " Oregon College Massacre."  I clicked on it, scanned the story, saw that a lone gunman had opened fire on a classroom at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, killing nine, then taken his own life after a standoff with local police. I did not visibly react: the staff room was full of teachers and EAs, cheerfully talking about the silly things their students were doing, what their weekend plans were, what they'd be having for dinner that night--standard stuff. I didn't want to rain on that lunchtime parade, didn't want to cast a pall over the rest of the school day. I knew this would hit uncomfortably close to home, and not just because of the Oregon dateline: our d...

The day after the shooting, this headline, this image, and this ad appeared on the front page of the Charleston Post and Courier: That ad's a little hard to read in context, so here it is all by itself: In case you're still not sure what it says, here's the text of the ad: Ladies' Night THURSDAY! ATP Gun Shop & Range specializes in teaching ladies to learn to shoot for fun, sport & self defense! $30 GETS YOU EVERYTHING! Eye/Ear Protection, Souvenir T-Shirt, Pistol or Revolver, Range Pass, 50 Rounds of Ammo, Instructor  The morning after a young man, using a pistol purchased at a department store, shot and killed nine African-Americans at a Bible study, the local newspaper ran this ad, partially obscuring the headline announcing the killings. To its credit, the newspaper acknowledged the horrendous timing of the ad, as did the ADP Gun Shop and Range. What neither did was admit the irony of the juxtaposition--or make even the smallest admission that ...

It took me by surprise. Yesterday, a Reynolds High School freshman broke into his parents' gun locker and took an AR-15 type rifle, along with magazines capable of holding hundreds of rounds of ammunition, a semi-automatic pistol, and a large knife to school, where he shot another freshman to death and wounded a teacher. The teacher was able to escape to the office and initiate a lockdown. With police closing in, the shooter took his own life. I've written about my outrage over the laxness of American gun laws many times. The knowledge that, in this case, the gun had been locked away by "responsible" owners lends the lie to the notion that these weapons have any business being in the hands of enthusiasts. A teenager with a death wish will find a way around the locks. It's fortunate--if we can call it that--that there were just two deaths. Given the firepower and the quantity of ammunition, there could have been dozens. But I'm setting aside the outrage...

II. A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. --U.S. Constitution, Bill of Rights As controversial documents go, this one is short. It's also convoluted. Like much of the foundational legislation of the United States of America, the second amendment to the Constitution suffers from dependent clauses and the passive voice. With that said, it's telling what the first half of the amendment states, quite plainly: "a well regulated militia..." The entire reason for a "right to bear arms" is maintaining a well regulated  militia. Set aside for a moment the reality that the role of maintaining security has become the province of an immense military-industrial complex with highly regulated armed forces and police forces at every level of American society, that said military and police forces are under constant scrutiny from elected civilians from city hall ...

I know how some of you will react. "Guns by themselves don't kill anyone!" "It's mentally ill people and criminals, not law-abiding gun owners, who are the problem!" "It's our Constitutional right!" Yes, I've hard all these arguments, ad nauseum. I even feel some sympathy for them, particularly the one about how our society no longer cares for the mentally ill as it once did, and something needs to be done about that. I've also been reminded, by Michael Moore of all people, that Canadians own more guns per capita than Americans and seem somehow to manage not shooting each other thirty times a day. His reframing of the slogan goes like this: "Guns don't kill people. Americans kill people." But here's where the rubber meets the road or, better euphemism, the hot lead punches through the rib cage: people are dying, boatloads of them, and apart from sympathetic speeches, empathetic arms around the shoulder, and choreog...