Midlife Meditation

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....

The door of this refrigerator is regulated. The handgun is not. Sometimes, a meme sums things up beautifully. Here's one I saw on Facebook, originating with Occupy Democrats: Just to be sure I've got the facts right, I Googled "refrigerator safety regulation," and got the text for the Refrigerator Safety Act of 1956 . I was unable to find any reporting on how the appliance industry reacted to this legislation, or how long it took to get it through Congress, but I think it's important not to rush to any generalizations about corporations having more common sense than other collectives of people: think for a moment about how many decades it took for the automobile industry to take steps to improve gas mileage, or to install airbags and other safety devices. With that disclaimer out of the way, though, I am quite ready to jump to an explanation of why the refrigerator lobby made little or no effort to resist the imposition of safety regulations by ...

"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...

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...