08 Apr Al Martinez: The Guns of America

Once more the guns of America have roared across the land, leaving a trail of bodies, blood, tears and the terrible acknowledgment of our national heritage. We’re a gun-totin’ culture, partner, and it ain’t just the cowboys who are drawing on each other.

Parents are killing kids. Kids are killing parents. Husbands are killing wives. Wives are killing husbands. Kids are killing kids. And a lot of others are just gunning down whomever happens to be in the way. Did I mention that students are killing students? Them, too.

We’ve come to expect gunfire in the big cities, beating out rhythms of grief like bass drums at a funeral. We blame too much noise, too much traffic, too much racial animosity, too much anonymity, too much poverty and too damned many people.

But why violence in small towns where everyone says howdy and nobody hates out loud and the kids walk home from school and the dogs don’t bite? What’s happened to happy, peaceful Podunk, America?

In one two-week period alone, 19 people died by gunfire in communities as diverse as Binghamton, New York, and Santa Clara, California. Binghamton has a population of under 50,000 and Santa Clara under 100,000. Not exactly villages, but not Manhattan or Chicago or L.A., either.

Size doesn’t matter, anyhow. What matters is that you own a .45 or a .38 or an Uzi or and M-16 or a shotgun. Hell, a .22 would do the trick. And with the National Rifle Association helping things along, guns aren’t all that hard to get.

So you end up with killings in private homes, public buildings, school yards, churches, and out in the front yard where the lawn is trim and flowers bloom in an early spring.

I’m not even going to try to list all those one-off gun killings where babies die in drive-by shootings and motorists shoot other motorists for cutting them off in traffic and lovers kill each other for sexual infidelity.

But take a look at the mass killings by gunfire since April, 1999, when a couple of losers in Littleton, Colorado, shot up Columbine High, killing 12 students and teachers before turning their guns on themselves. During the 10-year period since then:

Thirteen died in mass murders in Atlanta, 7 in Fort Worth, 10 in Washington D.C., 6 in Chicago, 13 in Birchwood and Brookfield, Wis., 5 in Nickel Mines, Pa., 33 in Blacksburg, Va., 9 in Omaha, 6 in Carnation, Wa., 5 more in Chicago, 6 in DeKalb, Ill., 6 in Alger, Wa., 10 in Covina, Ca., 10 in Geneva and Coffee Counties, Al., 8 in Carthage, N.C., 6 in Santa Clara and 13 in Binghamton.

The figures, however horrifying, don’t include the wounded, who will bear forever the emotional scars of murderous rampages that guns have produced. Oh, wait. I almost forgot. The NRA, an armed citizen’s best friend, tells us that guns don’t kill people, people kill people. And indeed, that was true in all those places mentioned above.

But what the mantra fails to address is that while people might employ a variety of methods to kill each other, the gun remains a principal means of easy destruction. And it takes a simple twitch of a trigger finger to set it off. Much less work than a knife, a club, a garrote or any number of other devices a person might employ to wipe out a classroom or a church hall.

It’s not just NRA policies that have contributed to the horrifying number of gun deaths in America. We have created our own culture of violence in the name of entertainment that makes death look easy and even temporary. Shooting humans in movies, on television and in video games seems no more consequential than shooting bottles off a fence.

Death is clean on the big screen, almost boring on TV and fun in the millions of games sold to just about anyone of any age, targeted like laser lights to that center of the brain that influences and controls. Our kids grow up convinced that murder is no big deal, and our borderline adults grow dark with the fixation that vengeance is just a trigger squeeze away.

I’m no stranger to guns. After a hitch in the Marines and combat in Korea, plus half century of covering street crimes, I know guns. I have stood in the bloody hallways of homes where husbands, bereft of hope, have wiped out their families. I have gazed down at chalked outlines of small bodies where children have died by gunfire. I have seen the bones of innocents in makeshift graves, lost to the world by a felon’s bullets. These images remain fixed in memory like sepia-toned photographs from long ago.

The late actor Charlton Heston, when he was president of the NRA, warned that the government would have to tear his gun from “my cold, dead hands” before he would relinquish it willingly to any kind of ban. A shame he didn’t live to count the number of lives torn from the cold, dead bodies victimized by the weapons he so enthusiastically endorsed.

(Reach Al Martinez at almtz13@aol.com)