Originally posted on 12/14/2012
This morning in a seminar I attended on Suicidal Assessment, the facilitator told us that people who express strong feelings of anger and hostility are more likely to kill themselves. “Like in those school shootings,” he said. “We look at those as acts of violence against others, but most of the time that’s just a way to commit suicide. These are people who just want to take a lot of other people with them.”
It’s true: it’s a refrain that we hear, time and time again. Columbine. Virginia Tech. The Sikh Temple in Wisconsin. Jiverly Wong in Binghamton, NY. George Hennard in Killeen, TX. James Edward Pough in Jacksonville, FL. Pat Sherrill in Edmond, OK. Now Newtown, Connecticut. Then the shooter turned the gun on himself.
Gun control, people always cry out after such tragedies. And rightfully so. We are armed to the teeth and we pay the price. But these mass shootings – though tragic and terrible and inexcusable – are not the reason we need gun control. They are the outliers, the abberations. Saying we need gun control because of crazed mass murderers who kill kindergartners in their classrooms is a cop-out. We need gun control for all the thousands and thousands of people who are killed in this country by guns every year. For the man who argues with his wife and accidentally shoots his child. For the drug dealers who turn menial fights over turf into bloodbaths. For the teenager who breaks up with his girlfriend, drinks a bottle of his parent’s whiskey and shoots himself. We need gun control not because of the extreme examples but because guns make everything an extreme example. We make impulsive, angry, sad, frightened choices, and guns make those choices instantly destructive and often fatal. We need gun control because we, as a country, as people, often do not know how to control ourselves.
I’m not going to preach at you, because I know people have heard it all before. I know the other side’s arguments, too, and honestly: I don’t give a shit. I don’t care about the 2nd Ammendment, “a well-regulated militia,” the NRA. I think Americans largely agree with me. For every loud, well-funded gun rights advocate there are thousands of silent victims of gang warfare, domestic violence and suicide, millions and millions of witnesses.
Get loud, America. Stand up for what you believe in. Don’t just shake your head and accept it. Don’t just do it when kindergartners get killed. Do it every day, because people die in this country from guns every single day. Do it every day. Do it until someone listens.