A valediction: forbidding crazy

Read this.

A couple of years ago, I got out of my step-son's band concert, went to turn the volume on my phone back up, and saw about 4 texts from my son. He and my daughter were at their youth group, on Franklin Street; there'd been an incident on campus, an armed person was heading towards F. Street, and the church was locked down. Initially, he didn't know where my daughter was, so that was a fun kind of terror; I knew one child was fine, but not the other. Pretty quickly, though, he and I were able to figure out where she was, and that she was with an adult, and safe.

Eventually, they figured out the guy only had a knife, and he was caught pretty quickly, so in terms of true panic, it was pretty short-lived. Yeah, people can kill with knives, but they can't kill as many innocents with a knife as they can with a gun. And knives are unlikely to break through a glass window and kill someone who's trying to hide.

Those 20 or so minutes, though, of trying to keep track of my kids via text, without any of us actually knowing what was going on, were horrible. No, I don't really know what it would've been like to be one of those parents who hear about a shooting at their child's school, text, and never get a response, but my experience and my imagination can allow me to think about it. I don't know how you cope with that.

And I don't know how you deal with a world that tells you you mustn't think about how it happened, or that you shouldn't try to stop it from happening again. In any other grief, we encourage and applaud activism, and call it brave. Lose a child to a drunk driver? Form MADD and become a hero. Lose a parent to cancer? There are walks, and runs, and fund-raising out the wazoo. For that matter, it's not just life-ending causes. When a loved one has autism, diabetes, Crohn's disease (my own "cause"), if you choose to write letters, lobby, walk, or otherwise raise both funds and awareness, no one tells you that you should just take time to grieve.

I don't really care if you own guns or not. I don't really care if you're a responsible gun-owner. I know plenty of people who do own guns, and are responsible. Great.

Guess what? I'm a responsible driver. I'm careful, I follow the rules, I try to be aware of other drivers, and if I happen to ding someone in the parking lot, I leave a note so I can make it right. I've taught my kids to follow the rules, be aware of other drivers, and if they ding someone, make it right.

What I do NOT do is lobby against things like speed limits, Driver's Ed., automobile insurance, graduated licensing, driving tests, mandatory insurance, etc. I recognize that just because I'm careful, and just because I would take responsibility for my actions, doesn't mean that every other driver on the road will. And I recognize that, to ensure the safety of not just all drivers, but also all pedestrians and cyclists, there need to be rules and (wait for it) regulations.

I'm tired of the crap. I'm tired of people dying. I'm tired of politicians saying that to talk about regulations is politicizing grief. Don't treat me like I'm stupid. Many of those same politicians had no trouble politicizing the grief of the families of the people who died in the World Trade Center. Or the grief of families of journalists who've been killed, whether in Syria, or Afghanistan, or wherever. Or, quite frankly (yes, Mr. Bush, I'm talking to you) of Terry Schiavo's grieving parents. It's not that they don't want to politicize grief, it's that they only want to politicize the grief that helps them.

And don't tell me the answer is to put more guns in the hands of "good people". Yeah? Cool. Who decides who's good? Me? You? And how do you know that the good guys will be able to stop the bad guys? Oh, they'll be trained. Yeah, because no one who's been trained has ever panicked when they find themselves in a real-life situation. And, for that matter, what makes you think that having armed good-guys along with armed bad-guys is going to do anything other than confuse the situation? Whether you believe the increase in police killings is because of police brutality or because the police are under attack and scared, I simply can't believe that in our current climate if a cop hears about a shooting in a school, goes to help, and is confronted with not one gunner but two, or three, or however many, the cop will somehow magically be able to know who's good and who's bad. No, it just sounds like a way for some well-meaning vigilantes to get themselves killed, too. And potentially more bystanders.

Our system is broken. We're allowing our own people to be killed because we're not willing to...what? Fill out some paperwork? Delay our gratification for a few days? Say to an adult that, no, they really DON'T need that military-grade weapon just because it's cool? Say to the responsible gun owners that it's time to admit that there are a lot of incredibly irresponsible gun owners out there?

If you want to hunt, fine, hunt. I don't care, as long as you eat what you kill. Heck, in the case of venison, I'll even help you eat what you kill.

If you think you need a gun for protection, I'm going to disagree with you, because in most areas of our country, you just don't. But even with a hand gun, OK, fine, I think you stand a greater chance of hurting yourself, or your family, but if it's in your house, OK.

But if you honestly think that there's a reason for any civilian to have military grade weaponry, and lots of it, then I'm not only going to thing you're wrong, but I'm going to consider you dangerous. If you honestly thing that the Second Amendment gives you the right to bring a gun anywhere, I'm going to consider you dangerous. If you honestly think that there should be no limits on gun ownership, I'm going to consider you dangerous. Because whatever your reason is, it winds up allowing the sort of loopholes that enable the dangerous, the racist, the misogynist, to get those weapons.

We take away the alcohol licenses of bars who sell to people who then drive while drunk and then kill. We require pool owners, whether private or public, to put up fencing, and locks to keep others out; if they don't, and someone drowns in their pool, they're liable.

Yet we can't even talk about stricter regulations on owning guns. Sorry, that's crazy, and I'm not going to be a party to that kind of crazy anymore. We need better rules. We need to act, and we need to do it now.