The Harvest of Fear

We’ve just suffered through the third fatal shooting at an American school in the last week, one in Colorado, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. It will be a while before we know how many kids will die from the latest shooting (five at this time). It will be much longer before we know how many other kids will suffer from the trauma that comes from witnessing and surviving such brutality.

Buried in a newspaper sidebar yesterday was a story about another student who went to a school in North Las Vegas the day before armed with an AK-47 and an automatic pistol. He was confronted and fled before he used the weapons; so we avoided adding Nevada to this week’s bullet-riddled list. But with the gun-toting kid in Nevada still on the loose, we can’t close the coroner’s books on this bloody week quite yet.

I don’t get it. Why does the United States have 10 or more of these senseless tragedies for every one that occurs in all other countries combined! It is one thing to lead the world in technology development, manufacturing, agricultural production or medical research, but it’s another thing altogether to lead the world in the number of incidents that result in burying school children, teachers and principals. Why are we so goddamn special?

We have to take immediate action to understand and address the cultural or societal drivers that underlie this almost uniquely American phenomenon. What breeds this kind of disgusting violence in our country? Almost automatically I referred to these shootings as “senseless” tragedies, because that’s a very popular word when something like this happens. But we can’t hide behind that word – we have to make sense out of why this is happening here, in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

It’s easy to jump on the gun control bandwagon in the wake of this kind of killing. After all, no one in this country can justify the need to possess an AK-47. Assault rifles are aptly named – they’re intended for assaults. Assaults are conducted by the military and the police. The only assaults conducted by individual citizens are the criminal kind, like those in Colorado, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

I believe that American citizens have the right to bear arms – but – like every other right under the sun, it isn’t an absolute right. Reasonable controls can and must be placed on this right, just as we’ve done with all the other rights we cherish. The freedoms of speech, worship and press are all subject to limitations. We’re only entitled to be free of unreasonable search and seizure. As the saying goes, the right to swing your fist ends where my chin begins.

Reasonable controls are part of the fabric of the constitutional freedom we enjoy in America. These limitations represent the accountability that we owe to one another as fellow citizens in the body politic. So it’s axiomatic to me that guns should be subject to reasonable controls – controls on buying, possessing and using them.

When I listen to the anti-gun control lobby I get a little crazy in the face of their fanatical assertion of an essentially absolute right to bear arms. They’ve conjured up the belief that this right and this right alone is unfettered by any control, reasonable or otherwise. Their reasoning is dripping in fear and they cry out for protection from those fears like a child cries at midnight for protection from the “big, bad monster” in the closet.

They fear a sinister government who they suspect is intent on subjecting them and their families to Communist-like oppression; they fear the evil neighbors who will come to take away their emergency supplies when destruction or anarchy hits; and they’re possessed by the omnipresent fear that roving criminals will bust into their home in the middle of the night to do them and their children harm.

I’ll grant them a measure of that last threat, but it can be handled by a weapon or two of reasonable size and efficacy. Never mind the fact that even those weapons have to be loaded and readily accessible in order to be useful in such a situation, which of course makes them readily assessable for kids to play with – or to take to school. In any event, no arsenal is needed; no assault weapons are needed; no fully automatic weapons are needed.

This is one of those subjects where we’re almost completely out of touch with the rest of the civilized world, yet we proclaim ourselves to be enlightened and proclaim others to be weak and naïve and, of course, confused. I began this posting by observing another way in which we’re completely at odds with the rest of the civilized world. These two matching ends aren’t accidental.

But – no one should think for a minute that gun control is the only answer to the school killings. It isn’t the most important answer. It may not even be in the top five or ten answers. It is a part of the problem and it must be addressed, but we have to address the rest of the problem – what makes someone in this country pick up an available gun and go to a school to kill children?

The answer is: fear. Point blank – fear.

Everyone who uses a weapon is afraid of something or someone. Fear manifests itself in many ways – insecurity; shyness; aloofness; inattention; avoidance; withdrawal; silence; laziness; denial; inaction; drug use; alcohol abuse; arrogance; self-righteousness; criticism; condemnation; cynicism; pessimism; prejudice; dishonesty; deceit; injustice; infidelity; greed; hoarding; possessiveness; stealing; yelling; bullying; bigotry; oppression; abuse; molestation; hatred; torture; and any other form of individual or collective anger, violence or rage, including terrorism and war.

Again, everyone who uses a weapon is afraid, often deathly afraid, of something or someone. We have to address the growing prevalence of fear in America. We love to proclaim our freedom; but there is no freedom in fear, there is only captivity and the need to escape.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt was profoundly right when, in his first inaugural address to the nation, he solemnly declared – “Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

It’s time for us to act like we are, indeed, the land of the free and the home of the brave.