True Colors

There are very few things in this world I absolutely cannot stand or abide.  I'm a tolerant and peaceful person.  I may not like you or agree with you, but as long as you don't try to beat the crap out of me or purposefully torment me, I will put up with you.  I won't necessarily be your friend, but I'll leave you in peace.  (Hat tip: Lisabeth Salander of Steig Larssen's Millennium Trilogy wants nothing more than to just be left in peace---except no one does, instead they just keep fucking with her, so she has no choice but to defend herself in very creative ways---which is one of many reasons why I adore that character).

But if there are two things in this world I cannot stand or abide, it's deception and violence.  Lie to me and get caught (you will), then consider our friendship/relationship over.  Become violent, same thing. I always tell my husband (we've been married almost nine years, with plenty of ups and downs) that "There are only two automatic dealbreakers for our marriage, adultery and physical violence.  Everything else is negotiable." It's worked for us so far.  Adultery is a problem for me not so much for the sex part as it is for the deception part, and I think physical violence is pretty much self-explanatory.  And I categorize weapons under physical violence, and that includes guns (both use and ownership.)

I don't like guns. I can deal with things like hunting rifles that use deershot or birdshot pellets for hunting animals.  That's fine, I understand some people go out and kill wild game to eat, and no human being is going to die if they're accidentally hit with birdshot.  (Full disclosure: I've even eaten wild game hunted by others with guns on occasion, but I have a lot more respect for people who hunt with bows and arrows, since that requires actual work and skill.) But handguns are another story. They serve no purpose other than to kill people. That's what they are designed for.  Handguns are not for protection, or security, or peacekeeping.  They are instruments of destruction that frequently become murder weapons.  I see no reason why anyone other than active-duty law enforcement should ever need to use or own one. And I consider gun nuts who collect handguns, brag about them, and rant/rave about why EVERYONE should own multiple weapons to be insane maniacs.  To wit, I consider the new "conceal-carry" gun nut crowd who are going around pressuring state legislatures to allow private citizens to carry concealed firearms under their clothes to be violence, personified. (i.e., they make me sick.) This is why I choose to live in an area where many towns and cities have total handgun bans, and don't really count anyone from the gun-nut crowd as my friends, since they violate my "no physical violence" rule.

The only time I ever handled a handgun was when I sat on a jury in a murder case.  It was technically an attempted murder case, and the only reason it wasn't full-blown murder was because the gun used in the crime misfired.  Therefore, we the jury had to convict or acquit based on criminal intent alone, and the ballistics of the handgun and exactly how it had malfunctioned were key pieces of evidence.  The prosecution frequently displayed the gun and bullets used in the crime (now separated from each other) in their arguments, and they were handed over to us along with other evidence in the jury room.  The twelve of us all handled the gun, inspected it, tried the trigger (it was unloaded), looked down the barrel. One of the jury members was a retired tactical officer from the U.S. Marines who explained to the rest of us how guns work, how can they misfire, and whether someone can still intend to kill with a misfired/malfunctioning gun (he said, yes, absolutely.) Even more damning evidence was the fact the defendant went into a police station carrying 40 rounds of live ammunition and a semiautomatic, with the stated intent to kill police officers, and he'd have succeeded if the gun hadn't malfunctioned. So, we the jury convicted him on four counts of attempted murder of a police officer.  After we convicted, we learned from the judge that this defendant had been convicted of murder multiple times in the past----had served time, been paroled, and then went out on the streets to try and kill more people.  So we felt good about our decision.

I've always been a pacifist, even as a little kid---likely because from a very early age, I was always the target of violence, just because I was different from the other kids. (And it's never easy to be a pacifist, but it's especially hard when you live in a blue-collar/gun-loving area and your dad works a job for the Department of Defense designing nuclear weapons).  But up until the time I'd served on that jury, I was sort of indifferent to guns.  I never wanted to own one, and I didn't hang out with gun people, but the idea of a handgun didn't necessarily bother me. 

After serving on that jury though, I changed my mind.  The only reason those four police officers the defendant tried to kill were still alive was because something went wrong with his gun.  (It was a cheap Chinese-made gun, the kind that are illegal in most U.S. states due to their low quality and potential explosion dangers, and chances are the guy didn't know how to maintain it anyway). The bottom line is, guns are dangerous because they make it too easy to commit murder with them.  A flick of a finger, a tiny explosion of gunpowder, and poof!  Somebody's dead. The thought process around what it really means to kill another human being is removed from the equation. Before you've even had time to think, you've already killed (or maimed) someone.  That's where the danger lies.  And that's where the evil is. It was just a random chance that this guy didn't get to commit murder that day, but he was still evil, and the weapon he tried to use was still just as evil, even though it didn't work.

In the old days when you had to kill people with swords or clubs, you really had to work hard to commit murder.  You had to have skill with bladed weapons or archery (which took years of work and training to develop), and clubs took a lot of brute strength.  Or if you lacked either one of those, you could always try poison, but that required quite a bit of alchemy knowledge.  The point is, murder wasn't something that was easy for everyone to commit until guns came along.

My home state of Ohio passed one of the craziest concealed-carry gun laws in the United States last week---it allows people to carry concealed weapons into bars and sports arenas (two places where people have a tendency to get physically violent even without guns).  Even some gun-accepting friends of mine from weapons-friendly Texas and Louisiana think it's a crazy law.  It makes me sad, because the Ohio of my youth would never have permitted something like that. But Ohio has changed, and not for the better.  And it seems some old friends of mine who I once thought shared my values have changed with it, and not for the better either. That's really the worst part.

The poet Maya Angelou has a saying: "When someone shows you who they are, believe them." 

She's right.

Peace.