I know what I write is a waste of time. It won’t change any minds, it won’t persuade those who demand legislation to ban guns or “assault-like” weapons, it won’t convince those who plead for change because some young school children, or Asians, or grocery shoppers were killed by a mad-man with a gun, nor will it change the minds of those who believe any change in gun control violates their personal freedom. But I write to appease me.
First, guns are tools. They may be good tools or bad tools based on your personal view or immediate need, but there is an old adage that goes something like “It is a poor workman who blames his tools for his failure.” If we substitute the word “society” for "workman" I think we come up with an accurate view of guns. It is a poor society that blames guns for society's failure (i.e. to create an agreed-to level of safety).
Nothing brings this home for me as much as a FaceBook posting from the United States Air Force Special Tactics organization. In Air Force Special Operations and Special Tactics, we have Doctors, Nurses and Medics trained to deal with the battlefield trauma our Airman, the Soldiers, Sailors, Marines, and the allied partners they support will experience in combat.
How exactly do we train our medical personnel to be proficient in the life-threatening injuries they may find as our combat troops protect the nation and execute its foreign policy? We send them to work in inner-city hospitals in large cities like New Orleans, Chicago, Atlanta, New York, and Los Angeles. There they find far more combat-type trauma than we can simulate in training and they, unfortunately, experience the frightening reality of gunshot wounds and other “combat” related injuries while they help their civilian counterparts care for the neediest.
Are all these injuries a result of some single madman and a mass shooting? No, they are the reality of an on-going war the news can’t be bothered covering and it involves people who’ve lost their moral basis for decision-making and a society that has cast them aside as just so much flotsam and jetsam.
When we as a society have reached a point where we argue the technical details of a rifle, rather than the sanity of a gunman and how best to treat him or her, while ignoring the reality of life in the inner-cities, we have all surrendered our belief in the actual basis of our society. A belief that each of us must be responsible for ourselves, our family, and our society. Why is this?
Is it because so many of us reject the idea of God as a higher power, and now believe ourselves god-like? Perhaps it is because we’ve destroyed the foundation of family for the poorest among us and the young men and women grow up with the role models of the entertainment industry where outlandish style and behavior sell the next ticket? Maybe it is just a generalized sense of “it’s somebody else’s job” that leads to this, but if it is whose job is it to unite society with a purpose to protect the individual and his/her rights? Clearly, our politicians don’t think it is their role, beyond the promises they make what can the new laws and the spending on entitlements really do to change the shape of society?
George Santayana famously wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." The one truth a study of the past teaches is civilizations come and go, falling most often to the foolishness of mankind. The question then becomes how much longer will this modern civilization continue until it to is replaced by some dark age where all the glories of the past are buried in some tomb waiting for the reawakening of minds open to the possibilities of the future rather than the condemnation of the past?
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