Colorado killing on such a summer night

By Max J. Castro
majcastro@gmail.com

A mantra, says my dictionary, is a “mystical formula of invocation or incantation…” The mantra of the gun nuts – the gun rights movement according to the propaganda of the National Rifle Association (NRA), the hugely powerful lobby for the gun huggers and those who sell them their toys – is: “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.”

It’s a lie. Guns kill people. They go off, by accident, and kill people, like their owners, or their children, or the spouse, or the neighbor, or the guy out for a deer carcass and a few beers. But for a few inches, former Vice President Dick Cheney would have killed his erstwhile hunting buddy.

Guns kill people, and with tremendous efficiency. In the real clash of civilizations, not the one invented by Samuel P. Huntington which pits the West against the rest, but the one that started when Europeans began grabbing other people’s land, like those of the guanches of the Canary Islands (wiped out), the aborigines of Tasmania (disposed of), the Taínos of the Antilles (extinct), Africans of all nations (enslaved, colonized), the Native people of the American continent (dispossessed, decimated, marginalized), guns won.

Every time, guns won. They beat bows and arrows. They defeated those wielding spears, hatchets, and swords. They had it all over the blowgun guys of the Amazon. Today, in one of the last and most thoroughly disguised instances of that authentic clash of civilization – European gun-aided expansionism versus futile native resistance – Uzis have it all over slings and rocks. Check the casualty differentials from the various Israeli-Palestinian clashes in the occupied territories.

And, finally, guns wielded by the deranged and those who are just plain evil or bigots or fanatics can quickly kill an awful number of people going about their daily lives attending school, participating in the democratic process, or just going to the movies. Don’t believe me? Go to Google and search for “Columbine,” “Virginia Tech,” “Gabrielle Giffords,” or “Colorado Batman shooting.”

The facts about the latest gun carnage are not all in yet – as important as how many were killed, several people being in critical condition as of this writing – but the basic story is already known and isn’t very different from all the rest. Guns make it all too easy to kill people – try pulling any of the massacres mentioned in the last paragraph with a knife. Very powerful guns, like the assault rifle used in the Colorado shooting, a weapon that used to be illegal in the United States until the gun lobby put the fear of God in his incarnation as the NRA into the hearts of politicians of both parties, yield mass kills. The AK-47, the iconic assault rifle and weapon of choice not only for the Red Army and its counterparts in the former Soviet bloc but for every guerrilla movement in the world, has killed more people than planes, tanks, destroyers, or even the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

If by now you figure this column is written in anger, you are right. I am enraged at the murderous James Holmes, who the mainstream media, in a display of cowardice in the name of journalistic ethics would say “allegedly” – a dodge I am dropping here – did open fire in a crowded movie theater with a clear and careful plan and exactly the right instruments to kill many innocent people enjoying a late-night showing of a just-released film. He succeeded.

I am also livid that the power and the fierce vindictiveness of a lobby, whose extremely liberal (permissive) views about the possession of and the commerce in guns don’t represent the attitudes of most Americans, has effectively silenced all discussion of the issue of guns by the political class that is said to represent “we the people of the United States.”

To borrow an idea from the pioneers of the militant wing of the movement to fight loudly for a governmental assault against AIDS, this is the kind of silence which kills. Almost as infuriating, this deafening soundlessness signals that on this front, as on too many others in U.S. political life, democracy – the lively clash of policy proposals, political views, and ideas – is dead, at least for now. On issues like guns (an inalienable right), Israel (unconditional support), Cuba (undying hostility), or the virtues of winner-take-all capitalism (best invention since fire), one can express only one view to be politically viable, a narrow and indefensible one at that. All else is deadly silence.

The political dynamic that enabled the ghastly incident in Colorado – the shooter bought, legally, an AR-15 assault rifle and a high-capacity ammunition clip, both illegal until 1994 when Congress let the ban expire – is laid out in an excellent analysis in The Los Angeles Times (Seema Mehta, “Colorado shooting renews focus on Romney’s gun-control stance,” July 22, 2012).

For his entire term, President Obama has said or done nothing about guns. The reason is simple. It’s a fight he couldn’t win. Republicans in Congress would vote against any gun control legislation mostly out of conviction and Democrats mainly out of fear. Why give the Republicans another target for nothing?

As for Mitt Romney, he has been Mitt Romney on the issue: conveniently chameleonic. Quoting the LA Times:

“As governor of Massachusetts, he signed the first permanent state ban on assault weapons.

‘“Deadly assault weapons have no place in Massachusetts,’” Romney said at the bill-signing ceremony in 2004, according to a news release issued by the governor’s office at the time. ‘“These guns are not made for recreation or self-defense. They are instruments of destruction with the sole purpose of hunting down and killing people.’”

Amen.

But now Romney says he does not support any new legislation on assaults weapons.  In other words, he was for banning assault weapons before he was against it.

More than ten years ago I wrote in The Miami Herald that America’s gun problem required a radical solution. Repeal the Second Amendment. I was afraid that an increasingly conservative Supreme Court would someday ignore the part of the amendment that places the right to bear arms in the context of “a well-regulated militia.” And, indeed, in 2009, the Court did just that when it threw out Washington DC’s restrictive gun law and for the first time established an individual constitutional right to bear arms.

So now the United States is stuck not only politically but also constitutionally as being the only developed nation with Wild West gun laws. Let the carnage continue.