If not now

I wish to God I knew the answers.

I wish to God it didn't take a new mass killing to renew debate, when so many — so many — die daily by guns in the United States. In my city. Within 10 minute's drive. I shrug. We shrug; worse, we don't know. We don't care.

I wish mass killings weren't so commonplace, a nightmarish norm, real reality TV. An entertainment.

(There's the crime scene, the shrine … now the grieving angry family members … the recriminations … the essayists parsing the causes … ooh look, the gun lobby fires back, so to speak: Don't blame us! The script is familiar.)

I wish to God a grieving father reaching out to another grieving father for solutions actually put us on the path to solutions.

I wish the solution was to send a postcard to your representative, "Not one more." Can't hurt.

I wish to God their reaching out — the father of a victim to the father of an alleged killer — would be enough to make us lose our breath, and in shuddering to catch our breath, make us reconsider ourselves and what we support as a society.

Besides indifference and inaction.

I wish to God my first thought wasn't just, "Jeeezus!" and that my second thought wasn't, "Glad it's not me/my kid/my family." I wish still I could think of something more useful.

I wish to God the critics, the bloggers, the trolls, the spin controllers, the status quo, would all just shut up for about a week, roll their hyperbolic, vitriolic tongues back in their mouths, and consider these fathers' pleas.

I wish it wasn't the out-shoutin', sound-bitin',  gun-rightin', trash-talkin', Sarah Palin, what's-that-have-to-do-with-anythin'? yell fest we get now instead of reasoned discourse.

I wish to God the National Rifle Association used its considerable influence for reasonable solutions — rather than attack any and all calls for change as a threat to all freedoms. They're not.

I wish the Second Amendment wasn't so poorly written. Or such an anachronism.

I wish to God people who feel need to kill others out of vengeance, retribution, loss, anger, torment, justice, loss of reality — what have you — get help they need without losing their human and civil rights.

I wish guns didn't so readily become the help they think they need.

I wish critics didn't say, "Should we ban knives too? Dude killed with knives too! Where you gonna draw the line?! Sharp pencils?!" I wish I had an answer for them.

I wish the alleged killer's roommates saw the signs and saved themselves, or knew how they might save their roommate. I wish the alleged killer's family got the help they sought for their child.

I wish I didn't agree with Michael Moore, who said of the Santa Barbara shootings, "Enjoy the rest of your day, and rest assured this will all happen again very soon." Moore made the flawed but essentially true documentary "Bowling for Columbine," examining — without solving — why gun deaths are vastly more prevalent in the United States than in other countries.

I wish to God our country wasn't exceptional in this way, but in the way we still talk about ourselves, even the most cynical of us: The greatest country in the world, the best, the most innovative, the ones who can figure this out.

I wish to God we didn't think these deaths are the price we pay for admission.

Falling up somehow*

On Saturday, a 15-year-old boy near Albuquerque, New Mexico, shot his mom dead with a .22-caliber rifle as she slept. He told police his mom had annoyed him, and that he thought of suicide and homicide.

Little brother, sleeping next to mom, didn't believe the boy had shot her, so the boy showed little brother her bloodied face — then shot and killed little brother. Then he shot and killed two young sisters. This is what he told police, the Associated Press reports.

Next he grabbed a semiautomatic assault rifle from his parents' closet, and waited in a downstairs bathroom for his dad, a church pastor and volunteer chaplain at a county jail, to come home from helping at a rescue mission. The boy fired multiple rounds, killing his father as he walked past the bathroom door.

The boy put two guns into a family car and thought of shooting shoppers at a Wal•Mart, but went to his girlfriend's house instead. He also told police he thought of killing his girlfriend's family. Instead he told congregants at his church that he had killed his family.

Oh, well.

When you're upholding our absolute right under the Second Amendment to keep and bear arms, sometimes these things happen. It's too bad, but what are you gonna do? Call it … collateral damage.

Also on Saturday, five people were accidentally shot at gun shows in three states. The Associated Press reported three people were injured in Raleigh, North Carolina, when the owner of a shotgun accidentally fired it as he unzipped the gun from its case at a security checkpoint. A man in Indianapolis, Indiana, shot himself in the hand as he was leaving a show. A gun dealer in Medina, Ohio, accidentally pulled the trigger on a new purchase and injured his friend.

Saturday was Gun Appreciation Day.

What?! They were appreciating their guns!

On Wednesday, two high school students in Albany, California, were shot by assailants apparently interested in taking their basketball shoes.

That's old school, and old news. Happens all the time.

So it goes.

I'm waiting for the gun lobby to accuse gun-control advocates of orchestrating these heinous shootings and exercises in social Darwinism as a misguided effort to demonstrate that guns galore create environments for heinous shootings like these.

In these days of galling lies and stunts and hoaxes from the people we're expected to believe and admire, I wouldn't be surprised …

(Callow and cruel digression: If you owned multiple guns, including assault weapons, and you heard 27 people, most of them small children, had been shot in Newtown, Connecticut, wouldn't you say to yourself, "Hey! I have just such weapons! And I have children! Maybe I should be careful about where I put my Constitutionally guaranteed weapons, and about who can get them?" 

Wouldn't you take steps to make it so? Wouldn't you see the possibility of disquieting parallels?

Wouldn't you?)

People are killed by knives and hammers too, says the gun lobby. Should we ban them too?

I'm going to take a wild guess here, but I think killing with a knife is hard work. A lot of strength is involved, you have to swing or jab many times, you have the inconvenient problem of the victim not wanting to die, fighting back. Same goes for hammers.

Guns are immediate and distant, an instant expenditure of rage. Household with a troubled family member = Anguish and anger and confusion and heartache and impotence and a threat to family resolve. Now dangle a gun.

Ban automobiles! They kill too!

But the primary purpose of automobiles is not to kill people — and those who kill with cars are most often impaired, not intending to kill. Laws are imperfect to limit those deaths, but laws and regulations exist; they are upheld, and they work.

We own guns, the National Rifle Association and advocates say, to prevent tyranny, a noble notion imbedded in the Constitution. Nothing, therefore, can change gun policy. No ground may be given up in debate. No consideration for limiting access to guns. Absolutely, tyrannically, none.

So who decides tyranny? Who determines it's time to raise arms? Who determines the target? Who organizes this well-regulated militia, whatever that is?

It seems many opponents have made a straw tyrant of Barack Obama since he became president, with a talking-point vitriol and Orwellian newspeak I had never heard before in my life.

What of teapot tyrants? Do we start shooting when a town council denies a zoning permit? When animal control tells me to leash my dog? When are assault weapons justified here?

The brother of the New Mexico pastor shot and killed by his son said we shouldn't make the killings a political issue. So, it's just the tragic fate of a troubled family, then.

Just add guns.

*"Marker in the Sand," Pearl Jam, a jabbing satire of Bush administration war policy, which I'm sure not enough people heard.

The price we pay

Twenty four years ago today, Patrick Purdy fired a Chinese-made AK-47 assault rifle into the playground at Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, Calif., killing five children and wounding 29 others and a teacher — then killed himself.

Law enforcement authorities said Purdy was upset that Asian immigrants were taking whites' jobs. All of the children killed and some of the wounded were Cambodian or Vietnamese immigrants.

His wasn't the first school shooting, of course. Ten years before, a teenager named Brenda Ann Spencer shot into a schoolyard from her house in San Diego, picking off students and teachers like a sniper. Asked why, she said, "I don't like Mondays." Her reason became infamous as the impetus for The Boomtown Rats' hit.

Tori Amos' plaintive version of that song keened from my computer for days following the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings, when Adam Lanza killed 20 children and six adult staff members after killing his mother.

We can see no reasons, because there are no reasons.

Brenda Ann Spencer was not the first school shooter, either. Adam Lanza wasn't the last; police believe a 16-year-old Taft High School student last week shot two other students in the south San Joaquin Valley town. On Tuesday a student shot an administrator and then himself at a St. Louis business school; police say a man in southeastern Kentucky Tuesday killed his girlfriend and her relatives at a community college, with a gun he bought that day.

That's just school shootings. A burglary suspect on Tuesday shot a Galt police officer a half-hour south of us, then shot himself to death.

Just some of the killings by firearms in the United States, which the FBI tabbed at 8,583 in 2011. An average of 23 killings by firearms each day. A classroom's worth.

In my short life as an editorial cartoonist, the Stockton shootings and their aftermath took up a good share of my attention — just as the Sandy Hook killings focus us today.

So … where are we going?

President Obama yesterday unveiled a list of $500 million in proposals to reduce gun violence, such as restoring bans on assault weapons, invigorating background checks, reducing bullets in clips, and buttressing mental health services.

Consider it the latest large volley in a firefight of statistics and particulars and semantics and invective and lunacy that will mushroom.

After the Sandy Hook killings, the National Rifle Association called for armed personnel in all schools. Teachers in parts of Utah and Texas and Ohio have begun firearms training. Posses in a part of Arizona are ready to take gun positions at public schools.

I'm imagining some of the ways that would play out:

• the day a teacher forgets to lock the gun away and remove a bullet from the chamber, and a student finds a new toy for recess …
• the morning a teacher fumbles to unlock the protected firearm, then the protected ammunition, as a shooter moves closer down the hall unimpeded …
• a school district announces it can't possibly pay for music education and teacher target practice, so tubas get tossed …
• shooters outgun armed school personnel (which happened at Columbine High School) …
• school and law enforcement officers announce at a future news conference that thanks to quick action by armed teachers, only three people died instead of nine … though, again, three people died …

Meanwhile, Americans flock to the gun shops and shows, buying the assault weapons and ammo, driving up their prices. Some of the buying derives from fear that the government will take away the weapons, and it's easier to lose what you don't have in the first place. And harder to defend.

Gun owners — their own well-regulated militias — dig in against any and all enemies, their triggers becoming ever more sensitive.

Maybe it's true, as the NRA says, that the saturation of violent video games and movies is what makes people shoot other people. Millions play and watch every day, and far more violent fare than the outdated films NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre cited.

Even if all shooters get their motivation from these media, though, the fact remains: They get the guns easily. It doesn't matter what kind, where from, how many bullets; they get the guns easily.

Guns become the logical, terminal extension of anger or confusion or delusion. Find a way to keep the guns away, maybe people won't get hurt or die.

In the months and years to come, push and shove and shout and condemn will leave us all right back where we are. Guns will still be easy to get.

I keep returning to a line in The West Wing, in which a congressman who's gay explains why he remains in the Republican Party — whose policies disparage him.

"I never understood why you gun control people don't all join the NRA," the congressman says. "They've got two million members. You bring three million to the next meeting, call a vote. All those in favor of tossing guns ... bam! Move on." 

Josh Lyman, the president's deputy chief of staff, derides the congressman's change-from-within strategy as unworkable.

I guess Josh is right.

I think we'll just have to live with the idea that the sanctity of the Second Amendment comes at a cost — 23 people killed every day by guns in the United States. Teachers and their little students occasionally, albeit tragically, shot and killed.

It's the price we pay.

The lesson today is how to die.

Guns versus mutter

Two beacons for radical change crossed this week, one gone cold, the other burning hot.

•••

Robert Bork died. He's why Supreme Court nominees don't say much more than "We gotta play 'em one game at a time" and "I'm just happy to be here" and equivalent clichés during Senate confirmation hearings.

Because when Bork opened his mouth during his hearing, out spilled arrogance and contempt for all of us. Supposedly charming in social settings, Bork might have made it onto the court were it not for his public demeanor — he somehow had popular support — and would have died on the bench trying to put all women back in skirts with minimum hem, and everyone back to before civil rights.

Bork was one of the original "originalists" who argued that we must follow the Constitution as its creators intended. By the looks of his Shaker beard and wild ringletted hair, he could have been one of those creators.

President Nixon's hatchet man in firing Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox (when attorney General Elliot Richardson refused and resigned in protest), Bork was a Harvard professor specializing in antitrust law — which he opposed.

He also opposed your right to privacy, because it's not explicit in the Constitution. Nor is civil rights, he said, though a poll tax, designed to prohibit blacks from voting, wouldn't OK; it wasn't in the original Constitution, just the 24th Amendment, I suppose.

"In the subsequent quarter-century," after most of the Senate voted against his confirmation in 1987, The New Yorker said, "Bork devoted himself to proving that his critics were right about him all along."

Ahhh, Bork and Ollie … key players in the Reagan administration, second
only to the Nixon administration for its dark melodrama …

To paying choirs, he was a libertarian who preached against individualism, and railed against our social sins ruining the country — sins sent forth by the free market he loved, even if it wasn't free enough. He tried to turn back time and tide rather than deal with the inexorable change.

"Bork" became a verb in his time, meaning to vilify publicly. Better to bork than be borked, I guess.

•••

In sincerity and silliness, debate over what the country does next after Sandy Hook still burns hot.

California's retired teachers' investment program plans to divest itself of a company that owns a gun maker (noble and immediate, though why didn't it do so long before?). Gun owner advocates, led now by the National Rifle Association, continue to urge we arm teachers, or at least post an armed guard at every school. Armored children's backpacks are selling briskly at $200 per.

NRA director Wayne LaPierre blamed violent video games and movies and said today the next Adam Lanza is planning an attack on a school. (Buy more guns, by the way! Become a member, before it's too late!) As much as I hate the video games — what's fun about shooting people, even for pretend? — I doubt they're the cause. How many millions play? Are we going to enforce ideas now?

News reports this week remind me that Patrick Purdy's Stockton schoolyard shooting in 1989 prompted a ban on assault weapons — that wasn't enacted until 1994, and not without guarantees to lift the ban in 2004, nor without loopholes that guaranteed assault weapons could still be sold legally.

The Bushmaster assault weapon — one was used at Sandy Hook — is popular, I learned, because the makers stripped it clean of all the features that would have banned it under that 1994 law. It's sleek and cool and fun, I've heard gun advocates say more than once.

Of mental health, President Obama said access to it should be at least as easy as access to guns. California's Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg urges early mental health treatment.

That's it so far.

Talk should shift almost entirely to mental health, not just in money to provide it but in the way we all think about it. And certainly not just for people who would shoot up a school.

Suicides in the U.S. military run almost one a day now, and most who kill themselves never deployed, never saw battle, as we expect. Many face isolation in the military, and try to survive in a culture that frames mental issues as weaknesses.

But as far as we know — and we don't know what we don't know — the Adam Lanza got his weapons from his mom, who would likely have gone through meetings and training to procure them. They were legal; the shooter got them by some means, and police say he shot his mom before driving to the school. His mental health was known, his troubles known, as far as we can tell. His mother was trying to do something about it.

That's where the talk should focus.

Some of the reaction this week is … reactionary. In what is shaping up to be an Internet meme, dads of elementary school children are donning their military or police uniforms and standing guard outside their children's schools. It's a sincere Hands-Across-America gesture that poses troubling questions:

• How long are you planning to stand guard?
• Are you armed? Please say no.
• If you aren't armed, how are you planning to stop an attack?
• Who are you? How do we know?

Already, at least one self-appointed guard may not be the Marine he claimed, and the gesture suddenly becomes absurd.

At the school where I teach a weekly art lesson, nothing had changed, to my surprise. The office staff sits far back from the front counter. Most of the time they don't ask who I am with my cart full of papers. I fill out my adhesive nametag, sign in on the visitor log, and sign out while I'm at it, since it's easier to go straight back to my car after the lesson.

It's no different now, a week after the Sandy Hook shooting. In fact, I forgot to peel off my nametag yesterday; it was still sitting there on the label sheet when I thought twice and went back to the office, just to see if anyone noticed. No, still there. No, no one looked up to see me pass.

Maybe that's as it should be. Horrible as it is, statistics show school shootings are rare, the danger extremely low. That's small to no comfort.

The real epidemic, requiring radical change, remains our mental health.