[Oe List ...] more on guns

Tue Dec 18 20:05:40 PST 2012

We all grew up in a gun culture if we grew up in the U.S.A. (note Gordon's
manner of speaking: "It's essential if we're to have a real shot at
changing the images...." Earlier this evening I watched a Newshour
interview with five or six people from Newtown who were meeting to decide
how to respond to this latest horror, and one of them said something about
"what we are *shooting *for...." It's small, but it's real and deeply
imbedded; maybe we could say, "symbolic."

About 27 years ago, while I was visiting my mother, I decided to oil my old
410 shotgun (given to me by my dad on the occasion of my 11th birthday).
Other family members wandered about the kitchen where I was sitting, and
someone asked what I was going to do with the gun. My young nephew
immediately answered, "shoot people," to which I quickly replied, "not
people -- birds." My nephew responded with a pain-filled frown, "Why would
you kill a bird?!"

It was probably about 1956 that I last shot that gun. In 2004, just before
moving to Indiana, I took it to a local gun shop and sold it.

I believe the conversation has opened up again, and surely we can do our
part in helping it to move along. I will be exceedingly happy if Feinstein
can get her bill passed, and having the president do something radical
would be helpful, but I think Gordon is right about what our job is, at
least for now.

Doris Hahn

On Tue, Dec 18, 2012 at 4:52 AM, Gordon Harper <gharper1 at mindspring.com>wrote:

>  Since I'm part of this problem and hopelessly complicit in sustaining
> it, I'll start with a little confession.  Like many of us, I grew up in a
> gun culture, in my case as a Wisconsin farm boy.  I loved the various
> rifles and handguns I accumulated over those early years, and I continued
> to sharpen my target shooting through college and graduate school and even
> as a young professor (never really had the heart for hunting).  I was (full
> disclosure) a member of the NRA starting in high school, so that I could
> get my cases of 22 ammo for a pittance.  (I dropped my membership while in
> college, when the organization started to morph into the right wing entity
> that we see today.)
>
> When our family joined the symbolic order and moved to the West Side, I
> got rid of everything except for a special treasure, my Ruger Single Six
> (replica Colt six-gun) with its beautiful rosewood grips and fancy Mexican
> fast draw holster.  Lane Erskine and I used to enjoy sharing our
> fascination with our handguns' workmanship.  Unlike Lane, who was given to
> packing heat as he moved about in 5th City, I kept mine unloaded and in a
> locked case in our room.
>
> After a few months, however, I became concerned that even with those
> safeguards, in our community, with the kids having easy access to
> everyone's rooms, it was too much of a risk.  With great sadness, I took my
> beloved revolver and holster to a gun shop in Wisconsin and sold them, thus
> ending my gun ownership phase.  When it came time, a few years later, to
> decide which of my siblings would inherit our father's firearms, I chose
> not to participate in the distribution.
>
> I start with this to make the point that what we're dealing with in this
> gun culture lies very deep in many of us.  I've had--and still have--a love
> affair with the classic American Western film.  This is a tradition that
> exalts the single shootist, who is able to do good and make things right
> for others precisely because he has at least one sidearm and when necessary
> uses it well.
>
> I see myself mirrored in the fascination of young people today for all the
> first person shooter games, battlefield adventures and standing one's
> ground against those hordes of attacking vampires.  It's a manifestation of
> our special culture as Americans, with our frontier tradition and
> mythology.  Which in turn is an aspect of what we sometimes refer to as the
> concept of American exceptionalism.
>
> To deal seriously with gun violence, it seems to me, is to take on the
> challenge of shifting these profoundly rooted national and personal images
> and stories of who we are.  They are so much a part of us that we hardly
> ever feel the need to talk about them--they're simply assumed, taken for
> granted as part of the common ground we share as Americans.
>
> We all grieve when events like those of this past week occur, and we feel
> personal shock and pain when one of them hits close to home.  At the same
> time, at some deep level we also find our way to accepting these
> occurrences as the tragic but necessary side effects of our special nature
> as a frontier people and the unique role of our nation in the world.
>
> It's like the collateral war damage to innocent people that we've
> accustomed ourselves to living with.  We lament it, and we truly want to
> keep it to the bare minimum, but we also feel that our historical role
> requires our paying this cost (a bit of White Man's Burden, *redivivus*).
> Theologically, there's a strong connection here with the myth of redemptive
> violence, which provides a religious rationale for many among us to accept
> the way things are and for at least part of the deep resistance we
> encounter to changing the gun laws.
>
> I suspect that we will now begin to see some modest changes in access to
> semi-automatic weapons, some improvements in preventing, spotting and
> caring for mental illness, maybe even more support for our educational
> systems.  I'm hoping it's also a point in time where we will see, in
> various formats and venues, the start of the conversation about our
> national identity and values that we very much need to have.
>
> What I find myself looking for are ways to engage our neighbors and
> ourselves in surfacing and exploring together these largely unquestioned
> images and stories that so powerfully shape our behavior.  What is really
> special or exceptional about America--the good, the bad and the
> ugly--relative to what is special and exceptional about any other nation
> and people?   How are we to understand that exceptionalism, and what do we
> do with it in today's world?
>
> Some of us might like to get rid of the whole idea of exceptionalism, but
> I think in this country, it's there, and we have to engage it.  Doing so,
> it seems to me, is key to that long range and indirect strategy we've been
> talking about in this conversation.  It's essential if we're to have a real
> shot at changing the images from which we continue to act and from which
> we and others continue to suffer.
>
> Engaging these conversations, I'm afraid, means welcoming and listening
> deeply to those with whom we strongly disagree--sharing and discussing
> together what we think the times call us to preserve in our heritage, what
> to leave behind and what to recreate.  If it's to work, it will have to
> be uncomfortably inclusive, in a big tent, as the Occupy folk like to
> say.
>
> We could begin to start such conversations in our workplaces, our
> churches, our book groups, our community meetings, at the pub or coffee
> shop, over dinner with friends, on line, using all these wonderful social
> media tools.  It's something each of us could tackle, if we chose to,
> without much of an organizational structure.  Maybe down the road at some
> point, . . . .
>
> Is this a tactic--and a conversation--we want to be part of?
>
> Gordon
>
>
>
> On 12/17/2012 1:45 PM, jlepps at pc.jaring.my wrote:
>
> Colleagues
>
> I'd like to add one more note to this lively dialogue (which I hope
> continues, and perhaps even begins to focus).
>
> It's obviously the case that a change of heart is required in this
> situation. The question becomes how to make that happen, and I'm reminded
> of Martin Luther Kings's response to us WASPS who were opposing
> desegregation because "we need to have hearts change to support
> integration." To paraphrase him, "Laws can't make you love me, but they may
> prevent you from killing me." Strict gun control may be that kind of law.
> And, IMHO, whatever will prevent this sort of mass murder is worth doing.
> Also I've noticed that hearts are remarkably adaptable to their external
> situation.
>
> In terms of luring the tiger, the question now that she's out of her lair
> (sorry Cynthia), what do we do: well perhaps something initial like
> forbidding the sale of assault weapons and mass magazines. That might be
> able to get some support from tigers. After all, we endure considerable
> inconvenience to insure safety on airplanes,, so perhaps the inconvenience
> of forbidding access to these instruments of mass destruction might be a
> possible first step.
>
> I don't believe we'll be able to change tigers into lambs, but maybe we
> can help de-fang them!
>
> John
>
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