Saturday, April 8, 2023

Tennessee's Gun Battle Shows Who's Wrong

 

As if last week's shooting at Nashville's Covenant School wasn't bad enough, this week, politics subverted humanity on both sides of the aisle in Tennessee's legislature.

Here we had on the left some folks screaming stale gun legislation rhetoric, and on the right, we had folks voting them out of the legislature for using a bullhorn in their chants.

Bad form all around.  Grandstanding, exploiting fear, and tossing racism into the mix just to stir the pot even more.  It's an embarrassment for Tennessee, and for everybody who's taken sides in this charade of governance.  

No, seeking to incite or thwart elected officials on the literal floor of any statehouse through incivility and crass disruption is not democracy, it is chaos.  Doesn't matter if it's Republicans doing it to the US Capitol, or Democrats at Tennessee's, although at least Tennessee's chaos wasn't violent.  Propriety is still relevant, regardless of your age or the issue.  Sure, censure the legislators who participated in the obstruction of legislative affairs, but kick them out of the offices to which they've been duly elected?  For yelling through a bullhorn?  How can that not look anything less than malevolent?

By now, we Americans should recognize that politics and legislation are NOT the places where we will find sustainable, fair solutions for everything.   And yelling louder (even metaphorically) to make it so... doesn't.  Especially if you want to enforce variant degrees of "morality", from a left-wing or right-wing perspective - you still can't legislate it.  Look at the colossal failure of Prohibition.  Yet we groom our politicians to be noticed and essential, the leaders and enforcers of our particular worldview.  And the media - we've got bad media actors on both sides of the political aisle - is more than happy to help politicians duke it out in the public square.

Respectfully negotiating an issue between sides is difficult, boring, often time-consuming, and thin on headlines and meme-able photos.  Staging a crisis creates far more immediate, provocative digital content. 

I suspect when it comes to the specific topic of gun-involved violence, politicians actually prefer to pick fights among themselves because they probably already know... shucks, there are no laws to stop gun-involved violence.  In our country, that horse bolted long ago.  Even if all assault rifles were completely banned starting right now, there would be about TWENTY million of them in circulation just in the USA.  And folks who oppose banning them have a valid point:  How many assault rifles have been used in gun violence?  A fraction of a percentage of the total number out there.

That doesn't mean we don't have a problem with gun-involved violence in America.  And it doesn't mean that laws preventing the future purchases of more assault rifles are a bad idea.  Why do so many Americans think they need to own an assault rifle in the first place?  Many surveys indicate that assault rifle owners like the raw power embodied by such weaponry, even if they never plan on killing anybody.  Which, if you follow that logic, also means assault rifles aren't necessary to normal, everyday American life.  Which begs the question:  Why do so many gun owners get so anxious and angry when the topic of gun control comes around?  Some gun owners say they fear martial law, but when they say that, the irony is lost on them that other Americans fear gun owners!

As for the folks who are guaranteed to scream (literally) for more gun control after a gun-involved violent incident, their reliance on their pet brand of politics to protect them is as illogically placed as it is for right-wingers and their politics.  For all the gun-control advocates out there, I'd simply ask you to consider the staggering gun-involved violence statistics for cities like Chicago, which already has a lot of gun laws on the books.  Laws don't stop the violence.  The simple fact of the matter is that if somebody wants to shoot somebody else, they're gonna do it.  And that's why focusing on guns misses the mark.  Pun intended.

Nevertheless, the media can't bring itself to let society even try to pivot away from conflict.  No matter their flavor of partisanship, it's in the media's interests to keep badgering society into believing politicians can fix things.  And sure enough, those politicians, to stay in office, have to look like they can, and are.  

But they aren't, and they can't.  Not everything.  Especially not people who want to kill other people.

That's what's getting lost in all of this grandstanding.  Why are some Americans bent on killing people?  Other countries have similar ratios of guns to population, but they don't have this murderous violence.  Is the way we're running our society to blame?  Let's take the Covenant shooting as an example.  While gun-control advocates have made it all about guns and laws, shouldn't we be having a hard conversation about being respectful of people who are different from us?  And people with whom we disagree? 

And what about bullying?  I was severely bullied in junior high, both emotionally and physically.  Those scars have run deep in my life ever since.  And many schoolyard bullies turn into adults who bully, and bullying takes all sorts of forms, from taunting fellow legislators with bullhorns (in Nashville) and death threats (in DC), to levying supermajorities against elected officials, to teasing people who struggle with the transgender zeitgeist.  And maybe I'm wrong to see bullying as a likely culprit behind the Nashville (alleged) shooter's motives, but it doesn't sound like the person reveled in respect throughout their life.  

Bullying in school, and at the workplace, and on social media are huge problems that few people seem interested in genuinely addressing.  Maybe because lots of people own guns and they like the swagger guns can give them... and maybe that swagger has a bullying component to it?  Like "I'm better than you, I'm stronger than you, I'm more protected than you, and I can prove it."  But do we ignore bullying at our collective and individual peril, since it seems to crop up a lot in the backstories of gun-involved violence?  

So, might harping over gun laws be distracting society from far more pertinent issues?

And there's more.  Because it's not just politicians and the media, unfortunately, who are to blame here.  Can you see it?  Neither politicians nor the media exist in a vacuum.  They exist as extensions of... all of the rest of us. Those of us who consume the media we prefer, and who vote for the people who get elected.  Who parent the kids who bully.  Who want to think they're more virtuous than their neighbors.  Who want others to defer to them.

Because in the grand scheme of things, in a democratic republic, with even our media creating content in a consumer-driven marketplace, we all share in the problem.  Whether we want to admit it or not.

_____

No comments:

Post a Comment

Thank you for your feedback!

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.