Gun-na Piss Some Conservatives Off

I’m baaaaack!! I’m so sorry for the impromptu hiatus. I ended up quitting my job that I’d been at for about three years total, with a break in the middle during which I lived on Cape Cod, and I got a new job. This new job is in the insurance business, and I absolutely love it. The only thing was, I had to get my Property & Casualty insurance license, so I spent the better part of the month of August studying for that. I took the test last week and received my license yesterday, wahoo! It’s a very exciting career step, but it will take up more of my time than my last job did. I still plan on blogging, it just might not be as often (especially with football season only 14 days away!)

Anywho, enough about me. Today I’m going to touch on a very, very sensitive subject. It’s sensitive for a couple reasons - 1) a lot of people have very strong - and opposing - opinions about it, and b) this will probably touch very close to home for a lot of people. In light of recent events - as recent as multiple different happenings this very week - I thought it was about time I pointed out some things about why gun control is necessary.

I’m not writing this to spark a debate. I’m writing this to try and get people to understand something that will save lives. I considered whether or not to post gifs and pictures in here to lighten the mood a bit, but I think this is one of those topics where there’s just not a whole hell of a lot of humor to be found, so the only images you’ll see are ones relevant to the topic.

I am from Colorado. When the Columbine High School shootings happened in 1999, I was 11 years old and attending an elementary school about 15 minutes away. Teachers at my school had kids who attended Columbine, and it hit our community hard. I didn’t understand what it meant when my teacher told us right after recess that day that we were on “lockdown”. I didn’t know I was supposed to be scared, I just knew something bad had happened. I’m not quite sure when the severity of it hit me, but I do know to this day 16 years later, I still don’t understand why.

I live about 45 minutes from Aurora, where the movie theater shootings happened, just a short three years ago. This one was different in the sense that the gunman is still alive, unlike the gunmen at Columbine (I am purposefully not using these people’s names). Therefore, it sparked a highly emotional debate for everyone of what, exactly, his punishment should be. Personally, I have always been against the death penalty. I don’t believe using death as a punishment for death is effective. I also don’t like the fact that my tax dollars go to killing someone on death row. I would much rather my tax dollars be spent on rehabilitation programs for the prisons. To me, in order to understand how someone can murder someone(s) else, I have to believe they have a legitimate mental condition allowing them to block out compassion and empathy for others (cases of self defense and war would be the exception to that - I’m not saying killing is ever okay in any capacity, but when it’s not from a place of hatred then it’s different). I can’t speak for the rest of the world, but I know for a fact that the United States mental health system is shit, and that’s a few steps up from what it used to be. Yes, it is improving, but there’s still an unnecessary stamina surrounding mental health. Face it - we all have some sort of mental health issue in some capacity, whether it’s something like OCD or addiction, or something more severe that causes your brain to function differently than what most perceive to be “normal”. Whatever it may be, we’re all in this together. My point being, I would like to see these people who are in prison for hurting or/and killing someone else, go through rehab programs to get to the point where they can understand and regret what they did, and then spend the rest of their life in prison, having to think about what they did and the lives they took and the pain they put the loved ones of the victims through. A lifetime full of guilt and regret is a much better punishment - and way more effective - than the death penalty. Once you die, it’s over.

I’m not saying I don’t think people deserve second chances. Everyone does. If you can turn things around and truly feel remorse for your crime(s), then more power to you, and good luck with your fresh start. But I’m not on a jury here; that’s a judgment that’s made inside the “justice” (ha) system, and above my pay grade.

I mentioned that I lived on Cape Cod for a bit. I lived there from the summer of 2012 to the summer of 2013. I happened to be there during both the Sandy Hook shooting in neighboring Connecticut, and the Boston Marathon bombings about 45 minutes north of my house. That’s probably the one I remember the clearest, the Boston bombings. I had gone to take a nap because I was tired, and as I lay down, I checked Twitter on my phone to see if there was anything I needed to know before I fell asleep. There was. My nap never happened.

There was this statewide pride felt after the bombers had been identified and/or captured, though. The day itself was eerie and deserted, nobody on the streets. But when the one brother was arrested, everyone in Massachusetts - and in that area in general - banded together. If you know anything about baseball, you know that the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox are one of the greatest rivalries in sports. After the bombings, the Red Sox played a game in New York, and Yankee Stadium blasted “Sweet Caroline”, traditionally a Boston tune, from its speakers to show their support. I imagine it was similar to what New Orleans was like after Hurricane Katrina - everyone bands together to help each other out, to provide a sense of community when it’s needed most.

I honestly started to wonder if I had some sort of rain cloud following me everywhere I went, because bad things always seemed to happen in the general vicinity of my home. That paranoia was only intensified after I met Aaron Hernandez when he was still playing in the NFL, before the general public knew about the murders. I’m terrified of meeting famous people now, because last month I met President Jimmy Carter and now his health is in poor condition.

I also recently had a dream involving a dear friend from high school, who got married last summer and moved to another state with her husband. The dream involved my friend, her spouse, and a ghost. I remembered waking up thinking I should text her to say hi, that my dream was a sign of something as they often are, and I should check in on her. I didn’t, though, because I had texted her a few weeks prior about having dreamt about her then too, and I didn’t want her to think I dreamt about her all the time, so I didn’t contact her. A few weeks after the dream involving the ghost, the same friend had an immediate family member who used a gun to end his life.

I’m not saying any of what has happened is anyone’s fault. There’s the argument that it’s the fault of the shooters/bombers/etc., but again, I have to cite mental health on those. Again, not excusing it, just looking for a way to understand it better personally. What I am saying, however, is we are capable of at least trying to prevent these violent crimes from happening. In fact, I’ve found some resources we can all use to get started on how to make a difference, because we all - myself included - say “someone needs to do something”, but most of us don’t ever do anything, and then it only gets worse. So here’s a website that I haven’t had as much time to browse as I would like, but it has a lot of resources and information, the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. And here is one from our very own President, Gun Violence Prevention, encouraging us all to do something.

Speaking of presidents, yesterday President Obama made a very good - factual - point. Your opinion on politics here doesn’t matter - love or hate the guy (hatred isn’t really helping anything, but it’s okay to disagree with your president, that’s why America is a free country), he said that guns kill more Americans than terrorism. When looking for an article of that quote I could cite, I found this one from the Washington Post. The article is supporting and backing up what the President said, while also chiming in with their own opinion, in a respectful manner that doesn’t hurt anybody else. A+ journalism.

Here is a graph from that same WP article:

Wow. WOW. I never in a million years would’ve imagined that to be the case, although unfortunately it makes sense. I’d also like to point out right now that “terrorist” does not mean someone from any specific part of the world, or someone who belongs to any specific religion or organization - it means someone who uses violent acts against others. That could be anyone.

(Sidebar - the WP article has another graph showing the other things that kill Americans, like car accidents and cancer. Those things, however, are not intentional the way murder is.)

At the new job I started, I had to take some online video courses about the company and the field I now work in. One of the videos was about safety in the workplace, addressing things such as fire, natural disasters, and chemical spills. The section on violence in the workplace - whether it be from a fellow employee, a customer, a stranger, a domestic situation, etc. - was longer than the rest of the sections, combined. Not only was it longer, but when I finished that particular video, the very next one was only on workplace violence, and what we can do to prevent it or ensure the safety of ourselves and those around us while at the office.

I know what the Second Amendment says. I’m a very patriotic person. I love the fact that, if I don’t like my president or my senator, I have the right to voice my opinion about it without being thrown in jail. The Second Amendment does not, however, give me the right to physically harm the person I disagree with, or anyone else.

When the Bill of Rights was written over 200 years ago, my guess is those men never thought the world would become so terrible that we’d go around shooting each other for fun. Those who defend the Second Amendment need to do it in context, recognizing that it was written in a time when the country was a much, much different place. I also know my First Amendment rights, which gives me the freedom to tell you that your endorsement of guns is not helpful to this country, or this world.

The people I understand the least, however, are those who say “if everyone carried a gun the world would be a safer place”. Um, no. Life is not a movie. If someone walked into a crowded room - say a movie theater - and started shooting people out of nowhere, it wouldn’t turn into everyone else standing up and shooting him or her back. It would turn into no one knowing who the real enemy was, and shooting at everyone they didn’t know or trust, until there was a violent massacre which was what carrying guns was supposed to prevent in the first place, according to those with that line of thought.

I understand the argument that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”. While that is true, I’ve found it to be people with guns kill people. I recently had this very debate with a friend of mine, who is pro gun. He said if we didn’t have guns, we’d have something else as a weapon, and cited parts of history and wars before the invention of guns. He made a good point - we will always find a way to harm each other, for some unknown reason. However, when somebody has to kill someone using a knife or a sword, they have to get a hell of a lot closer to their targeted victim than they would with a gun, which means less chance of getting away, which means higher risk, which makes someone less likely to kill in the first place, generally speaking, than if they had a gun (or a bomb, but that’s another debate). Think of all the people who might not have died when they did without guns - President Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., etc. Think of the wars that may never have happened, or escalated to the points they did if there had never been any guns, or any sort of weapon like them.

I am genuinely asking those of you who are pro gun to explain to me - civilly and respectfully - why you think guns are okay. I understand that people enjoy them for things like hunting (which still isn’t okay to me, but I eat meat so I don’t really have any room to talk), but how many hunting “accidents” have happened where another person has been accidentally shot? I mean, our own country’s vice president did it, while he was in office.

My other point is keeping guns in the house, especially when you have children. If you have it locked in a safe on the top shelf of your closet, that’s great, but how is that going to help you during a confrontation? You’re not going to have time to get it to protect you or/and your family, so what’s the point of even having it in the first place? And if you keep it somewhere with easy access, that means the other members of your household have easy access to it as well, which means you probably shouldn’t piss anyone off because anger breeds foreign emotions that are hard to control when you’re in the moment. Here is one of my favorite points ever on gun control, from Democratic presidential candidate Martin O'Malley, and here is the accompanying tweet that went with it:

Movies and television have made human death such a common happening that we, as a society, have disassociated ourselves to death and murder. I will be the first to admit that I can watch action movies where characters shoot each other and not feel affected because I’m so used to it, but I cannot watch any movie where an animal dies, and that includes the Lion King. It’s too hard. But that’s because society hasn’t pounded into our brains that it’s normal to randomly kill an animal for no reason, or because you don’t like the way they look or how they think. Using a gun to shoot someone else is so commonplace these days after all, so why should we be bothered by it?

I’ll tell you why: because, once again, death is not the punishment murderers seem to think it is. All it does is hurt the ones who love the person killed, but the person killed can’t feel that remorse for having hurt his or her loved ones because they’re dead. No matter what afterlife you do or don’t believe in, we can all agree that your physical body is no longer working when you die, therefore not allowing you to walk home and check on your family. The other reason death is not a punishment is because, once again, when you’re dead, you don’t care anymore what happened in this life. If you pissed someone off and they killed you, they’re the ones continuing to live on with murder on their conscience, while your spirit is now free. So, really, when you murder someone, you’re only making life harder on yourself, for so many reasons. Threatening someone or making them fear for their life is, once again, a lot more effective than just killing them out of your way (once again, not condoning that behavior, but someone who is alive is going to care a lot more about what happens to them than someone who is dead).

I am someone who is fascinated by serial killers. I’m not really much for gore, but I am interested in the psychological behavior of people like Charles Manson, Jack the Ripper, the Zodiac, Hannibal, all of them. How did they get to be someone who murders for sport? Is it nature or nurture? Are they born with that evil or does the ever worsening condition of the world cause them to need to kill?

I feel like this always worsening world wouldn’t be so bad if we all stopped hating each other so much. If you want to dye your hair polka dotted purple with a lime green mohawk, go for it! Express yourself. I think I’ve said this in my blog before but it’s worth pointing out again - as long as you’re not hurting yourself or anyone else, be who you want, do what you want, act and look and dress and talk how you want. There is a line in one of Miley Cyrus’s songs that says - “it’s my mouth, I can say what I want to”. Regardless of your personal feelings about her (which, once again, is it really your place to judge?), she makes a good point. It’s so true! We each have the right to say and think what we want (thank you, once again, to the First Amendment), but the people we say those things to also reserve the right to disagree, and vise versa. I mean, think of how boring the world would be if everyone had the same tastes and interests. We’d never learn anything! I love learning about people with different religions, different favorite foods, different clothing style, different musical tastes. It expands my horizons and makes me a better, more well rounded person.

I also feel the need to throw this out there - if you want to say something that involves having to describe the race, weight, style, or any other physical characteristic of a person, then it’s probably not a comment that needs to be made, or even thought, really, but I’m not getting into that one. When it’s something positive, such as complimenting someone’s appearance or style or whatnot, then that’s fine. But when it’s gossiping to your friend because you saw someone at the mall and you didn’t like the way they looked, then it’s really a completely unnecessary thing to bring up. Not to mention a waste of your time, because why the hell does it matter? If they’re not hurting anyone, let it go, and if they are hurting someone else, you can still talk about what happened without having to describe their physical appearance or heritage.

You don't have to like everybody, but you don't have to call everyone you don't know or understand a "piece of shit", either. 

I will never get how or why people could ever think guns are a good or necessary thing. It’s a hot button topic for me and I’ve had to keep my mouth shut lately as I work with people now who are pro gun. These people are wonderful and sweet and very helpful and we are able to find common ground, because despite our political differences, none of us are hurting anyone else and therefore we can find a commonality in simply being human.