Sadness

Early in the morning of Friday, July 20th, I received a text message from a friend who lives in Seattle stating:

“Hey I just heard about the shooting out there last night. Are you guys ok?”

Fresh off of a morning workout, I was far more worried about when I’d stop sweating than anything else. My assumption was that there had been a random act of violence in the town where I live, Arvada, Colorado. I thought nothing of it, replied that my girlfriend and I were fine and knew nothing about a shooting of any kind.

It was only on my drive to work that I first heard the details of the horrific event that took place at an Aurora movie theater early that morning, just 20 miles from my house.

Friday was a difficult day for me and thankfully, I was not personally touched by the tragedy; I didn’t know anyone who was in the theater that night and of the few people that I know who live in Aurora (both friends and family) all were accounted for. Still, this event resonated with me more than any other shooting ever had and I believe it was simply a matter of proximity.

Thirteen years ago when there was a shooting at Columbine High School, I was living in Washington, 1,500 miles away. When Seung-Hui Cho shot and killed 32 people at Virginia Tech in 2007, I was living in Colorado but I was still half a continent away.

Friday morning when I went onto the websites of CNN and the Wall Street Journal, there on the front page was a small suburb twenty miles from my home. It resonated like nothing ever has simply because of its frightening proximity and its terrifying randomness.

I went about my work day on Friday and tried to focus on my work but found it quite difficult. Upon reflection in the afternoon, I realized that at one point or another throughout the day, I had gone through the five stages of grief; denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Now, several days after this occurrence, I am left with nothing but sadness.

GUN CONTROL

Ever since I learned of this happening, I have been searching for an answer; some new piece of legislation or some new program to help identify people who are at risk of doing something along these lines. I’ve come up with many answers but whenever I put them up to any sort of scrutiny, they just don’t stand up and that has helped me arrive at a truly depressing conclusion; there is very little that can be done.

No, this is not me being a pessimist; this is me being a realist. There are roughly 310,000,000 people in the United States and there are an estimated 270,000,000 firearms. Because of that, the crime rates in the United States involving a firearm are truly frightening when compared with other countries. The obvious question at that point is what are those other countries doing that the US should be doing?

Ironically, the answer is our government has never restricted (within reason) the freedoms of the people. Firearms were a necessary part of American life once upon a time and although that time has long since past – the United States government accounts for roughly 40% of the world’s expenditure on their respective militaries – firearms have never been illegal. Yes, gun control laws have been passed but relatively speaking, the proliferation of firearms has been going on unchecked in this country for more than 200 years.

If the second amendment was repealed tomorrow and the decision was made to make it illegal for citizens to own firearms, think for just a moment of what a Herculean effort that would require. The budget of the ATF would have to increase by a factor of 10… or maybe 100… or maybe 1,000. Even then, there would be a significant number of people that would not willingly relinquish their firearms. How many firearms would have to be removed from circulation for them to no longer be a significant threat? 75%? 90%? I would argue that until they are all removed and firearms are only in the hands of trained law enforcement or military personnel, they are a threat.

To sum up all of that, eliminating firearms is a logistical impossibility.

ARM EVERYONE

The idea of everyone carrying a gun came up shortly after the Aurora shooting and it’s one of the more asinine and dangerous ideas that anyone has ever come up with.

First and foremost, let me address the Aurora incident before getting a bit more abstract. The shooter was wearing full tactical body armor and most importantly (from a combat standpoint) he was prepared for everything that was about to happen. The members of the audience were not prepared for tear gas canisters to be released in the middle of a dark and noisy movie theater.

Secondly, if everyone had been carrying a concealed firearm, how many of them would have been able to do any good? Handguns are relatively useless against body armor. In the infamous North Hollywood Shootout, police officers fired approximately 660 rounds at the two gunmen over the course of 44 minutes while the robbers were able to fire well over 1,000 due to their body armor. In that case, only one of the robbers was actually killed by fire from the police and this was only after being hit in the legs by roughly 20 rounds (the other assailant was hit in the neck right after shooting himself in the head).

If we apply this situation to what happened in Aurora, it is possible that the instinct to fight back could have cost more lives as people stayed to enter the fray instead of fleeing the scene.

Is it possible that spree killers could be stopped if more people had firearms? Yes, but the key word is possible. Would overall firearm violence go down? Absolutely not. Imagine the following scenario; you are out at a restaurant with a few friends and you have a few rounds of drinks. You get up to go to the bathroom and, tripping over something or other, you bump into a patron at the bar, spilling his drink. He is understandably upset.

Normally, this situation could be defused quite simply. You apologize and maybe offer to buy him another drink. What happens if he doesn’t like the way you apologize (don’t ask me why, these things happen)? Again, not too difficult to defuse but what if he’s carrying a firearm? Now, all of a sudden, you have gone from a simple alcohol-fueled altercation to a potential life-and-death situation. Having been drinking and perhaps not in the most sound mind, you perceive his advances as a threat and you pull your gun and seeing this, he perceives a threat to him and he pulls his gun. Nobody wins.


That is a relatively simple scenario but completely plausible. There are a million other everyday scenarios that if you simply add the presence of a firearm (or two) it makes the situation much more difficult to manage.

Arming everyone is not the answer. Murder rates might go down but the number of people injured and killed by firearms would skyrocket.

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

A debate is needed on the issue of gun control and as always, both sides need to give a little. Proponents of gun control need to realize that logistics are not on their side and they need to pick their battles. Proponents of personal freedom need to realize that the Supreme Court has determined that the states are able to restrict the sales of firearms while not being in violation of the second amendment. Most importantly, both sides need to realize that this is not a black and white issue; there is not a right answer and there is not a wrong answer.

There are plenty of concessions that conservatives can make without giving in on the principle of gun ownership. To name just one example, I wonder why the shooter was able to legally acquire an AK-47 which he then used in this massacre. Assault rifles are weapons of war and shouldn’t be in the hands of a civilian under any circumstances. If you can’t agree on that point, then you should not be debating gun control.

The same can be said on the liberal side of the argument. Does gun control really stop gun related crimes? I cannot answer that with certainty but I do know that if 8,000 people die from gun related homicides in a year, gun control is not working as well as it should. Who knows what the death toll would be without gun control laws; I cannot answer that. All I know is that laws for the sake of having laws are an exercise in futility.

I am sure that the answer is somewhere in the middle of those two extremes but it will never be found when both sides stick to their respective ends of the spectrum and treat the middle as a no-man’s land where one goes when they abandon their principles.

If I can broaden for one moment, I’d like to say that this is a mentality that is rampant throughout American society and it is abhorrent. Compromise is not a dirty word. Any idiot can say “I’m right and you’re wrong”. It takes one hell of a person to be able to say “I believe I’m right but you might be right as well”.

I do not believe that violence is an inherent part of human nature. I do believe that survival is. How many deadly altercations could have been avoided if more people adopted the second mindset than the first? Unfortunately, we’ll never know. How much better off would American society be if we could put our egos aside and work on solving problems? The word “utopia” comes to mind…

SADNESS

All I have left nearly a week after this horrific event transpired is sadness. I am sad that something like this happened and my heart truly goes out to the victims and their friends and families; nobody should ever have to endure something like this happening to someone close to them or to themselves.


On top of that, I am sad because I am deathly afraid that nothing good will come of this incident. It’s an election year and inevitably, this issue will find its way into the debates. Frankly, I’ve had enough. Until our elected officials come out and say that compromise is the only way forward on this issue, I won’t listen to either side.

Mostly, I’m sad because our society is obsessed with firearms and using them for their intended purpose; to end life. I am not a hunter but I have no problem with it but nobody can deny that the intended result is for something that was living to end up dead. Why do we feel the need to kill each other? There are a select few motivations that I believe are legitimate reasons to end someone’s life but if we applied those reasons to the nation as a whole, the death toll would be in the hundreds instead of in the thousands.

At the end of the day, our society has a terrible illness. Our elected officials are supposed to be the wise elders of our community of 300,000,000 people who guide us through difficult times. Instead, half of them are proposing unrealistic measures while the other half is saying there is simply nothing that can be done about the problem, a stance that has never been so eloquently put as in the popular saying “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”.

In the past week I’ve experienced the five stages of grief and I’ve finally found acceptance in the depressing truth that there is very little that can be done that will affect real change. However, that doesn’t mean I’m not going to try to find a solution. I have ideas and I will share them with whoever will listen. I will also listen to what they have to say; they might have the brilliant idea that I’ve been searching for but it just needed to be viewed from the proper perspective.

I will not bury my head in the sand. I will say that I’m right and someone else is wrong. There are very few issues where there is a “right” position and a “wrong” position and this is not one of them.

The time for blindly clinging to one’s beliefs and refusing to hear alternative points of view is past.

The time for intelligent debate is now.

Any takers?