No Country for Old Men

In case you haven’t noticed, America is a violent country. Based on my five minutes of exhaustive research, we have the fifth most murders of any nation on Earth annually, although in fairness we only rank 24th in per capita murders, but you have to figure that a lot of our murders are messed up by good medical care and that at least a few thousand of those missing teenage girls have actually been raped and strangled, but they’re not included in the count. There have recently been around 16,000 murders per year in the U.S. and about 90,000 rapes. There are nearly 450,00 robberies and 900,000 assaults annually, and all these numbers are actually down from highs in the early Nineties. I can’t say how many of these are cases where someone was both raped and murdered, or raped, robbed, assaulted and murdered, or perhaps raped, robbed, assaulted, murdered, insulted, harassed, under appreciated and taken for granted, but by any calculus, there are a lot of recorded acts of violence, and perhaps as few as half of some types of violence are ever reported (according to my intuition).

The United States has the highest per capita gun ownership of any nation on Earth, including Afghanistan. With well over 250 million guns in circulation, the U.S. has a gun ownership of over .83 guns per person. Since over 20 percent of the U.S. population is under the age of 15, and we can perhaps assume they don’t own many guns, adult gun ownership in America averages more than one gun per person. Statistically speaking, every person in the United States owns a gun, and about 40 percent of those guns are handguns. As the intellectually sophisticated Lynyrd Skynyrd noted, “handguns are made for killin’, ain’t no good for nuthin’ else”. Many of those quarter-of-a-billion-plus guns are also assault rifles, which aren’t well suited for non-human targets. I have to assume that we have all those guns for some purpose. It is estimated that only about six to seven percent of the population actually hunts with any regularity, so maybe we were thinking about shooting something else.

But don’t misunderstand, this is not some whiney, Liberal plea for gun control; in fact, I own a handgun myself which I ironically won in a raffle at a golf tournament, in Georgia, of course. I keep it in the glove compartment in my Dodge in case I need to shoot a terrorist with whom I have been involved in a minor traffic accident. My point is that contemplation and execution of violent acts are as fundamentally American as aboriginal genocide, roasted pork butt, racism, baseball and sweet tea. We may be a nation conceived in liberty, but we were delivered in war, grew up fighting, sometimes with ourselves, and our current geo-political domination of the world is at least in part based upon our ability to vaporize all the world’s major cities in seventeen minutes and 36 seconds. We glorify military power and indulge our thirst for gladiatorial combat in a myriad ways from dog-fighting to football to movies and video games so violent and bloody you’re not even allowed to see them in Sweden.

Now, I am not writing all this as a criticism. I am personally pathologically addicted to zombie movies, Quentin Tarantino, college football, explosions and anything where somebody is eaten by an animal. I have the mental capacity of the average female high-school graduate and the emotional development of a 14 year-old boy, which pretty much makes me a typical 48 year-old American male. Being that I am descended from European outcasts, adventurers, draft-dodgers, pirates, criminals, bad businessmen, religious fanatics, anarchists, debtors, dreamers and fools, I am suspicious, defensive, quick to take insult and resistant to authority, just the kind of person who needs to be heavily armed. I repeat, it is by no means my intention to hate on America, but we need to understand who we truly are and why we hold the values we do, because anything less leaves us open to the manipulation of sinister, selfish forces which would have us sacrifice our own welfare for their gain.

Which brings me back around to what I really wanted to talk about. I have recently observed, courtesy of our ever-watchful news media, some of our fine citizens carrying guns in a peaceful and law-abiding manner to places of political debate. These individuals claim, perhaps correctly, that they are simply enjoying their rights under the Constitution and that those of us who don’t support this can politely suck badger testicle. Fair enough, but we all know that we have the right to do many things which we ought not to do. We can ask out our ex-girl friend’s BFF, and we can try to rationalize it by suggesting that it wouldn’t be fair if she were deprived of the opportunity to enjoy our company just because of our previous association with her friend, but we all know we are just doing it to be an ass. The same clearly holds true of the patriotic Americans who parade symbols and instruments of violence among crowds who have assembled seeking to have their voices heard on a political matter. I read one clever analogy likening these gun toting scions of freedom to the rattle-snake shaking its tail in warning to an oppressive, socialist government. Reptiles, however, don’t generally support democratic institutions, and a threat is a threat. The presence of weapons in a place of political dialog simply implies that those holding the weapons will not accept defeat. They suggest that if they cannot prevail through learned debate, they will pump you full of hot lead and eliminate you from the political equation. This inevitably casts a pallor over the whole enterprise of free expression and honest exchange of ideas.

Our nation was founded on the principle that reasonable people acting in good faith could resolve their differences without killing each other. In my opinion, it is categorically and indisputably un-American to introduce the intimidation of threat of force into the democratic process. Whatever one’s views may be, we all have an implicit agreement with each other to allow the process established by our Constitution to work and to accept the results of that process until the next opportunity to effect political change within that process presents itself. This is the great and fundamental compromise required by civilization. It is not, never has been, and never can be all about one man’s opinion; there are limits to your rights because there has to room left for the rights of others. You have the right to express contempt for people and ideas, but you cannot express contempt for the system and still be a meaningful part of this country, and there is nothing more contemptuous of America’s values than the idea that you can substitute fear for reason or force for consensus. We tried it once, and the blood ran red.