Notes from my Knapsack 11-9-17

Notes from my Knapsack 11-9-17

Jeff Gill

 

We are a violent people

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Credit must be given to David Hackett Fischer, a history professor who wrote a 900-plus page book entitled "Albion's Seed" about patterns of migration to the early United States.

 

But fairly or not, I'd sum up what I learned from his scholarship in the simple phrase: "We are a violent people."

 

Not bad people, but restless, by nature rootless, wandering folk who chose to leave the British isles and come to the rocky uplands of the eastern United States to eke out a living, singing our folk songs which became bluegrass & blues, and maintaining tensions between clans and families which become legendary feuds, such as the Hatfields and the McCoys and NASCAR.

 

Americans are good, gracious, giving, caring, loving . . . and violent people. Maybe not you, generally not me, but in sum, compared to many populations around the world, we have a tendency to violent reactions. No, we are far from alone in this, but American violence is, well, known. And well known around the world.

 

Think about our movies. Car crashes and massive explosions and guns of every sort, but culminating with the ever-so-satisfying punch in the mouth of the bad guy by the hero.

 

As you may have heard, we own guns. It's not surprising. This is a vast continent, in the larger picture of things relatively recently pioneered, with big chunks of rural and even huge semi-wilderness areas between our sprawling cities. Colt Peacemakers and Winchester 73s and Browning M1911s have been intrinsic to our history; Garand M-1s and AR-15s and tin can plinking .22 caliber bolt action Mossbergs are in households all around us.

 

300,000,000 guns. That's what our best estimate is (no one really knows) of how many guns are owned in America. I'm skeptical, and not just on Second Amendment grounds, of anyone who argues that we should just have the government go door to door and collect them up and wait for the peaceable kingdom to arrive. That's one firearm per American, old, young, pacifist or veteran. If you don't have yours, don't worry, someone else has seventeen of them. No, I don't quite get that either.

 

Candidly, I don't think that the answer to safety and security of churches or public gatherings of any sort is more people packing heat. The whole "an armed society is a polite society" is one of those debating points that doesn't play out well in real life (ask the Dodge City sheriff). I don't know that gun control in any of the forms I've heard proposed is the answer, either. But I do believe I have reason to argue two things.

 

One is that while the idea of "we have to DO something" is always tied up with "pass new legislation," I see in the practical impact of recent events a strong argument for saying "actively enforcing the laws that are on the books will lead to less gun violence." Yes, that means more funding for the FBI & ATF & local law enforcement in maintaining databases and running background checks. Do that, not "something." Let's see what that does.

 

And rather than keep fighting about "gun control" per se, could we talk about firearm deaths as a public health crisis, and deal with it as we would such a thing? Yes, 33,000 firearms deaths a year are terrible – and two-thirds of those are suicides. Most mass shooters end in a . . . suicide. Most gun violence seems to have an element of willful self-destruction tied into it. What's going on with that? How can we respond?

 

We are a violent people. We need to work on that aspect of our American culture. Particularly between men and women, mostly on the male side of that. I don't notice many shooters being women with a grievance, and I know enough women to know that's not because they don't have any. Let's work on peace, healthy relationships, mental health and suicide reduction, and deal with weapons restrictions as they naturally arise within those contexts.

 

That we can peacefully and collaboratively do.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's fired many sorts of weapons in his life, but never in anger. Tell him how you deal with your violent tendencies at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.