Somewhere along the line my kids started playing a game called Gun, Bunny, Carrot, which is a screwed-up version of Rock, Paper, Scissors, apparently. Bunny eats the carrot, carrot plugs the gun, and gun (duh) shoots the bunny. I tried early on to get rid of this game but somehow my husband found it funny and subversively began letting the boys do it, probably in an effort to piss me off passive aggressively and force me to realize that boys will be boys, they should play boy games. A part of me realizes this is true, the other part of me, however, finds this horrifying and against all my judgement as a mother. I don't buy my kids gun toys, only recently have I even let them have water guns, because I don't want my kids to be That Kid Who's Mommy Is A Peace-Loving Leftist-Hippie Freak who doesn't let her boys play with guns. Gah. Thank you very much, Societal Peer Pressure. Drew is going to have a hard enough time fitting in anyway, he doesn't need my neurosis making it worse for him.
Today Cagey posted regarding the Virginia Tech shootings, and the problems with gun control. I think I've established here my thoughts overall, on gun control - that being, there should be a lot more control, dammit, and a lot less bearing of arms by the general public, outside of their homes. My interpretation of the second amendment has always been that the concern of the legislature when it was passed was the right of people to protect their homes, their families, their property, from intrusion. I'm pretty sure George Washington never imagined that we might interpret that law to mean we should all be able to walk the streets with AK-47's. Or that one person needed to be allowed to purchase an arsenal of handguns. I don't know any instances of normal people who have a stockpile of weapons in their home just to make sure to keep the rabbits from eating the lettuce. People stockpile weapons for insidious reasons. The NRA needs to accept that and stop defending it.
Cagey's right, the gun control laws need to change. Some of it works, some of it doesn't. I don't know why. I admit to being one of those annoying people who has a strong opinion yet am generally too lazy to do the homework to really figure out an arguable point. Sorry. Anyway, in some states it works - I am told Arizona has the most open gun carry laws, and somehow they are among the states with the least amount of gun violence. My friend who told me this says its because since everybody's packing, nobody gets out of step. This sounds like Russia vs the US in the coldwar. Does that fact that we both had nuclear weapons and had our finger on the button and could kill the other at any given time mean... we were all safer? No.
Virginia, on the other hand, is also a state with very open gun carry and purchasing laws, and yet they have one of the highest incidences of gun related violence. This has been made pretty public this last week, not only in the wake of the Va Tech massacre, but as miscellaneous political figures who shall remain nameless ::cough: NY Attorney General ::cough:: have started spouting figures of incidences involving guns purchased in Virginia, the numbers are out there. The fact that people are proselytizing in order to gain a political foothold in the wake of the tragedy itself, don't even get me started on that. Virginia does not have a waiting period to purchase a gun. They also do not have a sufficient background check system, clearly. Interestingly, the background check system appears to be up to the states to figure out, even though it is, in and of itself, a national mandate that each state have one to some degree. Please explain to me how the people on CSI have a multitude of databases through which they run people's names to check for records, but yet, in real life? Oh. Right. Nevermind.
The National Firearm Law says that people who are "subject to a court order that restrains such persons from harassing, stalking, or threatening an intimate partner, or persons convicted in any court of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence" are ineligible to purchase firearms. The kid responsible for the shootings at Virginia Tech would have qualified for this ineligibility clause, as I understand from the media, yet somehow it didn't catch in the quick, five minute, background check the gunshop owner conducted. It came back clean. This is not the shop owner's fault, I realize. Maybe its because those restraining orders were no longer active. Maybe the law needs to be clarified to apply to those people who have had restraining orders against them in the past but that are not longer active. Or maybe that would be too restrictive and violate someone's due process. Maybe that would be unfair to someone who had been abusive or a stalker in the past, but who is now a reformed, normal human being who promises to never engage in such behavior, you know, as long as that bitch doesn't try to leave him again. Maybe if we were less concerned about the due process of psychopaths and criminals and more concerned about keeping innocent people safe we could fucking get something done in this country.
(I realize this particular screw-the-criminals attitude doesn't really jive well with my normal, warm-fuzzy, peace, love and happiness brand of liberalism, but too bad. I'm a walking contradiction. This is kind of why I don't get into these conversations much in the first place. Moving on.)
I can't explain how the background check didn't catch this guy, I don't know enough about how it works. He obviously had some history of issues which should have raised some red flags, and did, albeit not high enough. I vacillate on how to handle the mentally ill with regard to firearms. On one hand, I'd like to see it be illegal, or at least harder, for people with a history of mental illness to get their hands on weapons. On the other hand, I know if such a ban were to exist, fewer people would seek treatment for their troubles. Not to mention the right to medical privacy this runs into. In order for the government to be aware that a person has even sought mental health services, on their own or by force of family, probation, whatever, their right to privacy has to be violated. This is a problem.
But I think here is where I end up - and stay with me, this gets a little convoluted. I know that sometimes its a thin line between diagnosis of a severe mental illness, and treatment of say, mild post-partum depression. Once we get into the right to privacy discussion, then we have to deal with what happens with doctor-patient privilege, and when doctors are forced to report certain behaviors and medications to the government, and to insurance companies. And when insurance companies find out a person has been treated, and that person changes insurance benefits, they reserve the right to call it a pre-existing condition, and not cover it. Now we're cutting off their access to continued therapy, and prescription medication supply. Then we have someone who, left to their own devices, starts self-medicating, and makes really bad decisions, and in the midst of their mind-fucked frenzy, they purchase a handgun. Because they CAN. Its all a big, violent, rights-vs-freedoms-vs-protection circle and we've created it ourselves, people. We have done this to ourselves. We are going to have to accept that some of our freedoms must be given up, in certain situations, for our safety. The safety of innocents is much more important than our collective right to bear arms, and possibly, dare I say it, even our right to privacy. Can't we accept that?
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