Upon the Use of "Thoughts and Prayers" as an effective defense against guns

This was a post I wrote on Facebook, back in June of last year:

Dear God! We are a nation under siege. When is enough enough? How many more people must die or be maimed by gun violence?!

The answer is NOT to put more guns on the streets! Don't quote the 2nd amendment to me - it calls for a well-regulated militia. These terrorists - the white men who believe they are acting for God or race or political bent - who carry semi-automatic rifles that can strafe a plaza - or a baseball field or a church or a business or (pick a place, any place) - and mow down human beings to show their might and power and hatred - these terrorists can pick up their guns and bullets without a care! It is more difficult to get a driver's license than a gun license.

Dear God - when will enough be enough?

Someone I don't know commented on it - "The criminals will get their guns one way or another," implying this was a good reason why gun control won't work and shouldn't be pursued.

Here's the thing - of course criminals will always get their guns! I'M NOT WORRIED ABOUT THE FUCKING CRIMINALS!

- I'm worried about the white supremacist skinhead who can legally buy a gun.

- I'm worried about the nice parents down the block who buy a gun to protect their family whose child ends up dead because said child found the gun - or MY child getting killed by their gun because he was over playing at their house and someone found the gun

- I'm worried about the mentally ill person who can readily buy a gun.

- I'm worried about the guy who’s pissed off at his wife or his girlfriend or boss or co-worker or the world who decides to do something about it

Of course the criminals will get their guns. We have law enforcement to deal with that; it's by no means perfect or even relatively effective. But gun control laws were never meant to deal with that issue!

Good God people! We created this battlefield all by ourselves. This blood is on our hands. Somehow, we deified the NRA and the 2nd amendment, and we build altars to their godhood daily. And you know - it's all of us. We are all culpable in this nloody passion play.

We wring our hands and offer thoughts and prayers as if that were enough. We shake our heads in sorrow, in anger, in bewilderment - and then we go on with our lives, until the next time, and the next time, and the time after that. Because there will always be a next time. And we will be just as culpable and just as sad and bewildered and angry.

Here are some cold hard facts, gleaned from the Center for Disease Control

• On an average day, 93 Americans will be killed with guns
• Those 93 deaths daily? Seven of them will be kids or teens.
• Nearly 12,000 people will die. victims of gun homicide, annually
• For every one person killed by a gun, two more will be injured
• Every month, 50 women will be shot by their intimate partner
• When a gun is present in a situation of domestic violence, the risk of the woman being killed increases fivefold
• The American gun homicide rate is 25 times higher, on average, than other high income countries. The US makes up 42% of the population of that group, but accounts for 82% of the gun deaths.

What will it take?

We thought Columbine would do it, didn’t we? I could have sworn we did. So I went searching, to find out how many mass shootings there had been since that deadly, horrifying kick-you-in-the-gut-and-take-your-breath-away massacre at Columbine High School in April, 1999. Funny thing - my research took me back to 1984 (a prescient year, to be sure; I could have gone further - I chose to stop there). That was the year a man walked into a McDonald's in San Ysidro, California and opened fire, killing 21 and wounding 19.

Between San Ysidro (1984) and Columbine (1999), there were nine other mass shootings - a total of 11 shootings in all at that time. The total number of dead numbered 112. One hundred twelve lives snuffed out, and one hundred fifty-nine wounded - physically. God only knows the countless others whose wounds are not visible to the eye. Angry men. Hurt and damaged boys. Empty people who wanted to punish, who wanted to hurt, who wanted to kill. Who wanted to die. They grabbed a gun - a rifle, a shotgun, a handgun, a semiautomatic rifle - and sprayed bullets and pain and death all around them.

Columbine hit us like a wave of frigid water. It shocked us all. It sickened us all. We wept with all of the families whose worlds were destroyed that day in April. And we swore it would never happen again. Didn't we? Of course we did! We had to have. I mean, this wasn't some gangland war on the mean streets of some city. This wasn't some pissed off guy with a chip on his shoulder who shot up his girlfriend's office in an effort to show her just how much he loved her and what lengths he'd go to make her stay.

This wasn't supposed to happen - not here! This was middle class suburbia, mostly white America. This was a couple of kids! White kids, who, seemingly out of nowhere, walked into their school and opened fire on classmates and teachers alike. It wasn't until later that we found out they had an arsenal of guns at their fingertips, all legally owned by their parents. It wasn't until later that we learned they were Outsiders, bullied and marginalized and unstable.

So we learned. We learned from the harshest teacher, this most brutal lesson. We learned, and so we declared it wouldn't happen again.

Until it did. Three months later, in Atlanta. Two months after that, in Fort Hood. And two more months. And then the next month. Again and again. Over and over. The killings never stopped. People who'd been fired, or passed over, or left - they took it out on the people they worked with or loved or hated or feared. Who the fuck knows?

From Columbine to Virginia Tech - the next of the "big" ones, the shootings that really shook us up. that seem to have a more permanent status in our heads (except, of course, if your world was rocked by one of the "minor" shootings, the ones that faded more quickly from public view) - from April, 1999 - April 2007: 13 mass shootings. Ninety-seven dead, seventy-four walking wounded.

We learned. We learned how to use social media to notify students and faculty that there was a potential madman on the loose. It would have been nice to learn how to keep guns out of the hands of the madmen. Almost a year later (with only one other mass shooting and eight dead along the way), Northern Illinois University was hit by its own disgruntled student. Again, we activated the notification system, keeping those kids not in the lecture hall on lockdown and safe. We lost only five souls that day. It could have been so much worse.

But we learned. And it won't happen again. We won't let it happen again.

Binghamton, NY: April 2009, 13 dead, 4 wounded

Fort Hood, TX: November 2009, 13 dead, 32 wounded

Huntsville, AL: February 2010, 3 dead, 3 wounded

Manchester, CT: August 2010, 8 dead, 2 wounded

Tucson, AZ: August 2011, 6 dead, 11 wounded

Seal Beach, CA: October 2011, 8 dead, 1 wounded

Oakland, CA: April 2012, 7 dead, 3 wounded

Aurora, CO: July 2012 - another one of the "big names" in mass killings. This was the madman who shot up the midnight showing of a Batman movie, killing 12 and wounding 58.

Oak Creak, WI: 6 killed, 3 wounded in a Sikh temple where people were at worship

Minneapolis, MN: September 2012, 6 killed, 2 wounded

Brookfield, WI: October 2012, 3 killed, 4 wounded

Newton, CT: December 2012, Sandy Hook Elementary School. This brought a nation to its knees. Stories of courage beyond what anyone could have imagined. The faces of those sweet, sweet kids, getting ready for the holidays. The teachers and administrators who did all that they could, and then did more. The parents whose children died. In all, 27 people - adults and kids - died. Were murdered.

And we declared we had had enough. We declared that this madness would end. We shouted "never again!" to anyone who would listen, and to many who wouldn't. We were done learning these lessons. We got it. Surely Congress would listen now! Surely Congress would no longer bow to the pressure of the NRA and other pro-gun lobbyists, not with all we had been through. Right?

Between Sandy Hook and the Charleston Church shooting almost exactly three years later, there were five gun mass murders, a mere 36 deaths. I mean, really - they should barely count, right?

Except they do count. As do the 13 other mass shootings that happened between then and yesterday, June 14, 2017. On that day, we saw two mass shootings, a continent apart. One in Virginia in, in the shadow of the capitol -where thank God no one was killed! - and San Francisco, where three were killed and two wounded.

In all, from what I thought would be five or six notorious cases of brutality and murder (because who can keep all of that death front and center? Life refuses to stop, or even slow down long enough to process these atrocities in their moments, and after a while, they seem to melt and fuse into one another, because how different are they, when it comes right down to it?) turned into 56 separate incidents of some guy (ok; there were two women who made it on the list; still...), some guy, some kid, some bruised and battered and broken person took out a gun and opened fire to assuage some inner demon.

From 1984 - 2017, 404 people have been killed in a mass shooting. I can't even start on those who've been killed individually. In Chicago alone, there were 762 homicides in 2016; 90% were a result of gun violence. Overall, there were 4,368 shootings here last year. When I wrote this last June, we were almost at 1,000 murders, and we hadn't even hit summer yet, when the temperature and the assault rates rise almost exponentially.

Let me remind you where all of this started: I don't give a flying fuck about criminals and their gins. In almost every single case of these mass shootings, the guns these mass murderers used were purchased legally, owned legally. Could very well have been concealed legally. In the blink of an eye, these sick individuals to their guns and ended the lives of so many.

The blink of an eye.

Do you really think that arming everybody would have stopped these murders? Even in those cases where the Authorities (whomever They may be) had an inkling that something might not be quite right in the head with these murderers, everyone was caught off guard. And no, I don't want to debate how many may have been saved in the seconds that someone on the battlefield may have had a gun, may have had the presence of mind to whip it out in the next blink of an eye, may have known how to use said gun, may have hit their target (the gunman) and not some other innocent who happened to be standing in the way (or close enough to it).

Arming everyone to the teeth is a recipe for disaster. 

We here in America seem to be the jumpy, hair-trigger gun-toting murder capital o the world. Remember that statistic, way up there? The American gun homicide rate is 25 times higher than other high income nations. Last year, the rate of death by gun violence in the US (per 100,000) was 10.2; in the UK, it was .2, 1.1 in Germany, 2.3 in Canada, 2.8 in France (according to a CBS news story).

It's the guns. It's the ease of access to the guns. It's the people who can get the guns, in all their angry, crazy, messed up lives. It's the inconsistencies from state to state. It's the loopholes and work-arounds that make what little control we have immaterial. It's the fucking NRA and their chokehold on Congress. It's the lobbyists and spineless politicians who put money before constituents. It's greed. It's short-sightedness and expediency. It's poverty and lack of education and gangs and ignorance and stupidity and arrogance.

It's death. Ugly, painful, nasty, brutish murder by bullet, and it knows no race, no socio-economic bracket, no gender, no religion, no political party. WE have created this battlefield. WE have condoned this culture. OUR hands are bloody. We cannot point a finger if we do not include ourselves, because we wring our hands and weep and keep these nameless, faceless victims and their families in our thoughts and prayers, and then we go on and live our lives, shifting a bit uncomfortably when we listen to the news, and we shake our heads when we hear about the latest atrocity, and we raise our voices, demanding change.

And nothing really seems to have changed.

I thought we might be finished, when I wrote this essay last year. Not really; I knew there would be more. And there have been. This, gleaned from a Mother Jones article:

·       The massacre in Las Vegas in October – 58 dead, 546 wounded

·       Edgewood  Business Park, MD, 17 days after Las Vegas – 3 dead, 3 wounded

·       A Walmart in suburban Denver, November – 3 dead

·       The massacre at the Texas First Baptist Church, on a beautiful Sunday morning in November, about a month before Christmas – 26 dead, 20 wounded.

·       Rancho Tehama, CA also November – 5 dead, 10 wounded

·       The Pennsylvania Car Wash, January this year (I guess we took a little holiday break from the mass killings) – 4 dead, 1 wounded

·       Stoneman Douglas High School, a Valentine’s Day massacre – 17 dead, 14+ wounded

Since writing last August, we add another 116 murders to the earlier number of 404, which took us through August 2017. Five hundred and twenty – 520 - murders. I’m sure I missed some. Their blood soaks into the ground that rises up in horror. Have we had enough yet? There is a religious tradition – not mine, but the sentiment works here – that the children shall lead us. And they are. Thank God they are! They are organizing and speaking out and demanding that this blood bath end. Now.

Have we had enough, yet> Are we willing to follow our children’s lead, and march with them, organize with them, raise our voices with them? Are we willing to demand that this end now, once and for all?

The Talmud tells us that to take a life is to kill the world entire (Mishna Sanhedrin 4:5 in Sanhedrin 37a. The Quran echoes the sentiment in verse 32 of the fifth Sura: whoever kills a person… it is as though he had killed all men. A few centuries later, John Donne, an Anglican cleric in the 16^th Centuury wrote Any man's death diminishes me.

I fear I have almost disappeared under the weight of all this death.

My Idle Feet Moved

There was no voice,

or perhaps a voiceless voice -

so soft, small,

it could only be heard

just beyond the edges

of hearing.

It sang anyway,

that voiceless voice.

It ran through my body

and burned my hands

that lay idle at my side.

It drummed a beat

that moved my heart,

that moved my feet

in surprising syncopation.

Not a waltz,

nor a tango,

but my idle feet,

idle as my hands -

my idle feet

Moved.

They danced with the

voice that was no voice

that had no sound,

but it sang in my heart

and burned my hands

and beat in steady rhythm

and so I danced.

and sang the song
of the voiceless,

and stumbled on broken bits

of shattered tablets.

For Isaiah 1:17

And so I danced

There was no voice,

Or perhaps there was a

Voiceless voice -

So soft,

so small

it could only be heard

just beyond the borders

of my hearing.

It sang anyway,

that voiceless voice.

It ran through my body

and burned my hands

which lay idle at my side.

It drummed a beat

that moved my heart,

that moved my feet

in surprising syncopation.

Not a waltz

Nor a tango,

but my idle feet,

idle as my hands -

my idle feet

Moved.

They danced with the

voice that was no voice

that had no sound,

but it sang in my heart

And burned my hands

And beat in steady rhythm

And so I danced.

And sang the song
of the voiceless,

and stumbled on broken bits

of shattered tablets.

For Isaiah 1:17

God of the Infinite Ocean

There was a time that I doubted the existence of God.

Hard to believe, I know.  To be totally honest, it was less that I didn't believe in God and more that I wasn't quite sure that God believed in me.  I wanted the God of Infinite Compassion.  What I got instead was God's Evil Twin Brother.  While I had little evidence of God's mercy and love as it played out in my life, I had ample evidence of how God (or His Evil Twin) was really trying to fuck with me.  I knew, from an early age, that I was lost and alone, slightly broken and beyond repair.  It was all God's fault.

It was so much easier to deny God than to face the idea that I had been abandoned.  So much easier to defy God than continue to hunger for a redemption that never came.

And I defied God with a vengeance.  I thumbed my nose at Him, ignored Her, talked trash whenever I could.  Talked loudly, and with passion.  I wanted to hurt God, just as I had been hurt.  I vowed to never sing again--- the one thing I had that had ever brought me a sense of peace and wholeness, the one thing that led me on a shining and sure path to God and grace.  I gave that up in a heartbeat.  It seemed like a good idea at the time.  I drank too much, to drown out the silence of God.  If not alcohol, anything: drugs, shopping, food or sex. I used everything I could to bolster my doubt, to delight in my heresy.

That'll teach Him.  Ha.

I spun through my life like a whirling dervish.  It was a mad dance, and I careened off people and places with equal vigor and disregard.  I reveled in that frenetic, frantic motion, ratcheting up my speed in an ever-widening arc.  I was a ghost in my own life: untouched and disconnected.  Empty.

I carried that little pocket of emptiness with me everywhere.  It was familiar, like a worn old robe that slips on so easily, draping just so against the contours of your body-- covering, concealing, comforting.  I could forget about my war with God and belief and just move faster into the empty, all sensation, devoid of meaning.  One night, one day, again and again, stretching into eternity, pure and empty.  And it was good.

I drank my way, stumbling and reeling, with brief forays into over-indulgence of every kind, to California.  Fueled by the passion of social justice, I went to work for a national poor people's organization. I flirted with the belief that if I acted with integrity, that integrity would transfer to me, by osmosis or proximity or luck.  I wanted to believe I would feel unbroken at last.  I hungered for wholeness, even as I drowned it with alcohol, prayed to a God I was convinced was an illusion, who could not hear and who would refuse me at every turn.

And then I stood in the ocean.

We had taken an Adventure Day, we rabble-rousers, we agitated agitators.  We took a day off from saving the world and drove down the coast from San Francisco to Santa Cruz, to play and cavort and drink.  We basked in the sun, let the salt breeze caress our pale skin, wandered the boardwalk without thought or care.  We laughed easily, and teased mercilessly.  We were released at last from the social and political battles that had defined us and given us purpose for so long.  We devoured the day and wandered into the mist of evening, almost spent.

We ended where the earth ends, where earth and mist and water come together in ceaseless susurration and motion.  No one had ever told me, this Midwestern child, how noisy the ocean could be.  No one had told me how the ocean could excite every one of my senses, make them tingle and feel alive as if for the first time.  

I wandered away from my friends, drawn to the edge of the sea.  I stood there, the water lapping against my ankles, licking up my calves, the salt drenching my skin and tangling in my hair, the moon--- huge and round, the golden light skipping along the waves in a path to eternity--- the moon rising like a promise, surrounded by the laughing roar of water and sky.  I stood there, amid the vast and endless sea, in the gathering night, and met God, at last.

My God: the God of Infinite Compassion, of light and sound and forgiveness.  God of the Ocean.  

It was all so huge, so boundless.  No one had ever told me.  No one told me that, in the face of all that holiness, the truest prayer is not spoken but heard.  And for the first time, I listened.  I quieted and calmed my heart and my fear, and I listened my prayer, a whisper of moonlight and a shout of the tide.  I was so very small against that moon-kissed horizon, and I felt comfort and peace and whole.  

I listened, and my prayer was forgiveness, my prayer was redemption.  My prayer was love.  I stood motionless, exhausted and enthralled.  Empty still, but ready to be filled.  Broken still, but ready to be healed.  I listened a prayer again, and at last, there was love, and God.  

Light enough (to change the World)

Long ago, I quit graduate school to become a political activist.  I had been working on a PhD in Early Modern English History-- Tudors and Stewarts and Puritans, oh my!  I was totally gung-ho, until I realized that almost the only people who care about Early Modern English History are other Early Modern English historians.  I gave up my full Fellowship to–as my parents so eloquently put it– become a professional street walker and erstwhile  beggar.

I was filled with a burning desire to fight the Good Fight.  I would be Don Quixote; but unlike my hero,  I was going to win my battles rather than simply tilt at stray windmills.  Five years and several thousand miles later, having traversed the country a dozen or so times, I quit the national poor people’s organization for whom I had been working, a little bedraggled, a lot broke and much bewildered.  I kept looking around for all that I had accomplished, all that we, as an organization, had accomplished, and saw… the detritus of really good intentions.

We fought to give people a voice, to find strength and power in numbers.  We got a few stop signs put up, a handful of crack houses boarded up or torn down.  We got enough press that Mayors and Police Chiefs learned to take our calls and listen to our demands.  Mostly though— we demonstrated on bread and butter issues that fed our souls and fired us up.  I was so determined to Save The World and Make A Difference, but really, what I was doing was drowning in a sea of windmills and broken lances.

The issues that plagued us twenty-five, thirty years ago, when I was young(er) and rousing rabble eighty hours a week or more— they’ve grown.  The rift between the Haves and the Have Nots is wider and more treacherous than ever.  Poverty.  Ignorance.  Hunger.  Disease.  Global Warming.  Hatred.  War.  Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse?  I wish! They are legion, these Horsemen, and they spread devastation in their wake.  They've had a few millenia to gain in power and scope.  Human history is the story of our inhumanity, a desolate and sere desert of indifference and despair.  My fear whispers for me to throw up my hands in surrender to the enormity of the task, to just walk away.  The need is so great.  I could be devoured by this need that grows daily and swallows hope.

It would be so easy to turn away from this overwhelming and insatiable need.

I could, but I don’t.  Instead, I do what I can.  I light a candle, a flicker of hope in this darkness, the flutter of a butterfly’s wings that becomes a storm.  The task may seem insurmountable, but I can’t avoid it.  The Talmud tells us: “It is not your duty to complete the work, neither are you free to desist from it.” (Pirke Avot, 2:16,15)

My job, as I see it, as I have been taught, is to light the candles and flap my wings.  Again and again and again— because I can, because I must.  Because I change the world every time I do.  And all those candles, mine and yours and on and on— they light the darkness and beat back despair.  They kindle hope:  A stop sign.  A voice.  Hope where there once was none.  It is the best of our humanity.

Are we our brother’s keepers?  Yes.  Having a roof over your head is a right, not a privilege.  Access to medical care, or clean water to drink, or food on the table— all of that is a right, not a privilege.  And no, before some of you get on that high horse of fiscal certitude: no, I don’t have an answer on how to pay for all this. I just know that we must.  It is our humanity at stake, and how could we turn away from that?  How could I look into my son’s eyes if I turned my back on such need? How can I not pass this candle flame to him?

And my son, my fourteen year old— he wants to house the poor and feed the hungry and fight for justice.  He has learned that he has his own candles to light.  He may not solve the riddles of poverty or ignorance or hatred, but he knows, in the face of all that desperate need and billowing despair, he can light a candle or two in the darkness, because he can, because he must, because he, too, can save the world.