At the Point of Guns – My Limited Experience Projected On the American Landscape in 2022
I have bad memories of the YMCA in Clinton, Iowa, so that means I was younger than 10. One was swimming classes. The pool room was so big and noisy and smelly and I hated the feeling of chlorinated water in my nasal passages, and I never learned how to not have that happen in the pool. I remember nose plugs, but they never seemed to work for me. I don’t know why. The water hurt my eyes, too, so I kept them closed. So I was always blind, which is not a good feeling. The other was at the shooting range. Is it possible it was indoors? That’s what I remember. As much as my best friend and I played “Army” and “Civil War” and “Cowboys” in our backyards, I did not like the real thing.
When we moved to Mankato when I was 10, I soon joined the Boy Scouts (hear Episode 3 for an eventful canoe trip), and I’m sure I had at least one session at the shooting range, but those memories have faded. In high school, at the height of the Viet Nam war, I followed the footsteps of my father and brother and basically became an unofficial pacifist. I eventually drew a high draft number and never had to face the decision to serve up close, and the war started winding down soon after.
After college and suffering a self-inflected failure in applying for Medical School (maybe a future episode), I drifted into some pretty bad jobs. That first winter was probably the worst year of my life, all told, as I ended up trading my saxophone for a ratty VW bug without heat or brakes, working the overnight shift in a 7-11 with frozen water pipes (no toilets) and an 8-store group manager that didn’t like me, and getting robbed at gunpoint twice in 7 nights. This resulted in several instances of being a law enforcement “asset”, the first being a major shoplifting event from the neighbors 3 doors down from the store. I learned a lot about being a witness, about the slow wheels of justice, and about how I react to a sudden, but fleeting, threat to life and limb.
I’m still wondering what causes (mostly) young people to fall into behavior that threatens someone else with terror, and, to a lesser frequency, threatens their own life with incarceration and all the risks to quality of life that comes with it. It’s probably worse now that it was back then, in the aggregate. And the whole country is fixated on the subject as much more powerful guns than I faced are used to make headlines and force whole cities to their knees to pray. Why has America lost 22,000 to guns in the first 6 months of 2022, on a pace almost identical to 2020? How do powerful weapons of war end up in the hands of so many willing to cause terror and mayhem? How do so many end up in states and cities that DO try to control them? Why do so many Americans resist efforts to stop that from happening, or revere them to the point of fetish? How do we stop a new Civil War from happening? I wish I had answers, but I’ll do some research and ask some more questions.
