I'm sick and tired of writing about guns

One more story about dead bodies and the pieces of metal that cause them

Did you see the story about the Florida boy who was shot and wounded with a real gun as his father drove him down a street so he could take pot-shots at people with his paint-ball gun? 

Yes, you read that right.  The boy, age 10, begged his father to drive him past a neighborhood house where kids had gathered on Sunday so he could shoot at them with his paint-ball gun.  So the father, a 26 year old resident of Opa-locka, a town 15 miles west of Miami, just went ahead and did it.  He put his son in his van and drove him around the neighborhood.  The boy was leaning out the side door of the van firing his paint-ball gun when an adult who was outside his home with some children thought they were under attack from a drive-by shooting and fired back.  He struck the boy with his first and only shot, and the boy fell out the door of the van, where he was promptly run over by his father. 

The father picked him up and put him back in the van and drove him home and the mother called 911. The boy was taken to a hospital where he is recovering from his gunshot wound and from being run over.  The father has been arrested on child endangerment “with great bodily harm.”  The man who shot the boy with the real gun has not been arrested.  “He is not the bad guy,” said Opa-locka police when questioned by a local TV news crew.

Not the bad guy. He shot a 10 year old boy with a handgun and he’s not the bad guy.  Only in America, huh?

It was only one of three shootings in the greater Miami area over the Memorial Day weekend.  Early Sunday morning, three people shot up a crowd standing outside a banquet hall in Miami, killing two and wounding more than 20.  There have been no arrests and the shooters are at large.  On Monday night, another shooting took place outside an upscale steakhouse in Miami Beach.  Two people were injured.  Two members of a prominent Florida rapper’s entourage have been arrested in the shooting.

The New York Times featured a front-page story today titled, “What Drives a Gunman to Act?  Does it Matter?”  To be brief, the story’s conclusion was no, it doesn’t.  The story discussed the mass shooting at the supermarket in Boulder, Colorado two months ago, where 10 people were killed, and the recent shooting at the FedEx warehouse in Indianapolis in which eight were killed.  Also mentioned was the shooting in San Jose, California, a week ago, where a gunman killed nine of his fellow workers at a light rail yard.  In none of the three recent shootings are the motives of the shooters clear, nor according to the Times story, do the motives of the shooters matter. 

Oh, there are plenty of shooters around with plenty of motives:  hatred of the “other,” for example, whether the “others” are Latino gay men in a bar and disco, or Latino moms and their kids walking around a Walmart, or Asian women in a massage parlor, or Jewish worshipers at a Pittsburgh synagogue, or Black men jogging through a suburban neighborhood.  And sometimes the motive can be as mundane as hatred by a husband for a wife, or by a son for a mother.  One-one-one run of the mill murders count, too, and there are far more of them every single day than there are the kinds of mass shootings that get all the attention in the press.

Motives may matter, or sometimes not, but there’s one thing for sure:  dead bodies do matter, and so do the guns that kill them.  The fact that a father in Florida standing outside his own home with his children was armed meant that he was able to shoot his gun at a threat that turned out to be a 10 year old boy with a toy.  It also meant that the boy was wounded…and could have been killed.  The dead bodies outside the restaurant and party facility in Miami wouldn’t be there if the people doing the shooting weren’t heavily armed.  Anyone with a driver’s license who doesn’t have a record as a felon can walk into a gun store and buy a firearm in Florida.  The state is overrun with guns and ammo from the panhandle to the Keys.  So is practically every other state in the country with a very few, very rare exceptions.  There are more firearms in this country than there are citizens, a fact I find astounding every time I write it, and I’ve written it more times than I care to remember.

I’m sick and tired of writing about guns and the people who use them to kill other people.  This would be a much better country without guns and bullets.  It would also be a much better country without the motives that cause people to use guns, but then people don’t need motives to kill other people.  All they need is guns.