The American horror story

I’m not going to dignify or add to the creep’s burgeoning right-wing rock stardom by using his name. Nor am I going to take you through the details you already know so well of what he did.  That such a recounting isn’t necessary tells us all we need to know about how ordinary this American horror story has become.

It isn’t only the verdict in Kenosha, Wisconsin, that’s horrific.  It’s what the verdict of innocent on all counts endorses:  guns.  Let’s take a look at a single day in America, the day the jury returned its verdict.  On Friday, November 19, 46 Americans were killed by gun violence, according to the Gun Violence Archive (GVA). 

This is the way the GVA reported a murder-suicide: “Kierra Lasha Johnson, 20, of Coffeeville and TraDarrian Dwight Crump, 20, of Grenada were found Friday in the Avalon area of Carroll County near Mississippi 7. The two were dating, said Carroll County Chief Deputy Adam Eubanks.” 

In another gun violence incident near Macon, Georgia on November 19 reported by the GVA, “18-year-old Montaveous Raines was shot and killed at the church on Greentree Parkway in Lake Wildwood.”

The death of one man and grievous injury of another were reported this way by the GVA on November 19: “Memphis Police are searching for four suspects after a deadly home invasion overnight.  Officers were called to the scene in the 2700 block of McMurray Street, not far from Lamar Avenue and I-240, just after 12:45 a.m. Friday. They found two men shot.  Both victims were taken to the hospital in critical condition, and one died from his injuries.”

On and on and on the reports of gun violence go, displayed across my laptop screen like a tale from some dystopian nightmare.  But they’re not a nightmare, the 46 people who were killed with firearms last Friday.  They are the flesh and blood of our fellow citizens who are no longer among us in America, the only country on earth with more firearms than citizens.

In Kenosha, Wisconsin in the summer of 2020 two people were killed and one was injured by bullets fired from an AR-15 assault-style rifle.  If it has been said once, it has been said 100 times that no one would have died that night if a gun had not been brought to the Black Lives Matter protest against the shooting of Jacob Blake, who was shot 7 times and paralyzed by a Kenosha police officer.

There is America’s horror story writ large:  the shooting of one man led quickly to the shooting of three more men.  It’s so ordinary, just typing these sentences feels effortless.  I could spend hours every day writing about gun violence.  It’s the story that never goes away.  Every day, or almost every day, a woman is killed with a gun in an incident of domestic violence.  Take the gun away, and the woman would still be alive.  Take the gun away from the church in Macon, Georgia, and the young man who was shot would still be alive. 

Deaths due to gun violence wouldn’t happen if the guns were not present.  It’s much, much harder to kill someone without a gun.  If the man who shot the other man to death at the church in Macon, Georgia, hadn’t been carrying a gun, he would have had to stab, or strangle, or beat the other man to death, or run over him with his car.  But he didn’t have to do those things because he had a gun, which meant that all he had to do was point it and pull the trigger.  Less than a second later, the man he shot was dead.  Bam.  Killed just like that.

The Second Amendment wasn’t written into the Constitution to give people the right to walk around carrying guns so they can shoot a squirrel crossing their path, or a pigeon out of a tree, or a tin can perched on a brick wall, or a stop sign, or somebody’s mailbox.  You can do all those things with a gun, but that’s not why people buy and carry guns.  The only reason to have a gun is to be able to inflict death and bodily harm.  It’s what guns do.  They don’t do anything else.  In fact, it’s not possible to use a gun for a truly “safe” reason.  Even target practice is practice for killing human beings.  It is no mistake that the targets used at most gun store firing ranges and so-called “recreational” firing ranges are silhouette targets depicting the human form.  People shoot at such targets to achieve skill at using a gun for its purpose:  killing human beings.

That’s what the “right to keep and bear arms” is for.  Nothing else.  It is why guns are banned from places like the Congress of the United States and the Supreme Court of the United States, because the people who work in those places don’t want the things that make it easy to kill them on the premises.  The Supreme Court may rule in an upcoming case that the Constitution gives Americans a “right” to walk around carrying a gun, but the justices, all nine of them, don’t want to look down from their perches and think that someone in the courtroom might be “bearing arms” that could be used to shoot them. 

I hope Justices Thomas and Alito and Barrett and Gorsuch and Kavanaugh and Roberts think about the “right” they may contemplate conferring upon American citizens to carry guns with them outside the home.  I hope they consider that Walmart shoppers and McDonalds burger buyers and pharmacy patrons and everybody else might have the same worries they do about allowing people to walk into a place of business -- in the Justices’ case the Supreme Court -- carrying loaded guns.  Perhaps they should consider that what’s good enough for the Supreme Court should be good enough for all.

But they face an inexorable problem: rights are only limited by reason, but there is nothing reasonable about owning and carrying a gun except to use it for the purpose for which it was designed:  to kill.  

The American horror story is a perfect circle:  we manufacture and sell to each other the things that we use to kill each other.  The vaunted “right” under the Second Amendment is actually two rights:  the right to own the gun that takes a life contains the right to have your life taken by a gun.  You don’t get the one without the other.