Have we reached a “tipping point”
in terms of a general social acquiescence in sexual harassment? That is the question raised, and seemingly
answered in the affirmative, by a lengthy article in yesterday’s newspaper. I hope so, but I pretty well exhausted such
meager opinions as I have on the subject last week, and I was hoping to move on
to something more uplifting, engaging, or erudite. Uplift, however, is in somewhat short supply
these days. I know that I am not the
only American patriot who finds himself more or less permanently down in the
dumps as I survey the many tipping points we seem never to be able to reach.
The really big story in yesterday’s paper was about one of these
unreached tipping points. A “crazed
veteran” shot up a Sunday worship service in a Texas church, killing twenty-six
people. Given its setting and
circumstances one might call it a contemporary Slaughter of the Innocents. Among the many victims were young children
and an unborn baby. In terms of the
language of the President’s Inaugural Address, the apt political term might be
“American carnage”. My appellation
“crazed veteran” is intentional and allusive.
I remember it from a headline in a 1949 article about the murder spree
of Howard Unruh in Camden, N. J. This
atrocity made a huge impression on the country at the time, and now seems to be
regarded by criminologists as the initial episode of a new genre of American
mass murder, of which there are too many recent examples to require further
comment, in which mentally disturbed people trained in military combat, or
simply using guns manufactured to pursue or simulate warfare, have committed
mass murders. Unruh’s weaponry, which
will now seem quaintly modest, consisted of a single German Luger pistol and
thirty-three rounds of ammunition. The
Texas gunman had a rapid-firing “military style” killing machine. Had he also had Unruh’s impressive kill
ratio, he would easily have wiped out the entire congregation. The unjust and unhelpful stereotype of the
“crazed veteran” returned in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. The preferred term of art among journalists
now seems to be “ticking time-bomb”.
I suspected this would be no
turning point, but knew so for certain when our President opined from an Asian
press conference that “We have a lot of mental health
problems in our country, as do other countries. But this isn’t a guns
situation. I mean, we could go into it, but it’s a little bit soon to go into
it. But, fortunately, somebody else had
a gun that was shooting in the opposite direction, otherwise it would have been
— as bad it was, it would have been much worse.” Like too many of our President’s
pronouncements this one marshaled faulty syntax and factual error in the
service of a hollow argument. If killing
twenty-six people with a rapid-firing rifle isn’t a “guns situation” what does
a “guns situation” look like? It is
precisely our American “guns situation” that so often renders our American “mental
health problems situation” grotesquely homicidal.
There is no way to eradicate gun
violence in our country, but there are many ways in which it might be constrained. I offered my own suggestion on this blog some
years ago. I suggested that the second
amendment to the Constitution be repealed, conceding the near political
impossibility of what I was suggesting.
This would mean that gun legislation would have to be crafted by our
duly established legislative bodies in the light of actual twenty-first century
social realities. I think there would be
absolutely no chance of prohibition, let alone of “confiscation”; but it might be
impossible, too, to return to the maximalist status quo that has been allowed
by fetish anachronism and an uncertain reading of an obscure gobbet of
eighteenth-century prose.
But lacking any national consensus,
or even the will to seek one sincerely, that is neither here nor there. We are left with the conventional thoughts
and prayers of our political leaders. As
it happens I am in favor both of thinking and of praying, but I find in my own
life that both are rather hard work if taken seriously. I doubt that politicians’ “thoughts and
prayers” have much linguistic precision.
But the desire for linguistic precision may simply be pedantic here. Or is it?
In the final act of this Texas massacre there appeared a “good guy with
a gun”, Stephen Williford, who lived near the church and who wounded and
pursued the bad guy with a gun, Devin Kelley, after Kelley had completed his
slaughter. Williford’s actions
demonstrate extraordinary bravery and initiative. The term “hero” is used so generously in
contemporary journalism that I was surprised not to see it used of him in the
first press reports I saw. What I saw
instead was “Good Samaritan”. Out of
respect to the slaughtered members of the First Baptist Church of Sutherland
Springs, many of whom were probably Bible readers, I recommend going with
“hero”. If you check out Luke 10 you
will find a good guy with pity, a first-aid kit, and two pieces of silver—but
no good guy with a gun.
.
