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GUNS ARE THE PROBLEM [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-10-30
I spent most of my life in Pittsburgh’s East End.
The first four years of my life, we lived on Stanton Avenue, in East Liberty, in the house where my father grew up.
We moved because the neighborhood was going downhill.
An exhibitionist would stop by of an evening, when mom was washing the dishes and display his parts by our back gate, where she could see them.
I suppose there were gang fights in our neighborhood.
They may have fought in the alley behind our house.
I wouldn’t have known. My bedroom was at the front of the house. I am a very sound sleeper.
This was back in the days when gangs fought each other hand to hand, like the Jets and the Sharks in “West Side Story”. The deadliest weapon was the switchblade. An experienced fighter could kill an opponent with a switchblade. But he would not harm bystanders, or people in a nearby house.
Forty years later, I was back in East Liberty. I loved everything about the neighborhood, except the gang fights.
I never saw them, but I heard them at night. Sometimes it sounded like the gunfight at the OK Corral down on Penn Avenue.
I found spent shells on the street on my way to the bus. There was a bullet hole in the windshield of my old Chevy.
The problem wasn’t the gangs. There were gangs in East Liberty back in the fifties.
Back in the fifties, the gangs didn’t have guns.
Living in a fourth floor apartment, I would have been in no danger if two young fools had a knife fight in the street in front of my building. Stray knives are not a problem.
Stray bullets are.
I would hear a shootout, and hope nothing came through my window. I would get the cats off the windowsills, just in case some trigger happy fool decided they were targets.
Gangs aren’t the problem.
Guns are the problem.
The Second Amendment has been the law of the land for more than two hundred years.
When I was in the fourth grade, our teacher explained the Bill of Rights to us. When she came to the second, she said, simply, that our country had once been a lot wilder and woolier, which we all knew, because westerns were very popular back then. It didn’t mean that you could own a tommy gun, and the boys should stop making tommy gun noises now.
In those days people didn’t feel the need to own private arsenals. It was agreed that you should lock your doors at night and, possibly, have a dog to protect the house. (We had poodles.)
In those days, the National Rifle Association was a sportsmen’s club, that had classes in gun safety and convinced Congress to make it illegal to own a machine gun.
Public patriots waved the flag, quoted the founding fathers, and praised their mother’s apple pie. They didn’t talk about guns, let alone brandish them in public.
How that has changed.
The mass shooter in Maine was able to murder 18 people, because he had a gun.
He had combat training. It’s possible he might have killed two or three people fighting hand to hand.
It’s also possible he wouldn’t have killed anyone, and that someone would have been able to talk him down, or knock him down and sit on him.
But we have decided that any lunatic should be able to buy any kind of gun he likes.
So, every few weeks, we hear about another mass shooting. Children have active shooter drills in schools. Politicians offer thought and prayers.
They assure us we don’t need more gun laws. Because guns aren’t the problem.
Except that they are.
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