Gun Totin' Amish Folk

Over the last few weeks, I've been traveling and vacationing, and the combination of time in aircraft and time at the beach has given lots of time to read.

There's been theology, the one Culture novel by the dearly departed Ian M. Banks that I'd not gotten to, and then a sequence of fiction and nonfiction books about the Amish.  The latter were as additional research for an ongoing novel project, and were both helpful and a bit confusticating.

Though I'd done research into Old Order communities as part of my senior undergraduate religious studies seminar at U.Va., that's old data.  I've also been doing online studies of both agriculture and home life, but wanted a bit of literary immersion.

The books...written either by former Amish or in consultation with active members...were helpful in that they will help me create a better mis en scene for the novel, trading the appearance of validity for a much more accurate representation of day to day Amish life.   They were "confusticating" in that they surfaced the wide variance in Old Order practices, which are as wildly different as the practices of other Christian communities.

One thing I didn't expect to encounter: the Amish are frequently gun owners.

They aren't, of course, at all interested in guns for self-defense.  Nor could they care less about the Second Amendment, which exists in its original intent for the purposes of collective defense, no matter what the SCOTUS might say.

An Amish gun...simple shotguns and hunting rifles, mostly, despite the entertainingly absurd picture above...typically serves the purpose of hunting deer or other creatures for food, or for ridding a garden of creatures that are consuming the produce that your family needs to survive.  They are tools, not instruments of violence.

This produces an interesting oddment.  An Amishman may have a shotgun, but if you break into his house, he will not use it to stop you.  The entire fear-driven dynamic of gun ownership in America means nothing to the Amish.

Home on the Range

Spending a full day with one's boys is a gift.  Teen and almost teen they are, and I can see that horizon of their adulthood coming into view in the far distance.

So that my Saturday was spent with them, the guys and me, was most excellent.  It was one of those memorable days, made more so by our delightful night-long bit of paranormal adventure in the darkened 1827 manse.

Amazing, how spending a long night in an intentionally darkened old creaky building can stir the imagination.   That was the stuff of hours, and gave us an hour of great footage for my "ghostbusting" history of that neat but...er..."well-worn" building.

But that was how our day ended.

Our day in Poolesville began with the outing I bid for and won in the church auction.   Shepherded by one of my stalwart Session members, it was a journey to the local chapter of a hunting/fishing conservation organization, just under two hundred acres of gorgeous Maryland countryside.

There, we were to spend time on a range, with a Whitman's sampler of different firearms.  It had been years, almost literally decades, since I'd fired a gun.  As a flagrant liberal, the sort of guy who shows up to the range in a Prius, wearing Chucks and an Ironic Jesus T-Shirt, I suppose it might seem somewhat out of character.  I've preached against gun violence from the pulpit, and I likely will do so again.

But I'm a liberal more than I am a leftist, so I like actually experiencing the reality of things rather than making pronouncements from a foundation of ignorance.

That helps understand them.   It helps, frankly, with the whole "love your neighbor" thing, which is kind of a priority for me.

Plus, I've not forgotten my boy-self.  It is still part of me.  I like fire, and smoke, and things that go boom.  Both of my lads are also boys, and so presented with the opportunity to go target shooting, they were thrilled.

My previous shooting had been, well, of the young and irresponsible kind.  I'd go out into the countryside with friends with my shotgun and a box of shells, we'd find an empty space far away from other human beings, and we'd just blast things.  We'd come back with grins and ringing ears.

But going to the range, well, that was different.  It was entirely volunteer run, but that didn't mean it was slack around the edges.

It was tight.  Once we were on-range, things shifted.  From the moment you arrived to the moment you left, a careful and intentional sequence of protocols established the framework for safety.  Safety posters with the NRA logo emblazoned on them were everywhere, and those rules and regulations weren't just window dressing.  Everyone responsible for the range was attentive to procedure, with the mutual and collegial understanding that these rules existed for a damn good reason.

Identification was required, as were forms establishing both awareness and liability.  Eye and ear protection were mandatory.  The range masters insured that everyone knew when the range was hot or cold, and that all appropriate preparations had been made for the transition between those two states.  The handling of the firearms was carefully observed, particularly with a gaggle of suburban noobs on site.  Nothing was left to chance, because everyone there knew and respected the firearms.  It was meticulous, but it was also mutual, with all eyes attentive for any risks that one set of eyes might miss.

It didn't get in the way of enjoying the afternoon.  Not at all.  It was a total hoot.

It felt free, but not chaotic.

"Well-regulated," one might say.

Words and Pictures and Guns

Over the last few weeks, I've been intermittently playing around with images and text.  I think it was a sign that stirred it, one carried at a gun-rights protest in Austin, Texas.  "The Second Amendment is from God," it said.   I reflected on that concept in my blogging, but it stayed stuck in my mind's craw.  As did some of the other signs and slogans from that demonstration.

Funny thing, about signs.  They point to different things, depending on how you view them.   Like, say, the slogan:  "An Armed Society is a Polite Society."  Gun rights advocates see one thing.  But I see this:

Then there's the old Charlton Heston classic, "From My Cold Dead Hands."  That evokes this:

That Red Dawn fantasy (Wolvereeeenes!) slogan about defending against tyranny?  I see this, because tyranny in the 21st century?  It won't look like Hessians with muskets:

Tell me that a handgun in the house makes you feel safe and protected when your husband is away?

This guy.  Really.  He's into it.  He totally thinks that.

Here, I'm not so sure.  The attitude is totally right, and the gaming reference is perfect, but it feels a bit like it plays off of racist fears.  Which is ironic, but there's only so far one can run with that without actually being that thing.

So I go with this one instead.  Notice how it's the same picture.  Sure, the composition of the first one is better.  But it's the same attitude.  The same spirit.  The same game franchise.  Tell me that doesn't mean something.

And this one, this one I see clearly.  I wish I didn't.

The Toys We Don't Need

As our seasonal festival of consumerist gorging comes to an end, that big pulse of buybuybuy that pushes the retail industry into the black for the year seems to have worked again.  Our houses are once again overloaded with material possessions that, by and large, we don't actually need but have been convinced we require for our happiness.  There's been a peculiar aspect of the surge of purchasing this year, though, one that is beyond me.

It's the great rush of gun purchases following the Sandy Hook shootings.  You remember that, right?  Yeah, I know, so-five-minutes-ago, but it's still having an effect, eh?  And the most immediate effect has been that assault-style rifles...meaning semi-auto, large magazine firearms that evoke actual combat weaponry...have been roaring off of the racks of gun stores this holiday season.  It's so intense that the profiteers are out in force, as folks pick up semi-auto AR-15s and Kalashnikovs and resell them for a healthy margin.   

That's not unusual for interesting new firearms, like the speculative rush on Keltec's KSG home defense bullpup shotgun over the last year, but this is another thing altogether.  This is actually a familiar trend, as the threat of gun regulation following mass shootings tends to lead to hoarding and panic buying.  It's always seemed a bit odd, but we're an odd people.

What has struck me in this current feeding frenzy is how peculiarly it meshes with another truth known to responsible gun owners.   The appearance of a gun is meaningless.  Oh, calibre matters, as do a range of other factors, particularly magazine capacity.  But in terms of lethality, a rifle is a rifle.  Urban leftists who are oblivious to the nuances between weapons look at all the pseudo-mil-spec farkling and tactical doodaddery, and assume that somehow makes a rifle more lethal.

It does not.  

Case in point: the most lethal soldier in the whole of the blood-soaked horror that was the twentieth century was a Finnish sniper by the name of Simo Hayha.  He used a Finnish version of the Mosin-Nagant hunting rifle...bolt action, five round magazine, iron sights...to kill over five hundred Soviets.   It's a sturdy, reliable, low-rate-of-fire weapon.  That rifle was the most lethal individual firearm in the history of modern warfare.  Lord have mercy.  It is also the kind of weapon that would be utterly unaffected by even the most stringent firearm regulations.

Of course, that's a hunting rifle, and not so handy in close quarters.  But for close quarters combat...the type of staving-off-the-serial-killing-burglar-rapist-Democrat fantasy scenario that sells so many American firearms...there's pretty much nothing better than a scattergun.  In the typical home on a typical quarter acre lot, you'd need nothing more.  And there's no better way to put shot on target than something like the humble but utterly reliable Remington 870, which happens to be...if those who I know who know guns are to be believed...a fine hunting shotgun as well.  Again, unaffected by gun regulation.

So here's what I don't get.  

If...as folks who know guns better than I will invariably tell you whenever a mass shooting happens...there is no functional difference in lethality, why the rush on the tactical semi-auto farkle-guns?   These aren't real military-grade assault rifles.  They just pretend to be.  Why the panic buying of guns that are all about ego and threat-display, but are functionally no better at hunting/defending against invading armies/home-defense than far less showy firearms?

Why? Because they are the toys that we want.  They are toys that appeal powerfully to our egos, and to our fears.  They happen to be lethal toys, sure, but they are more about what they whisper in the ear of their owner.  

"Look at how fearsome I am," they say.  "You're strong and powerful," they say.   "You are a warrior," they lie.  "You could kill anyone who messed with you," they say, mixing a dark truth with the fantasy.  Because like all toys, they are mostly about fantasy.  They are all about the fantasy of war, of violence, and of power.  

And as my dear friend Wayne LaPierre put it recently, "Isn't fantasizing about killing people as a way to get your kicks really the filthiest form of pornography?"

Perhaps that's what makes these toys so dangerous.  

Sikhs and Evil Stupid People with Guns

As I walked my dog yesterday morning, I passed a neighbor.

This neighbor lives up the street, part of a family whose daughter was the Safety Patrol when my 14 year old was getting on the bus for the very first time as a kindergartener.  She's in her last year of college this year.  Man, how time flies.   Back then, I hung out a bunch with the dad from the family, a genial, hardworking guy with a warm smile and an easy laugh.

This neighboring family is Sikh.

We smiled, I said hello, and we walked on.  I found myself...yesterday morning...reflecting on how interesting that faith is.

Guru Nanak, who founded the religion, has always struck me as kind of a brother from another mother, Jesus-wise.  The faith is monotheistic, and though it springs from an utterly different culture, it has powerful spiritual resonances with the core message and ethos of Jesus of Nazareth.  Guru Nanak taught a radically egalitarian approach to social standing, which put it into strong tension with the caste system in the Hindu culture from which it sprang.   I'd been doing readings in both Christian and world mysticism for the class I taught this last week, and Sikh teachings are both potently, esoterically mystic and eminently practical and earthy.

As I read the news this morning, I thought again about my neighbor, and my heart and my prayers went out to the Sikh community.  We don't know much about this particular "shooter" yet, but from what has been gleaned, it appears the reprehensible mass murders in a Wisconsin gurudwara may have been the work of someone who mistook Sikhs for Muslims.

If they'd been Muslim, it would have been no less horrific.  There is, however, the probability that this wasn't just a massacre, but a massacre undertaken by someone too hatefully ignorant to realize he wasn't even murdering the people he thought he was murdering.  Not that he wouldn't have hated them anyway.

From what is trickling out this morning, he was apparently thrown out of the military for misconduct, which isn't surprising.

What also isn't surprising is that he had easy access to firearms.   If the criminally insane can get guns, why shouldn't evil stupid people who are an embarrassment to the uniform?

Lord, have mercy.

A Second Amendment Remedy to Gun Violence

As the echoes of the Tucson shooting still ring in our ears, one thing is completely and abundantly clear.  When it comes to managing America's completely insane approach to firearms, ain't nuthin' gonna happen.  It never does. 

You can slaughter little Amish children.  You can kill dozens of high schoolers at Columbine.  You can mow down scores of promising young college students at Virginia Tech.  You can kill Federal Judges and patriotic little girls born on September 11, 2001.

What you'll get is nothing, nothing but the spokesperson for the National Rifle Association, clucking about how now is not the time, and how we should just be praying for the families.  You'll get inaction on the Hill, and in state capitols.  The echoes of gunfire will fade, until maybe six months from now, when a massacre large enough to catch our jaded eyes happens again.  Not that it doesn't always happen, many times a day, as a Vietnam-wars-worth of Americans die every year on the receiving end of a bullet. 

Gun control, as an expression of managing a murder rate that is the worst in the developed world, just is not going to occur.  Our political culture lacks the courage for it, because too many Americans own firearms and don't want to be told that somehow they are bad for doing so.  Those sane enough to see this for the problem it is might plead and reason, and point to the painfully obvious statistics, but that hasn't worked.  The essence of the debate hasn't changed since I was a middle-schooler, and still the massacres come, and the blam, blam, blam of individual shootings continue.  Kill, Equivocate, Forget, Repeat. 

Thirty-thousand dead American citizens annually means this is 1) a major issue and 2) a national disgrace, but we're just plain stuck.

So how to get out of this?  Reason isn't enough, evidently.  To steal the recent rhetoric of insane ultraconservative Sharron Angle, I think we need a Second Amendment remedy.  No, that doesn't mean opening up on NRA headquarters with that M134 you bought for home defense, as satisfyingly ironic as that might be.

What would seem more constructive is to approach regulation of firearms from an originalist Second Amendment perspective.  As Tea Party folks are fond of telling us, the purpose of the Second Amendment is national defense.  Period.  It does not, in it's plain text reading, exist so that we can get us some venison.  It does not exist so that we can menace folks with the threat of a buttload of birdshot if they don't get the [heck] offa our property.

It exists so that the citizens of our great Republic can be prepared and ready to defend the Republic from invasion and threats to our constitutional liberties.


So far, this is all Red State Red Meat.    Well, I'm just getting rolling.

If you are an American, you have the right to possess a firearm.  But it's more than a right, about which you selfishly whine.  It's a duty.  It's the duty to use that firearm in defense of this country should the need arise.   If you are unwilling to fulfill that duty, inadequately trained to fulfill that duty, or mentally incapable of fulfilling that duty, then you should not be in possession of a firearm.

What?  You don't love America enough to stand up and defend her in time of crisis?  You gonna go there, son?

I thought not.

My humble legislative proposal...which will go no further than this blog and the three people who read it...would be to register firearms and owners.  Further, I'd require gun owners to receive both training and clearance.   But we're not calling this gun control.  Of course not.  This isn't about law enforcement.  It would not be viewed or described as licensing of a semi-illicit activity.

Instead, it seems more...um...constitutional...to have the registration to be tied in to the D.O.D.  Specifically, through the newly formed Homeland Defense Reserve sub-agency of the National Guard.  How can our men and women in uniform call on patriotic American gun-owners to stand with them in a time of national crisis if they don't know who they are or how to reach them?  So of course you need to register, and have your weapon registered.  That data would be shared with DHS and law enforcement, of course.  After the lessons we learned on September 11th, you can't have it any other way.

With registration and the background checks that insure your preparedness to protect the Homeland would come training.  It would have to be renewed every other year, just to keep your skills honed.  That mandatory training in firearms use and basic squad tactics, of course, would be conducted through a public/private partnership between the HDR and the National Rifle Association.  'Cause you know, that means some serious new revenue and membership opportunities.

This would weed out the crazies and the criminals and those unpatriotic enough to not be willing to prepare themselves to protect America.  It would serve the purposes of national defense and law enforcement.  And it would...I am convinced...cut down on the shameful slaughter that makes us a global laughingstock. 

Is it going to happen?  Goodness no.  No more than the next stage, which would be using such a plan as part of the process of standing down our imperial military to levels more befitting a constitutional republic. 

But it is, as Shaggy might say, so crazy it just might work.  If only we'd try it.

Toy Guns

This last weekend, I served as the Party Bus Dad for a minivan full of boys. My little guy was turning 10, and rather than one event, he wanted a smorgasbord of a party, a great heaping tapas plate of fun.

Stop number one on this multi-event delight involved unloading my bad self and six fired-up pre-teens at the local laser tag emporium. Both of my boys, and their dad, are most fond of laser tag. It's a hoot. The tactics and strategery of simulated combat are exhilarating. It doesn't hurt that we're not half-bad at it. Of the 45 players in the arena that afternoon, my oldest son rocked the highest score, my little guy came in slightly behind, and yours truly...who specializes in lower-scoring base defense...came in third. Our team, "Team Green," managed to completely rout our opponents. Of course, they were mostly panicked clusters of eight year olds whose grasp of close quarters combat tactics were woefully lacking, but why let a little detail like that dilute the glory? Hoooah!

That fascination with things martial extends deeply into the games my boys play. And, frankly, the games I play. Unlike many progressive parents, who hover and micromanage and try to get their boys to play with happy homemaker sets, I'm quite happy to have my pups charging around with giant squirtguns, or firing Nerf projectiles at one another. I, too, was once a boy. So long as they're aware of the difference between toys and real weapons, aware of the deep difference in cost between play combat and the blood and muck of real war, they know what they need to know.

I do wonder, though, just how many Americans grasp that difference. That wondering particularly applies to members of our Tea Party movement. One of the more dominant threads in American conservatism is the Second Amendment thread. It asserts, as was the intent of the folks who wrote that portion of our constitution, that unrestricted ownership of firearms is necessary if citizen soldiers are to be prepared to defend our nation. Every once in a while, one of the more...um...earnest folks who are affiliated with that movement will darkly grumble about the need for us to have that Glock in our dresser drawer to throw off the yoke of tyrants.

I understand that desire to defend the homestead and the nation. I also understand that fascination with weapons. What I can't quite understand is how you can 1) support gun ownership on the basis of the second amendment and 2) be utterly and uncritically supportive of our current approach to national security. America's warfighters are, by the standards of militaries throughout history, without parallel. Our immense and sprawling defense budget may include a whole bunch of waste, but it has also produced the single most ferocious fighting force in human history.

Because of our engagement in Afghanistan, that budget is increasingly dedicated to developing tools for use against insurgent populations and local militia. Sophisticated drones and Joint Direct Attack Munitions are really rather effective at disposing of little groups of human beings bearing small arms. We're a very short step away from a revolution in military robotics, one that is being actively funded and pursued and could be the biggest game-changer since iron swords sliced through bronze shields like they was buttah. The fantasy of local militia being able to put up any kind of meaningful resistance against an unfettered mid-21st century army is just that. A fantasy.

What I just can't quite figure out is how folks who ferociously proclaim that they own small arms because they don't trust the government to provide health care are simultaneously eager to provide that same government with the most impressive destructive tools in the history of humankind.

Human beings are strange, strange creatures.