In The Land Of The Gun

You don’t live around, and in all honesty once belong to the extreme end of the gun culture without having some basic understanding about how things have gotten this bad. There was time when the general public had enough commonsense to understand pulling any sort of weapon out as a threat was a declaration that society had essentially broken down at that moment. 

Without delving into all the facets of Southern society and their various strengths and faults the overall view was that civility was preferable to some sort of recreation of the Old West. Now there were individuals who were exceptions to this viewpoint, but a seemingly casual visit by a reputable law enforcement figure was usually enough to quash any nasty proto-anarchical tendencies forming. However, decent and mostly sane behavior could usually be traced back to how a person was brought up.  

For various reasons my grandparents raised me from the age of eleven until I reached that nebulous stage called young adulthood. During that time I was exposed to, but did not have any access to weapons greater than a BB gun without my grandfather right beside me. One of the few times my grandfather actually felt the need to ever spank me was the day I showed off his antique double barreled shotgun to a few curious buddies. Concerning the BB gun, I once made the mistake of bragging to him about a bird I shot for a thrill, the calm and cool reasoning my grandfather shared with me about how that was monstrous behavior was in its way far worse than the spanking. Needless to say, I never killed another bird again. Squirrels were a different matter; they could be cleaned and cooked and my grandfather’s neighbor loved to serve them up with rice and butter beans.    

Somewhere in the midst of the Ronny Reagan-inspired rebirth of American patriotism the usual reserved approach to even the appearance of weapons in public went the way of the dodo bird. It is hard to stay reasonable in the face of a massive theatrical onslaught where semi-coherent, quasi-actors battle the latest surge in atheistic communism with humorous one-liners and the most advanced and massive assault weapons their steroid soaked arms can hold.

While there is a question which actually came first, shrill politicians panicking over the Soviets conquering the Western world or the Hollywood action hero going out to battle this political Sauron and his legions of AK-47 carrying orcs. Our elected leaders, always willing to sink to the lowest common denominator of base behavior far faster than any daytime talk show host, continued to stoke the communist fears and promote the idea that the way to defeat the red menace was through armed conflict.

You simple cannot carry on like this without the basic underpinnings of society starting to come apart. Never mind that the Soviet Union collapsed under its own ponderous weight, once fear has been instituted as a national characteristic and the belief that all problems can be solved with the use of a weapon with sufficient caliber all bets are off. People start believing that weapons specifically designed not to outright kill, but shred the bodies of soldiers should be owned by all. That there is a right to the unrestricted purchase of all kinds of ammunition even though you cannot buy one package of extra-strength sinus medicine in a drug store without a record being kept. Or that a person should be immune from prosecution if he kills an innocent bystander because he was “standing his ground.”

From "The State" newspaper:

Is shooting a bystander in South Carolina someone else's fault?

COLUMBIA, SC — Shannon Scott argues he should not be prosecuted for shooting and killing an unarmed Keenan High School basketball player.

In his Stand Your Ground argument in a Richland County courtroom this week, Scott and his attorney, Todd Rutherford, said Scott fired his weapon from his front yard to protect his daughter, who was being chased by people trying to hurt her.

It’s terrible, but Darrell Niles, a 17-year-old innocent bystander, just got in the way, they said.

“He simply ended up being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Rutherford said.

Scott, 36, says he should be granted immunity from going to trial on murder charges. But others told the judge that if Scott isn’t prosecuted, South Carolina will move one step closer to becoming a free-fire zone where people shoot and kill innocent bystanders with impunity.

Read more here: http://www.thestate.com/2013/08/16/2924473/is-shooting-a-bystander-in-south.html#storylink=cpy