Another Mass Shooting

by Tom Shafer

Updated December 26, 2018

This writing addressed the November 7, 2018, mass shooting at Borderline Bar and Grill in Thousand Oaks, California.

I hate this title — though I know I shouldn’t.

When I was teaching, my kids would frequently say stuff like this.  They would say, “I hate this assignment” or “I hate winter” or “I hate school lunches.”  Of course, being a protector of language, without fail I would respond, “Don’t hate something that can’t hate you back.  That’s a terrible waste for such a strong emotion.  Save your hatred for people — especially people who deserve it.”

If you haven’t gathered already, I’m a pretty sarcastic guy, and my students knew it as well — and they also knew I was kidding about the hatred stuff.  In fact, I established then supervised for many years our school’s peer mediation program.

So, my hatred of this title is misguided.  Following my own logic, I should then hate the shooter.  But that doesn’t feel entirely right either.  He was a Marine who served a tour in the perilous Helmand province of Afghanistan.  Law enforcement had some interactions with him, including an episode this past spring that prompted mental health professionals to evaluate him.  Though it was noted that he might be suffering from PTSD, he was not deemed a danger to himself or anyone else and could not be taken to a mental health facility for a full workup.  Reportedly, his mother, whom he lived with, was also concerned about him and supposedly “feared what he might do someday.”  Obviously, he was suffering from some sort of mental illness and needed help.

Okay, so maybe I should hate the extended magazine that permitted him to fire off  as many as forty rounds beyond the normal ten held in the barrel (plus one in the chamber) of his Glock 21 .45-caliber handgun.  But again, my anger would be misdirected, this time toward an inanimate object, one that is already banned in California.

But with thirteen people dead (including the shooter), I want to hate something.  Not even two weeks ago, eleven parishioners were gunned down in a synagogue near Pittsburgh by another disturbed individual, this one using a once-illegal assault rifle.  Before that, it was Parkland.  Then Sutherland Springs.  Then Las Vegas.  Then Orlando.  Then San Bernardino.  Then Newtown.  Then Aurora.

Even though all of those shootings involved assault-style weapons, I know I can’t hate them.  Not just because of the whole inanimate object argument.  After all, assault rifles were developed (first by the Germans) during WWII to do just one thing: kill humans.  And they are very effective and efficient at doing that.  So on the battlefield in the hands of a well-trained soldier, they make perfect sense.  But on the streets of America, they don’t.  So how did that happen?

Politicians, that’s how.

Now I know what, or whom, to hate.

I hate politicians.  I hate politicians who bow down to irresponsible organizations like the NRA and refuse to agree to common sense gun regulations: extended background checks; closing gun show loopholes; reconstituting bans on assault weapons, bump stocks, and high-capacity magazines.  I hate politicians who give lip service to the mental health and domestic violence issues regarding gun ownership — then punt them away.  Just because.

I am a gun owner, and I do enjoy shooting them when I get the opportunity.  But I am also practical.  Even though gun ownership is a right protected by the second amendment, it is a limited right that should be treated more like a privilege — as was intended by our squirrel-shooting, flintlock-owning founding fathers who certainly could not have foreseen the killing machines being developed today.

All of that said, I still hate my title.  And, what I hate about it most is that I know that I will have to use it again.

(For another of my writings about the gun issue, please read “Hi, America.  I wanna buy a tank” found under the Not Politics?! menu, that one written after the shooting at Marjory Douglas Stoneman High School in Parkland, Florida.)