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Gun Sickness

Posted December 15th, 2012 by Lesley Hazleton

Guns make me sick.  Literally, sick.

At the sight of one, I get this queazy feeling in the pit of my stomach. I feel kind of faint. I want to throw up.  I want to be anywhere but where I am at that moment, to put as much distance as I can between myself and the weapon.

In this, I am no coward. I am simply sane. I am damned if I’ll show that I’m intimidated, but I’d be crazy not to be. Because whether a gun is holstered at the waist of a policeman, held pointed at me by a solider at a checkpoint, brandished by a proud collector, or flashed by a thug outside a nightclub, it says one thing and one thing only: “I can kill you.”

So with all the years of psychology behind me, with all my “experience” with guns (the sound of a bullet whistling past your ear is not one you ever forget), why do I still not understand why others don’t react this way? Why do I not understand that guns evidently turn many people on, and make them want to be the ones doing the killing?

What am I to make of a Facebook “friend” who declares herself a peace activist, quotes Rumi, and then obscenely argues that if only the teachers at that Connecticut elementary school had been armed… ? Or of another self-declared Facebook peacenik who maintains that she is “neither for nor against guns”?  That’s some kind of peace on earth. Forget good will to all men. Let alone women and children.

Over half the American population agrees with the National Rifle Association’s solipsistic dictum that “guns don’t kill, people do.” As though guns had any other purpose.  The same majority agrees with the argument that “incidents” like the Connecticut elementary-school shooting — only one of an average of twenty such mass shootings each year in the US — are not a gun-control problem, but a mental-health one. And in a way they don’t realize, they are right.

The United States does indeed have a severe mental-health problem, but it’s not a matter of a sick individual here and there.  It’s something far worse.  It’s a mass psychosis, in which this country places gun protection above the protection of human life.

Guns are the sacred cow of American politics.  Could there be a falser god?

Effective gun control is a political no-go.  And even if it were possible, it wouldn’t be enough. All guns are initially made and sold legally. And the guns used to kill twenty 6- and 7-year-olds and their teachers in Connecticut yesterday were bought by and legally registered to the shooter’s mother — who was his first victim.

Here’s what we really need to do:

We need to amend the Second Amendment.   We need to limit the “right to bear arms.”

And we need to brand the NRA a terrorist organization, one that aids and abets terrorism.  The terror on the faces of the surviving children being led out of their school yesterday testifies to that.

gun sickness

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File under: ugliness, US politics | Tagged: Tags: Connecticut, gun control, mass psychosis, mental health, NRA, Sandy Hook, Second Amendment, terrorism | 13 Comments
  1. Bushra Zafar says:
    December 15, 2012 at 8:44 pm

    I am so sick of all the stupid playing politics with people’s lives. this is not a rights issue. this is a common sense issue. If they want the right to bear arms then we should go back to the arms that were about when the constitution was written.

  2. saheemwani says:
    December 15, 2012 at 9:58 pm

    Thank you Lesley. I’m sharing this post on Facebook. One tight slap for the gun-defenders.

  3. Lynn Rosen says:
    December 16, 2012 at 9:13 pm

    Thanks for your reasoned post. Would that the rest of the world could see this through your clear eyes.

  4. Tea-mahm says:
    December 17, 2012 at 11:08 am

    Thank you for your wise words, Lesley! Also, I think we need to mention making it easier for families with mentally sick kids to get help. And prayer for the families. T’m

  5. zummard. says:
    December 17, 2012 at 3:30 pm

    Many of us feel more than sick to mention in words. I cannot imagine how the parents and relatives of those children will ever recover from such a tragedy.
    In my view, the real culprits are the (weapon)gun-manufacturing businesses. As someone said aptly, ‘so many guns are already in the hands of people in the U.S. that it is not possible to eliminate them anymore.’
    The manufacturers have sold so many to the rest of the world that we will never know how many innocent lives have been cut short by the guns that have travelled all over the world.
    WHEN WILL THEY EVER LEARN? WILL THEY EVER LEARN?
    When will their greed for making and selling weapons be satiated?
    And please don’t give me the line, Guns don’t kill. People do. Of course guns in the hands of people KILL. That is their only function.
    I don’t know if I am making any sense here – the world is an insane place right now.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      December 17, 2012 at 8:03 pm

      Thank you for prompting me: I just posted video of Marlene Dietrich singing Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All The Flowers Gone” with that famous refrain. — L.

      • zummard. says:
        December 18, 2012 at 4:19 am

        Thanks. I wish the whole world would sing it all together. I ask all those whose hearts have been touched by this violence to pray for a world where the sanctity of innocence is respected and sacredness of places such as schools, homes and places of worship is preserved.

  6. Joan Clark says:
    December 19, 2012 at 2:35 pm

    There is no need to amend the constitutional right to bear. Arms. Pass legislation to ban civilian sale of multishot magazine ammunition. If a mentally disturbed person only had access to single shot guns, knives, etc, fewer people would be killed.

  7. Jerry M says:
    January 15, 2013 at 11:11 am

    Except for the part about NRA being a terrorist organization (they aren’t they are a lobbyist for the gun manufacturers), I agree with everything else in the post.

  8. Fish Jones says:
    January 17, 2013 at 12:04 am

    There are so few hobbies that carry the feeling behind owning, caring for, and shooting a gun.

    So many people die every day–yet guns are what people whine about.

    Cancer and other diseases takes years to kill and is degrading, expensive, and exhausting. You become your disease. A gun accident has much less chance of that.

    If Sandy Hook had been a bus+train= exact same casualties, no one outside of Sandy Hook would care 2 months later.

    Yes, guns can sicken you. As someone with really bad phobias, I get that, but it’s just a gun.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      January 17, 2013 at 10:57 am

      What exactly IS “the feeling behind owning, caring for, and shooting a gun”? And what makes it a “hobby”?

    • Jerry M says:
      January 20, 2013 at 10:30 pm

      Why are we so willing to control alcohol consumption in order to prevent possible deaths but unwilling to control gun use? We have a gun violence problem that is an embarrassment (if only we were capable of embarrassment).

  9. Jerry M says:
    January 20, 2013 at 10:27 pm

    I will never know why all sorts of restrictions are allowed on freedom of speech (the first amendment) but to touch the second is considered in impossibility. The US has gun violence rates appropriate to a third world country. For some reason many Americans cannot be shocked into sanity when they are read the statistics.

Caution: Democracy at Play

Posted March 14th, 2011 by Lesley Hazleton

When a political activist friend who runs an extensive email distribution list sent out this photograph over the weekend, many on her list mistakenly understood that she’d said it was taken in the US Congress and rushed to correct her.  In fact it was “only” Connecticut’s House of Representatives. The trouble being that it might be too representative:

Note that in addition to the two solitaire-playing legislators sitting side by side (the irony of that!), the guy sitting in the row in front of them is on Facebook, while the guy behind is checking out baseball scores.

The photograph is indeed real.  And old. It was taken on August 31, 2009, in the final session on the Connecticut budget, as Minority leader Larry Cafero (R – Norwalk, standing at right) was holding forth at length.  Jack Hennessy (D-Bridgeport,  center foreground) at least issued a letter of apology to his constituents, and has doubtless since undergone solitaire detox.

But as my friend noted in a follow-up email, at a time when our screens are full of images of the tsunami in Japan, when nuclear reactors there are on the verge of meltdown, when Ghadafi is bombing his own citizens in Libya, when Saudi Arabia has sent troops into Bahrain, when the Supreme Court has given corporations the right to fund US elections, and, as they say, much much more, this photograph is what the politically concerned people on her list chose to get really worked up about.

She wondered angrily if this reaction was a sign of paralysis, of feeling helpless to do anything when it feels like the world is in free-fall.  “So many of you put your good brainpower to work to let me know that this is not the U.S. legislature,” she said.  “Did I imply that it was?  Sorry.  Regardless of whether it is state or federal, the state of the political sphere is beyond belief.”

She’s right to be angry.  People in the Middle East and elsewhere are literally dying for a taste of democracy, while here in the US we take it so for granted that half the electorate doesn’t even bother to vote.  And quite clearly, dumb voters elect dumb representatives.  I mean, they could at least have been playing chess…

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File under: US politics | Tagged: Tags: Bahrain, budget debate, chess, Connecticut, Ghadafi, House of Representatives, Japan, Saudi Arabia, solitaire, Supreme Court | Be the First to leave a comment

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