The Weekly Screed (#593)

After every massacre, machismo prevails 
by David Benjamin

BROOKLYN — Predictably, my three most macho high-school friends — Roger, Dan and Jerry — objected fiercely last week when I responded to the Aurora massacre by suggesting ways to shrink America’s vast and bloodsoaked national arms bazaar.

How macho are they? Suffice to say that any one of these men — all Wisconsin natives — could survive a winter in the woods of Iron County with nothing but a toothpick and a pair of swimming goggles. Jerry’s so tough he’d probably emerge in the spring with a potbelly (from feasting on wolverine carpaccio) and a golden tan.

First, let’s consider ol’ Rog. His Facebook page depicts him with a gun. Well, a rifle actually — probably with sufficient firepower (more than .30 caliber, or 7 mm) to swiftly dispatch the dead deer that shares his portrait. Knowing Roger, I know he’d never hit the woods with an AR-15, like the puny theater-sweeper that James Holmes leveled at the crowd in the Aurora Century 16. The AR-15, firing .223 caliber ammo, is useless to bring down a deer, even if you empty a whole clip into the woods. Holmes proved the the AR-15’s lamentable firepower when he hit 70 targets but only scored 12 kills.

I doubt that Rog, an honorable sportsman, owns any automatics or semi-automatics  — an Uzi, say or a Kalashnikov — at all. If he does, I’d guess he keeps this ugly toy locked under glass — like a stuffed tarantula — without a functional firing pin.

Also, I’ll bet Rog has never mail-ordered 6,000 rounds of ammo — or even a thousand — because he’s an actual hunter. If you take pride in your marksmanship, your aim is to get your deer — or moose, or bear, or rhino — with one clean shot, center-mass, right through the ticker. The idea is to drop the noble beast instantly, respectfully and with a measure of mercy. Long ago, I used to hunt squirrel with my dad, who would chide me for wastefulness if I fired four times and came home with only three squirrels.

Jerry, a hunter-gatherer like Roger, lives on a rugged island in Lake Superior and roars around Wisconsin’s highways on a Harley-Davidson hog. Jerry was a 97-pound weakling in junior high, but now he’s the manliest man I know. If he were any more testicular, he’d be wearing a buckskin loincloth and living under a log. Fortunately for humanity, Jerry married a woman who has charms to prevent Jerry’s inner Neanderthal from bursting forth and gnawing the neighbors.

In my idealized vision of her, Janet is sweetly tolerant of Jerry’s deer rifle and his varmint-hunting .22; also, maybe a scattergun for partridge, and a .38-caliber S&W in a padlocked steel box on the top shelf in the garage. And she accepts Jerry’s Harley as a sort of huge, oily binky. But that, I suspect, is Janet’s limit. If ol’ Jer starts stocking up grenades, mortar launchers, .50 cals and nuclear warheads for a siege by the ATF, FBI and DHS, he’ll have to build his bunker on the next island over — without Janet.

Now, Dan, a city boy, says he used to be a policeman. This renders his defense of universal access to assault weapons a little confusing. Like most cops, Dan probably never fired — or even unholstered — his handgun. If he had, he would’ve had to fill out forms for a week and sweat out a board of inquiry. As a cop, he not only feared guns in untrained hands, he knew how easy it is for trained gun-handlers, like the police, to misuse their weapons under stress. I suspect, but don’t know, that Danny, now off the force, no longer goes around with a 9-mm strapped to his hip. If he does, he reserves it to rare occasions, and does so with every intention not to touch it, much less fire it.

None of these three guys is your Tim McVeigh survivalist with a militia troop in the forest. So why do they wax passionate when I suggest that a few of America’s 47,000 gun dealers should suffer a little public censure when someone uses legally bought firearms for mass murder? Do these three prudent gun owners honestly share the wide-eyed, peeled-nerve terror of the National Rifle Association that jackbooted G-men will sweep down — any minute now — in black helicopters to take away everyone’s guns?

If they believe this, here’s the irony: These guys agree — vehemently, and justifiably — that the government is America’s least competent organization. I mean, the government has been trying to take away our marijuana for 40 years. How’s that going?

The government’s been trying to tax our income since 1913. So, in 2010, you know who got away with paying NO INCOME TAX? General Electric, Boeing, Citicorp, Pfizer, Exxon/Mobil, Verizon, News Corp., Google, DuPont, Mattel… The list goes on.

And then there’s immigration. Today, we have 11 million undocumented aliens. In my experience, these folks are easy to spot. They’re fairly large; they walk around in public and shop at Wal-Mart; they mow your lawn and they look, well, Mexican! But we’re not getting rid of them! Here they are, year after year. If the government can’t gather up 11 million illegals, most of whom are right out in the open, how’s it going to even begin to disarm 150 million gun owners who have really good hiding places?

And who’s going to run this government takeover? Not the government. Since 1994, Congress hasn’t passed one gun-control law — or even tried. We’re a nation of bipartisan Billy the Kids. Reversing just one of our cheesecloth gun laws, in one county of one state, would — at this stage — require years of propaganda, billions of dollars and a restoration of civic idealism that takes us back to 1961. During this campaign, every elected official in favor of that one measly gun-safety measure would be, at least, driven from office — and possibly riddled with bullets — by the rabid minions of the NRA.

As I wrote last week about weapons whose sole purpose is to kill lots of human beings as fast as possible, common sense dictates that most people should be prevented from acquiring them. But whatever I say, however often I say it, does not matter.

Roger, Dan, Jerry, why are you arguing at all? It’s bad form. It’s tacky. Makes you look like sore winners — because your side hasn’t just won. You’ve taken the ball and gone home. The all-or-nothing Shiites of the gun lobby — who (trust me) don’t need your help — are in charge. They’re holding a semi-automatic, speed-loaded, 33-bullet, pearl-handled, 9-mm Sig-Sauer to everyone else’s head. We’re not gonna move — we’re not gonna breathe — ‘til they take their thumb off the hammer and say, “OK, scumbag. You can go.”

Even then, we’re going to move real slow, ‘til we’re way out of range.