I was going to write something about Queen Elizabeth II coming into her own in old age and seniors in the workplace — and I will do that in the next post — but once again I had to interrupt the pleasures of a quintessential spring night (a cup of herbal infusion, my writing, my warm but not-too-warm floral bedding) to weigh in on another mass shooting in the United States. This one — in Uvalde, Texas, a small, working-class city on the Mexican-American border — took the lives of 19 second through fourth graders at Robb Elementary School and two teachers. (The gunman was reportedly killed by police officers.)
Second through fourth graders: Let that sink in. “There are no right words,” the N.B.A. team the San Antonio Spurs said in a statement. No, there are no words at all. How could there be? And yet we are going to hear a lot of words in the coming days, the same words that will result in no action — “thoughts and prayers,” “our hearts are broken,” “Second Amendment rights,” “filibusters” and the famous “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.”
We’ll get to the people who kill people in a minute. But first the guns. Here’s what the Second Amendment says: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” To me it sounds like the new nation — or any free nation — has a right to defend itself. At the time it was ratified in 1791, Americans had just fought a long and costly war with Great Britain, an empire that had no qualms about seizing the property and persons of the colonists. Indeed, it would continue to try to do so until the British were finally repelled in the War of 1812.
But you know what? Poor King George III — whose madness and love of everything from his 15 children to those 13 former colonies is shown in a different, poignant light in PBS’ “Lucy Worsley Investigates” — had been dead since 1820 and he isn’t going to be coming back to take any Americans or their guns. Indeed, I’m quite sure that if you gave the United States to Great Britain for free, the British would say, “no thanks.” They don’t even want Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, to visit for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee. Their attitude toward the Sussexes — and by extension America — is “you made your bed, now lie in it.”
So we don’t need to have more than one gun for each of the 330 million people roughly living in the United States. And we certainly don’t need these high-powered weapons capable of firing many rounds to shoot a bunch of dumb animals. Thus the question remains why do we have these guns? It may be true that “people kill people,” but fewer people would kill fewer people if there were fewer guns. Yes, you can kill people by other means, but no one kills 20 people in a matter of minutes with his bare hands or a knife.
Notice I said “his bare hands.” Let’s talk now about the “people who kill people.” They’re almost always young, male and white. The one in Buffalo was. This one wasn’t. The subway bomber in New York City wasn’t. Nor was the shooter at the California church. But by and large, the shooters are young, male and white. I’ve written extensively on this blog about the effect of white people becoming a majority-minority in the United States in the next decade or so on white nationalists. The white fear of being replaced was the motivation of the Buffalo shooter. We know this, because he wrote a manifesto about this. (If only these people would pour that energy into an education and a career, we might be better off.)
But, as I said, not every shooter is white and not every shooter is that young. So that leaves us with male. I think it’s time we look at men and the world that men have wrought, since they’re the ones primarily in power. It is a world that has given us technological advances but few psychological ones. Indeed, in the past two years alone we’ve had Covid-19 and any number of conflicts, including now the war in Ukraine, and inflation on its way to a recession. Most if not all of this was created and abetted by strongmen for whom the retaining of power is everything.
Would women do any better? There are those women who derive their status from identifying with male authority and bolstering the fragile male, uh, ego. But in general, women tend to be more open-minded and collaborative, if only because the powerless need to work with others and try new ideas. In any event, women are generally less violent than men. And when they do strike back, they’re pilloried at the digital stake. I’m surprised Amber Heard hasn’t been made to wear the Scarlet Letter A — hers for “abuser” — on those courtroom outfits that one New York TImes poster brilliantly labeled “Wall Street Amish”” and climb the scaffold with Hester Prynne.
Why don’t more women pick up a gun? Maybe because they’re too busy getting an education, holding down a job, carving out a career, running a house, taking care of kids and fighting for their rights. Maybe they’re hard-wired not to. But not men. They’ve got all that raging testosterone and apparently all the time in the world. They’re so entitled, so aggrieved, so enraged at any rejection beyond all proportion. The specific motivations and complexions may vary but the basic story is the same, which is the real reason “there are no words.” Because they’ve been all used up, haven’t they?
These raging, hormonal men have got to explode before them implode. So they pick up a gun and shoot a group of kids looking forward to summer break, who never knew their spring would be too brief.