Democracy Rules

Since my knee surgery two weeks ago, I’ve had a really hard time sleeping through the night. It’s either pain, muscle cramping or simply because I can’t get comfortable, but if I start out in bed, I end up in the recliner before morning. Last night, finally, I made it through eight hours with only a single walker-assisted trip to the bathroom. At some point, I managed to lay on the TV remote resulting in MTV being my wake-up call. I was listening to Janet Jackson around 8:15 AM, when minutes later I learned school children in Minneapolis were dodging death and longing for the safety of home.

I know, this occurred at a church, but does it really make any difference? School, church, one isn’t any safer than the other any more. The point is, our children were the target. I don’t know about you, but the thought of the children running for their lives makes me want to take up arms and stand a post. Right or wrong, my reaction is visceral. Put me in harms way, not them. 

And, of course, the public response has become predictable. Thoughts and prayers, ad nauseum. Democrats call for more regulation of assault weapons, Republicans call for arming teachers, both blame the mentally ill because only the mentally ill would “do such a thing.”  When it comes to identifying shooters before they pull the trigger none of us is worth more than a bucket of warm spit. 

Oh, and by the way, today’s shooter used a rifle, shotgun, and pistol, all purchased legally, so there’s no blaming illegal possession or boohooing about illegal aliens. Which brings me to another point: guns that find their way into the hands of those who misuse them generally don’t fire bullets that fly straight. That is to say, they don’t use  weapons designed to preserve the integrity of the target (meat), whether deer, elk, you name it. Instead, they tend to use assault-type weapons that fire bullets that tumble, end on end, once they leave the barrel of the gun. As a result, they don’t simply enter the body, spinning neatly left or right, they’re designed to rip and tear their way through tissues that are helpless to maintain their integrity in the presence of such violence. They’re designed to kill an enemy or render them helpless.

Now, here’s the rub. If we’re hunting for food and we actually know what we’re doing, we’re not going to pack an assault weapon because it does too much damage to valuable venison. If we simply want to take the Ruger or Springfield to the range and work on accuracy, that’s fine. Go for it. My point is, responsible gun ownership does not have anything to do with playing with guns. It entails using gun locks, obtaining professional training, and bending over backwards to ensure our shooting is safe and exemplary of sound common sense. 

So, back to the beginning: what do we do with those among us who seem to think gun ownership can be divorced from thoughtful and mature gun ownership? We begin with education and training involving appeals to those who don’t think, who don’t like complexity or complications, who like to believe problems were simpler way back when. They’ve got to learn sometime.

You see, the circumstances that contrived to make things easier back when, no longer exist. Our populations are larger, we live in bigger spaces and work in more complex situations. All the political blathering in the world can’t change the fact that no single person can know everything and no single concept can encompass all that we know. In other words, like it or not, complexity and diversity are here to stay. The sooner we embrace them, the sooner we can begin to figure out how to prevent one of us from trying to kill too many of the rest of us.

In the meantime, blowhards claiming to have the only answer have no answers. Our problems are too much for any one person. I repeat, they are too much for any one person to understand, solve or otherwise make explicable, and only a huckster or a fool would claim to try. Knowledge is too much of everything for one mind, one school of thought, one anything to have all the answers. If you doubt me, go read the late Karl Rahner on intellectual concupiscence; it’s all there in black and white. 

In the meantime, let’s keep on talking, keep on asking hard questions, keep on refusing to let the blowhards speak for us, and keep on trying to find our truth together. Democracy rules; it’s the only rule.