Arguing With Wyatt Earp and My Grandfather

WITH TYPICAL PENETRATING INSIGHT, skin deep, President Trump proclaimed recently that what we have here is a mental health problem, not a gun problem. He should know. Guns, it seems, have nothing to do with killing people. guns are merely convenient means, among many others. People kill people. Blame people and their mental health issues, blame anything, but not guns. hang on to that conservative NRA base of support. However, if you are a human being, mind, body, and spirit, and have lived longer than a few days, you are going to experience, sooner or later, illness, both physical and mental. Ask any expert. With modern medicine and normal human healing capabilities, we can usually heal, and delay death for decades. To say that our American mass Murder orgy (AMMO) is the product of mental illness is essentially saying that we are all capable of participating in it, responsible for it, and that at any given time anyone is capable of practically anything, which we already knew, or should have known. So, we need to turn to environmental factors, outside the human mind, for possible answers. In the United States of Ammo-rica, personal disputes are a dime a dozen. We Americans can't swing a dead cat, as they crudely say, without knocking down somebody we either hate, have divorced, or have already slandered or beaten up. In America, inter personal conflict is rife, interpersonal conflict is the norm, it is our way of life, it begins in grade school, and extends to the grave. The United States of Animosity is an angry, competitive land, where gangsters gather together. Enter the four million member NRA, with their good guys need guns mentality, wanting us all to be armed and ready to aim and fire. Our conceal and carry culture, with over three hundred million guns, is the law of the land. We already had the motive,now we have the means, far more convenient than rolling pins, knives, and baseball bats. Retribution as a safe distance. Fifty four percent of our mass murders are perpetrated by people who have recently perpetrated an act of domestic violence. Merely slapping one's spouse around a little bit leaves one unsatisfied, still angry, needing to vent more. We are back to square one, with motive and means. Conservatives say gins don't kill people, liberals say that people with guns kill people, people sing guns, people and their weapons working in tandem, as a team. We may never know which paradigm to call correct. My grandfather once said that if you put a gun in a man's hand, the first thing he wants to do is use it. Seems sensible. Wyatt Earp, when he was the law in Dodge City, did not allow guns to be carried in town. You could pick them up on the way out. domestic violence is a problem everywhere, but turns into a gun nightmare far more often in a country where guns are ubiquitous. There is far more gun violence in the U.S. than in England and Australia, where guns are scarce, but the same rate of domestic violence. maybe they know something we don't', or something we are unwilling to accept. For that mater, maybe my grandfather and Wyatt Earp had a point too.