Long live the gun

Long live the gun. I mean, is there anything better than the cold-steel, hot-power, hey-look-at-me, are-you-talking-to-me, run-for-your-goddamn lives, thank-you-Constitution, screw-you-common-sense American gun culture? I doubt it. Hell, 4.3 million National Rifle Association members can’t be wrong, can they? (Brief thanks to the NRA media relations dept. for offering this figure after 17 phone calls — what the hell, I have nothing better to do).

Try not to dwell on the fact that 17 (one per phone call) serious school shootings in the past 10 years have left dozens dead and scores injured in our aren’t-they-bad-enough-without-worrying-about-dying K-12 schools. Hey, what’s after PE? Oh, cool, another playground massacre.

Thank the bullet-proof heavens that owning a gun is our God-given, er, Constitutionally-granted right. What a disaster it would be to wipe guns out of our Utopic society, revert to flashlight beatings and live in some semblance of peace.

Why, Vern?

Christ, Larry, there are deer to be shot.

Sorry, I’m pretty drunk.

So the guns live on and on-outliving our murdered children — and, due to unfortunate shortsightedness, they have been grouped with the legitimate staples of our society. The Second Amendment’s gun reference is only legitimate by association. It hangs out in good company and is the runt of the justice litter. It is fought for and coveted as a right. It is deadly. It is wrong.

But it’s there in Ye Olde Constitution. The right to bear arms. Out of my way, hippie, I’ve got some democratically-endorsed cap-in-ass poppin’ to do. This right, hung from the NRA’s flagpole and worshiped like a god (a fascinatingly Charlton Heston-shaped god), is held in higher esteem than reason and safety, more valued than an end to bloodshed, and more politically empowered than struggles for a healthy environment and well-educated children. Its support comes from an endless temper tantrum (but I want to kill something NOW!) from gun owners who are simply responding to their gun-loving, sex-fearing, confused society.

I’ll try not to fall into the yummy pit of generalization — past columns have caused bitter anger sauce to flow over “all Southerners drive F-150s-type assumptions (you’re right, some travel drunkenly in a wheelbarrow pushed by two friends, my mistake) — and so I’ll do gun-owners the service of not assuming they’re all choosing big guns to compensate for small genitalia and smaller brains and/or brains so small they can’t recognize the freakishly small nature of their genitalia. No such generalizations will be made here. Not on my watch.

But what about American society and culture? The European Observatory of School Violence stated quite simply that American violence can be directly attributed to the overwhelming availability of guns in our society. Guns equal violence. It’s time to take a new look at an old and obvious observation revisited by a couple of crazy Europeans who have fewer guns on their streets and are, incidentally, less likely to die.

The truth (of the bitter variety if you’re one of the fiery 4.3 million) is that our society — based on freedom of expression and the marketplace of ideas — would function a hell of a lot better (Hey look, living children!) and would remain consistent with our framers’ vision if owning a gun were made illegal.

No one should be able to own a gun. For those that absolutely need to hunt (unless you hunt for subsistence, you’re drastically in need of a trip to some alternate dimension in which deer hunt orange-vested humans for sport to impress their fellow country deer with human — head trophies — you know, just for perspective), for those that will simply die or cry or settle into melancholy if they can’t shoot something, there should be a gun rental program.

After an intensive gun-safety and preparedness course, hunters or target-shooters can use a gun rental license to check out officially-registered and safety-inspected guns for a certain period of time. After the big weekend with the boys (beautiful new kills to mount on the wood paneling), the gun is returned, inspected and subsequently not found next to the VCR and brought to school for show, tell and shoot.

People who want their gun fun will take the time to go through this process, and everyone else can simply live. At some point, the major emphasis in the fight to free ourselves from the politically-motivated and horrifically-stubborn death-shackles of gun culture needs to be simple gun reduction. You can’t keep deadly bombs in your basement, and you shouldn’t be able to keep guns. They’re ticking. They’re waiting to go off.

Until guns die like American children, I advise the TV news to keep those “School Shooting” logos ready. They’ll be using them soon, again and again. Bam.