The armament of the United States is truly astonishing and greatly saddening to me. As a 68 year old white male born and raised in rural Texas my jaw would have dropped off the ground in 1970 to have seen anyone other than police to carry a firearm to any kind of public gathering. I lived and grew up around firearms and got a 22 rifle for my 12th birthday. Never was anything taught except the danger of a gun and the rigid guidelines for safe handling. We were invested in the idea that a lawful and peaceful society was of utmost priority and value.
I never heard even a suggestion guns were ever the remotest option as part of social interaction outside the hellish, barbaric and horror of war or social fabric (my uncles fought across north Africa, Sicily and Italy — 2.5 years of duration combat). It was clear that a circumstance involving firearms was a complete breakdown to dog eat dog brutality, a loss of all reason, rationality, social fabric … by far the worst situation and to be avoided at all cost as a horrible last resort in the face of a nation state conflict for which human rights and freedom were at stake. In 1970 Texas guns were fairly common on the gun rack in the back window of a ranch pickup as coyote rifles, those cowboys were among the least likely to remove the rifle or carry a weapon amongst people. I am a rancher and have a pistol for rare euthanasia of sick/injured farm animal or rabid skunk/raccoon. I have a rifle but it’s rare use is coyotes so thick they are daytime harassing ranch animals with bold frequency or a feral hog who is so bold to be rummaging pasture in daylight. I keep neither loaded nor carry them with me or entertain weaponized home defense, I’m committed to social sanity.
I have the bias that anyone banishing firearms has a mentality that hasn’t thought through the lawless, chaotic, complete barbarism of killing and war. American General William Sherman’s comment that such a environment is “hell” is an unembellished gross understatement from someone (Sherman) who was immersed first hand in violence taken to the extreme of lawless brutality beyond the wildest conception of culture, society or nature.
Do I take comfort in seeing black men and women displaying and banishing weapons in public? Of course not, it represents to me an escalation of white men showing up at political gatherings or Walmart with their “open carry” weapons — it’s a sickening display of social breakdown and rejection of commitment to the structures of everything American was founded upon — all humans equal, unalienable rights, freedom, patriotism, tradition, law, sanctity of respect for our society and flag, disrespect for democracy and the antithesis of every religious or morally rational value.
If you think firearms are a path of comfort let me introduce you to an experiment. We will gather 6 each of people you align with and 6 people who are prejudicially opposed and put all 12 on my ranch where you must stay day and night hungry outside as animals in miserable conditions until all of one group has been murdered. Now spread that to a larger scale to thousands or millions of men, women, children and babies simply murdering each other in an unrestrained mindless brutal horror of unbridled complete self destructive insanity.
That lawless, unfettered violence of kill or be killed violence — that is the one thing I will soldier against because to live in such a gas chamber society one would be better off dead anyway. I choose non-violence and peace.
The Greenwood district massacre Memorial Day of 1921 was fueled insane racism, by media hype, the failure of Oklahoma State officials to rapidly deploy National Guard to deal to disperse a white lynch mob then the introduction of firearms in which initially 10 white people and 2 black people were killed. The violence and destruction that followed is a story of where unfettered barbaric behavior and lawless counter-behavior goes with no victor but instead another chapter of the blight on the soul of America, another chapter in the inhuman, unjust and unconscionable treatment that black (and other minority) Americans have suffered and continue to suffer for which words cannot do justice and seems to have done little to raise the consciousness of where bigotry and violence lead.
