Fifteen Lessons from Sandy Hook

1. Some gun people think that if you don’t know the difference between a clip and a magazine you’re not qualified to speak on the issue. They are wrong. The average person knows everything they need to know about guns: guns are by their nature potentially deadly and in the wrong hands can inflict ghastly damage on the human body.

2.  Some gun people claim that because any object is potentially deadly all objects are potentially equally deadly. This is prima facie false. 

3. Some gun people claim that because stricter regulation will not eliminate all gun deaths, no stricter gun regulation is warranted. By this logic all laws and regulations should be taken off the books, since no law is 100% effective. This is the perfectionist fallacy.

4. Some gun people think that being permanently armed is the best protection against random violence. The two armed and trained Las Vegas cops recently shot dead while eating their lunch is but the latest testament against this claim.

5. Some gun people claim that an armed citizenry is the best bulwark against governmental tyranny. But I would claim that if they are depending on an armed but unorganized citizenry to protect against tyranny they’ve already waited too long to react. If the U.S. military sides with the government, these citizens will be quickly obliterated by far more sophisticated weaponry. Preventing tyranny is most effective when it is still in its infancy. Rampant gun ownership and political freedom are not coextensive.

6. Some gun people justify their position by making references to fevered conspiracy theories, “false flag operations,” etc. These conspiracies only serve to distract us from real social and political crises that are right in front of us in plain sight: the evisceration of the middle class, the wholesale corruption of our political system by big money, legislative paralysis, criminal wars and their attendant profiteering, decreased civil rights, increased surveillance of citizens, deteriorating due process, indefinite detention, torture, etc. Reality is frightening enough without making up more things of which to be afraid.

7. Some gun people think that 30,000 gun deaths a year is the price that must be paid to secure their constitutional right to bear arms. But there is no individual right to bear arms embedded in the second amendment. The Supreme Court has erred, as it has in the past. Until some future court corrects this error, 30,000 Americans a year will continue to pay for it with their lives.

8. Even if there was an individual right to bear arms embedded in the second amendment, no right in the Bill of Rights is absolute. It is hard to imagine any right, however legitimate, being “worth” 30,000 deaths per year.

9. These are the best arguments the NRA has; everything else is slogans, falsehoods, expressions of desire, selective citations of evidence, fear mongering, etc.

10. To talk about guns in the U.S. is to talk about race. For every victim of a high profile mass white-on-white shooting, hundreds die and are wounded by gunfire in the inner city. This is why people of color favor more gun control than do whites, by a significant margin.

11. While thinking of countries that have struggled with the politically primitive rule of men with guns, I discovered the bitter irony that the U.S. is using its freedoms to abandon the more advanced concept of the rule of law to revert to this primitive political condition.

12. This primitive political condition was called the state of nature, the state of war, the war of all against all by people like Locke, Rousseau, and Hobbes, all foundational thinkers to our way of governance. All would wonder at the absurdity of a culture that would willfully dispense with one of the primary functions of society: to protect citizens from arbitrary violence.

13. Guns make every one of our individual and social pathologies potentially more deadly. Sexually frustrated? Shoot women. Short tempered? Shoot your wife. Don’t like your grade? Shoot your teacher. Having a bad day? Grab your gun from the closet and eat it. Stressed at work and mad at the boss? Shoot him. Afraid of black people? Stand your ground and shoot first. Incompetent parent? Leave your loaded gun on the coffee table and let your five year-old shoot your three year-old. Stupid? Bring your gun to a party and play Russian roulette. Paranoid schizophrenic? Go buy a gun from WalMart and take aim at the voices in your head. Politically deluded? Assassinate two cops eating lunch. Low self-esteem? Get together with your friends and bring your long guns into a family restaurant. Confused as to which are the bad guys with guns and which the good guys with guns? Shoot. Shoot.

14. Nothing will change. If the slaughter of twenty first-graders in their classrooms cannot prompt a reform of our gun laws, nothing will. Perhaps if a gunman went to Congress and dispatched 20 politicians, maybe. But still only maybe. 

15. The elites love that we love our guns, and are happy to let us have them. Having already taken the country from us, they allow us our guns and then play us off against our own government, the only instrument powerful enough to allow us the possibility of reclaiming from them what is ours—“we the people.” From the perspective of the elites, guns are actually pacifiers that allow some people the illusion of political agency. These people only worry about government “gun grabbers” and remain blind to the fact that the elites have grabbed well nigh everything else, as if nothing else—a decent job, health, affordable education, a future for their children—is as precious as having the ability to deliver death at a distance. This is no agency at all, or if it is it’s an agency for losers, losers who don’t even know that the war they spoil to fight is already over and they have been defeated, like those Japanese soldiers who fought on for years after their country’s surrender. To give them their due, at least these soldiers could take aim at their perceived enemy targets. But how do you shoot a multinational corporation? How does one take aim at capital? It is precisely this quandary that makes the American cult of the gun so absurd, so pathetic, so pointless, and so tragic.

Confirmation of an Ancient Thesis

The good book famously teaches that one cannot serve both God and Mammon. Christ himself drove the moneychangers out of the temple, understanding that one could not look to God while consumed with a desire to overfill one's pockets. Before that, Plato very explicitly cautioned that the appetitive types be kept very far away from the levers of political power, understanding that this ever-grasping class would steer the ship of state onto the reef of ruin. All of the ancient sages we claim to venerate have always warned us of overvaluing the "goods of the world," understanding the lust for things to lead to vice, sin, decadence, and social decay. Now, over two millennia later, we've given over whole societies, perhaps even the whole globe, to such types. And not just to the farmers, merchants, and craftsmen of Plato's day. No, we long ago gave our well-being over to bankers and financiers who can move vast sums of money across the globe at the stroke of a key, producing nothing but vast profits for themselves while producing not a single good or service for society. Given our present state of affairs, there is no need to revise the ancient thesis. Indeed, our horrified eyes pronounce the thesis confirmed.

So Obvious It Requires No Further Explanation

The absence of effective State, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power. The prime need to is to change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate power which it is not for the general welfare that they should hold or exercise. We grudge no man a fortune which represents his own power and sagacity, when exercised with entire regard to the welfare of his fellows. Again, comrades over there, take the lesson from your own experience. Not only did you not grudge, but you gloried in the promotion of the great generals who gained their promotion by leading their army to victory. So it is with us. We grudge no man a fortune in civil life if it is honorably obtained and well used. It is not even enough that it should have been gained without doing damage to the community. We should permit it to be gained only so long as the gaining represents benefit to the community.

― Theodore Roosevelt

John Tomich (1960-2013)

No one is ready for this. At this point in our lives, many of us have eulogized grandparents and parents, aunts and uncles, but no one expects this—to come together to mourn and remember someone who should still be walking among us, here, in middle life. No one can be ready for this. Even today I suspect that many of us have still not reckoned with the sudden reality of this enormous absence in our lives. For many of us, our minds are still struggling to catch up with our broken hearts.

A week ago today my old friend Pete called me late to ask about some disquieting messages on his Facebook feed, and after rushing to my computer to see for myself I felt my heart go faint with vertigo. Within the hour, after several frenzied messages and phone calls, another old friend, Jane, called to confirm the worst. “He’s gone, John is gone,” she said with a catch in her throat, and in that instant I felt my heart plunge deeply into the pit of my stomach. After a moment of stunned silence and a couple confused, whispered exclamations of disbelief, we both agreed that we each had to go cry for a while, and we promised each other we would talk later.

I sat with tears running down my cheeks, and watched my screen for a while to see how we start to grieve in this age of the internet—and what I saw was a beautiful thing. I saw that since the time the world had started to steadily pull our lives in different directions, John’s had spread and intertwined and had its wonderful effect on other constellations of neighbors, colleagues, and friends, most of whom were unknown to me. As the pixilated messages of shock and sorrow, memory and condolence continued to slowly accumulate, I started to see them as a confirmation crystalizing right there in front of me, a confirmation of John’s exceptional qualities as a person and friend. His warm reach was long and embraced many, and many beyond me were devastated by this loss. This made me think of the only passage in western philosophy that almost always moves me to tears, the account of Socrates draining off the last of the deadly hemlock, and the reaction of his friends:

And hitherto most of us had been able to control our sorrow; but now when we saw him drinking, and saw too that he had finished the draught, we could no longer forbear, and in spite of myself my own tears were flowing fast; so that I covered my face and wept over myself, for certainly I was not weeping over him, but at the thought of my own calamity in having lost such a companion (Plato, Phaedo, 116d).

After posting this tribute I went to bed, my face covered and tears flowing, awash in the collective calamity of our loss of our friend John, our husband John, our father John, our son John, our brother John, our kin John.

Every day since last Thursday I returned to read John’s page, and every night, alone with my thoughts, I would ruminate about what these testimonials and sentiments said about his life. These recalled to me John’s wide-ranging, curious, sharp, and playful mind, his articulate insights about the larger world, his love of tinkering with technology or any mechanical problem, his amazing photographic eye, his boundless passion for every genre of music under the sun, his shirt-off-his-back generosity, the boisterous wit of his conversation, and the warmth of his company over food and drink. But even while weeping silently in the dark over the loss of our friend, every night without fail I found myself smiling through my tears at his relentless sense of humor. Let’s be honest: no one can think about John for very long without smiling or laughing out loud, even now. We all have our “John stories,” and to tell them all would take many happy hours, if not days. The thing I’ll remember most vividly about John is his unrestrained and joyful guffaw that came from straight from his belly. There was never anything false or pretend about it, and it was impossible to resist. In John was an insatiable lust for life that found its expression in laughter, and it is his laughter that I will always keep with me.

Of course John’s family knows all of this better than any of us, because no matter how long any of us have known John, or how well any of us think we know him, his family know him at a higher magnitude of intimacy. I know that the words I am about to speak might not reach them in their sorrow, but I find I must speak them anyhow. An old friend of mine from Duquesne wrote me the following last week:

Life is full, especially the lives of those who impact us deeply. This is obviously true in life, but this fullness cannot be emptied, even in death. We need to find new ways to let their lives be full, and continue to fill us, and to pass this fullness on to others, and to share with them and fill them with the joy of a life well-lived, so that our loved one’s life remains, in a very real sense, a life well-lived. 

To Sarah, and Anton, and Stella: I know you realize that John’s life, though not nearly long enough, was well-lived and full—well-lived and full because you helped to fill it with your love and your own lives, and because his life and yours combined and flourished in love, filling you all. John’s life is still full even today because all of us are here to celebrate this fullness despite our sorrow. It’s okay to weep in your laughter and smile through your tears; I suspect that it is within this weird, paradoxical tension that we can continue to feel John most closely, even in his absence, so the life he lived can continue to fill us throughout our lives, and we can share the well-lived joy of his life until the end of our days. In this, your husband, your father, our friend, will remain. In us.

The Life of O'Reilly

It must be soul-killing to play a pompous, boorish nincompoop mouthing patent inanities, even if you're paid millions annually to do so. At least your average Tea Partier truly believes every element of his fantastic ideology. It informs his worldview, sustains his soul, and makes his heart jump with life. The life of O'Reilly is pathetic by comparison; a perfectly intelligent person wilfully playing a fleshly puppet spewing stupidity into the ether, to be recorded by posterity as nothing more than a pimp selling ignorance, all so he can trade on his empty celebrity and pose with the powerful.

On Syria

"I am against delaying reaction to what is a massacre of a thousand people," he said. "You saw these pictures of these dead children. Come on. This is horrific. We can't stand by and watch this happen."

Senator John McCain

What a foul and steaming pile of manure. We in the US routinely witness the slaughter of innocents without lifting a finger. We're not bothered in the least by mounds of corpses even if the product of our own policies or proxies--especially if the dead complexions are of a darker hue. We even consider our own 30,000 annual deaths by gunshots to be normal; we don't care enough to protect our own citizens from violence. We are the most hard-hearted of peoples, immersed in our own tawdry culture of distraction, isolated from each other and the world and armed to the teeth, but at the same time easily manipulated by reliable old war horses like McCain who never met a missile he didn't want to send over the horizon to deal death at a distance. The gift bequeathed by Bush and company, and one happily received by Obama, is the Orwellian concept of permanent warfare, where the enemy is ever-shifting and therefore unconquerable, providing morally and materially corrupt politicians the means of easily manipulating an apathetic and ignorant population. They can arbitrarily point to any convenient stack of bodies and loudly proclaim that a line has been crossed and now we must act immediately, that our former enemy is now our ally and vice versa, and to not act now is to allow this newly anointed evil to prevail.

Be assured that this strategy will work--yet again. But let us not flatter ourselves that the impending and deadly intervention is due to our collective kind hearts and far-reaching empathy. As history up to the present shows, we have an inexhaustible tolerance for the indifferent witness of slaughter. We care more about our "reality" shows than the reality of wholesale massacres; this is our default mode. When the missiles fall on Syria, it will be due to our fearfulness, our stupidity, our cowardice, and our seemingly unending desire to play the hapless marks of our conniving leaders.

A Modest Proposal

What to do with cannibals intent on consuming all of society for themselves and their own kind? The only sure course of action: off with their heads!