9:55am | Another day, another gun crime, another murder.
Almost undoubtedly you’ve heard about it: a clerk working at a liquor store at Cherry Ave. and 4th St. was shot in the head, murdered, in what the police are calling a botched robbery.
I am angry. I’m sitting here suffering that mute, futile anger that just smolders and feels like it will explode because there’s nothing you can do in the moment—and maybe at all—that will address its cause, never mind remedying the specific wrong, which is beyond remedy.
I’m feeling especially mad about this despicable everyday occurrence because right now our news atmosphere seems especially polluted with gun crimes. The Arizona shootings of Gabrielle Giffords and so many others started it off. Then there was the 15-year-old Gardena High School student who toted a gun to school in his backpack and shot two of his classmates. The next day brought us the shooting of a police officer on the grounds of El Camino Real High School. And now this.
After a recent BBC report on Yemen (I think it was) saying that there is at least one gun for each of the 23 million residents in the country, I got it in my head to try to get a guesstimate from someone about the number of guns in Long Beach. The Long Beach Police Dept. told me they don’t have a figure and suggested I try the Department of Justice, since all legal gun purchases are registered through them. But the DOJ blew me off. Then I tried the National Rifle Association: I’ve yet to hear back.
I am not a fan of the 2nd Amendment as put into practice in the 21st-century, since our current right to bear arms doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the keeping of a militia—the whole idea of which centered around the people’s ability to bring down a treasonous government (should the need arise), which would be possible in theory, since the weaponry conceived by our Founding Fathers could almost as easily be kept by We the People as by the U.S. government.
Of course, those days of potential parity are long, long gone. And so, while I support an individual’s right to bear arms (even though I detest guns), I think it’s ludicrous to argue that this means every non-felonious American adult has inalienable right to possess whatever instrument of death on which he or she can lay hands. Gun control is simply a way of keeping madness in check, and a fair debate is exactly what form gun control should take, not whether it should exist.
That’s part of my gut reaction, but in the above-mentioned cases this is not the issue, because all of these were handgun crimes.
Another reaction I’m having will undoubtedly seem quite off the mark to some, but I’m wondering if our culture has perverted the concept of forgiveness—and if this has made us as a people more willing to transgress even the most distant moral frontiers because of a refuge in the belief (whether conscious or unconscious) that forgiveness always can be had.
This is a decidedly Christian concept, and we are a Christian culture at our roots, even if societally we have become secularized over time. Without implying that there is only one viable interpretation of Christianity, it can generally be said that a core belief of Christianity is that (to repeat the phraseology I’ve heard innumerable times in my life) if you accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and savior, you are forgiven for all your sins and automatically go to Heaven—that, in fact, this is your only way into an afterlife that doesn’t suck (or at the every least doesn’t exist). More than one self-professed Christian I’ve known has told me that Gandhi is languishing in eternal torment while Hitler (providing that in his last moments he truly excepted Jesus Christ as etc.) rejoices forever with God.
I don’t especially care what people believe; I care very much about what they do. There are people whose Christian beliefs have helped them be wonderful, wonderful people, just as there are people whose Christian beliefs seems to have moved them to be separatist, self-righteous, scientifically-challenged, hateful, compassionless, violent, and so forth. Not surprisingly, a pragmatist like me looks at the former type and is glad they found Christ, while I wish the latter type had never heard of the bloke, since knowing him hasn’t done jack for making them good neighbors.
There is a sense in which I am very much on board with the idea of forgiveness. But there are things I do not forgive.
Two guys walk into a convenience store. They want to steal some money, and for one reason or another they decide the attempt to get $200 or whatever has more value than the life of a poor fellow who is behind the counter working for a living, and they shoot him in the head. I find this unforgiveable, and I can’t help wondering right now if we might not be better off as a society if we did not inculcate into our citizenry that ultimately everything is forgivable.
Intellectually I don’t find the matter at all simple. I am very persuaded by pragmatist arguments about contingency, that all of us are who we are as a result of genetics and life experience, the combined total of which is mostly a yoke we are given and from which we cannot unburden ourselves. I didn’t choose to be heterosexual. I didn’t choose to speak English. And to a very large degree I didn’t choose to be nonviolent. It’s closer to the truth to say that these dispositions chose me than to credit me with agency in these aspects of my being.
But when one of my neighbors is murdered, it’s hard to stay purely intellectual about it. It’s hard to be anything but angry and sad.
This column is not about having answers. This column may not even be a coherent whole. It is just a reaction, raw in everything but grammatical style. In such an emotional state, sometimes all we can do is share our reactions, our feelings, our anger and our sadness. I’d like to think the act of doing so brings us a little closer to each other.
Maybe that alone is worth something. Because I imagine that, no matter one’s morality, we are probably less likely to conscience harm done to those with whom we feel connected.