Guns (Kindle Single)

and express disbelief
at how disastrously their lives have changed. As a corollary to these
background checks, there have to be stiff penalties for those who lie about
their pasts in order to obtain weapons, and the penalties have to be enforced. Not
just a slap on the wrist, either. We’re talking jail time here.
    • Ban the sale of clips and magazines
containing more than ten rounds . I think that’s too many; to borrow the
title of an old sitcom, I believe eight is enough. But I’d happily accept ten.
It’s better than thirty. Or fifty. Or a hundred. I believe the NRA’s idea of
putting armed guards in schools is ridiculous — think of the last elderly,
truss-wearing crossing guard you saw — but suppose it happened? If I’m a
shooter with enough sanity left in my haunted brain to choose a high-capacity
weapon, I’m going to scope out the guards first, and they’re going to be the
first ones to go. But a shooter with only eight or ten rounds at his disposal
really might be taken down, if not by an elderly rent-a-cop, then by a brave teacher
or bystander. Dawn Hochsprung, the principal of the Sandy Hook school, died
apparently in an effort to subdue Adam Lanza. If Lanza had been reloading after
shooting his way in, she might have succeeded. He was crazy, but he was also a
scrawny wisp of a kid. The Bushmaster was his equalizer, he had plenty of ammo
left, so he shot and killed Hochsprung before she could get to him. I wish with
all my heart that she had tackled him, beat the crazy little fuck’s head bloody
against the floor, and gotten a medal from the President on national TV. She
was too brave to die the way she did.
    • Ban the sale of assault weapons such as
the Bushmaster and the AR-15 . This is the one that probably won’t happen,
partly because of the NRA’s influence on a great many congressmen and senators,
but also because plenty of gun advocates cling to their semi-automatics the way
Amy Winehouse and Michael Jackson clung to the shit that was killing them.
There are rationalizations but very little actual discourse on the subject of
banning assault weapons. What we get mostly are incoherent screams of outrage
and furious references to “the liberal agenda.” When I listen to gun advocates
and NRA brass on this subject, I get an image of a little kid doing a tantrum
in the dirt, rolling around with his hands plastered over his ears. No! No!
No! No! Also, La-la-la-la, I can’t HEAR you, can’t HEAR you, can’t HEAR
you !
    What they can’t hear — because they don’t want to — is that
the restriction of heavy weaponry works, possibly because most of these yo-yos
are so dismally screwed up they probably need a map to put their pants on in
the morning. James Holmes may have thought he was the Joker, but he
really wasn’t; he was a dope with a few very large screws loose in his thinking
machinery. Most of them are.
    Here’s a dope for you: Martin Bryant, of Port Arthur, in
Tasmania. On April 28, 1996, he went on a spree with an AR-15 he purchased
through a newspaper ad — easy-peasy. This happy asshole mowed down over a dozen
in a crowded café, moved on to a gift shop where he killed some more, then
moseyed to a parking garage where he killed yet more. The final tally was
thirty-five dead and twenty-three wounded. He called his spree “lots of fun,”
and in court laughed wildly when the judge read out the charges and intoned the
names of the dead. He is now serving 1,035 years in Ridson Prison, and that
should probably be enough. For him, at least. Maybe still not quite enough for
the grieving relatives of the dead and the maimed.
    For Australia, though, it was enough. The government
either banned or restricted automatic weapons (as well as pump shotguns of the
sort Eric Harris used at Columbine). As for those autos already out there, the
government authorized a huge buyback that eventually netted 600,000 weapons. It
amounted to about twenty percent of the country’s private firepower. Since the
Bryant killings and the resulting tough gun laws, homicides by firearm have
declined almost 60 percent in Australia. The guns-for-everyone advocates hate
that statistic, and dispute it, but as Bill Clinton likes to say, it’s not
opinion. It’s arithmetic, honey.
    In the end, this sort of ban can only be accomplished in one
way, and that’s if gun advocates get behind it. I can hear people laughing and
saying pigs will whistle and horses will fly before that happens, but hey,