Small Town Gun Violence

Here's an angle of thought from a place most people in America will think of as outrageous. Even in America, it's a bit much to base an areas entire existence on one thing. Be it a product or service, if everyone is beholden to it, there is an aire of complacency about that product or service. After-all, if it is everywhere, it becomes part of our lives. Fishing, Coal Mining, Logging, Firearms... In some cases, these become part of our character.

In nearly every small town in the United States, gun violence is not a worry at all. You can be assured that there are more guns on a Farm, Ranch and Country Estate than you can shake a stick at, yet the accident and murder by gun rates are very low in rural towns under 2000 residents. Even suicide rates by gun are much lower in small rural towns. Life is slower, people interact with each other more and after awhile, you've seen or heard of nearly everyone in town. Maybe it's because there is no-one anonymous to kill. The neighbor lady down the street would certainly drag you home by the ear and tell your parents if you shot up the school.

Some of the folks reading this may know that I spent a little time in Tombstone, Arizona. Tombstone is the wild-card in this peaceful small-town statistic. Tombstone is why we can only say... "almost" about small town gun violence in the United States. Tombstone actually has several notable incidents each year that help to hold these national statistics down. There were several of these types of incidents put in the books while I lived there, but one was most notable.
I wrote about it then, here is what I wrote:

"Yesterday a real nice guy, Tombstone fixture at the Birdcage Theater and I’d like to call him friend, was murdered at the hands of a fool with a gun under the pretense of unrequited love. Two lonely old men liked the same woman and the answer to the problem came with a wisp of cordite.

Not unlike my own experience of gun violence, this incident is but a blip on the American conscious but it is actually a bit more for those that can recognize true irony when they see it.

Let me tell you a little about it…

It all started in April of 1881 here in Tombstone Arizona and is entirely true.

1881 was the third year in the life of Tombstone, a silver mining town, and because of the wealth of silver, a very rowdy place. There were not only miners and their families here but also area Cowboys, thieves, drifters, gamblers, no-accounts and killers. Just three years in, the town was rife with violence and mayhem in such deadly detail that the Marshal of this town took it upon himself to champion a law requiring that there be no weapons carried within the city limits. This Marshal was one Virgil Earp, older brother of Wyatt Earp and the law became known as “Earps Law.”

As a matter of fact, the “Shootout at the O.K, Corral” happened because a group of local cowboys being enemies of the Earps, refused to obey this law.

Something many don’t know is that this law was in force and in effect until 1992. For one hundred and eleven years there were no guns allowed to be carried in the open within the 4.3 square miles that is Tombstone Arizona. Although not always strictly enforced everybody was happy with that.

Fast forward to 1992. The tourist inspired carnival atmosphere that is now Tombstone holds several licensed “Shootout Gun Shows” using real guns shooting blanks. There are horses pulling Stage Coaches through town for the tourists but of course automobiles are the norm in 1992 and seldom is seen an actual horse bearing a rider. Of course horses and their riders are welcome and encouraged to help with the old West atmosphere of the town and occasionally a group would ride through. Here’s where the twist comes.

A group of these riders from outside the city limits including a loudmouth local Bounty Hunter liked to come through in full blown Old West gear. This full gear included side arms and saddle guns. This seems reasonable but being unlicensed they were breaking the one law that is itself historical and steeped in the true history of the town. Certain folks and the local law pointed this situation out and the group although welcomed was asked to not bring their guns. Thinking that their right to carry a gun anywhere they wanted overshadowed Tombstones history, these people created a stink and soon the NRA was involved.

Long story short, part of Tombstones heritage and the very law that made Tombstone famous was overturned and free gun glorification began. The law that gave Tombstone its livelihood and gave people here a small sense of security was thrown under the stage.

Since then no-one here cares to remember “Earps Law” and it seems that nearly everyone in town with small shoes or anger issues has a gun on their hip. I’m not talking about licensed guns with blanks either. I’m talking Glock, S&W, and even old style single action .45’s loaded and “ready” for anything the imagination can dream up. Unfortunately as a whole, the people that carry these guns have been trained via the riddled can method.

There are mock gunfights in town 3 or 4 times a day and even the street hawkers are packing iron giving the impression to tourists that Tombstone has always been a gun toting shoot em’ up town. Apparently the town now depicts through its theater the three years of insolence before Earps Law even though the mock O.K. Corral shootout happens 2-3 times a day at the gun toting hawkers call. 
A true contradiction in history if you know better.

So now just yesterday a bad man packing a gun killed a good man with no gun at all, and it isn't the first time since 1992 that gun violence has occurred within the city limits. Gun violence from both locals and western fervor incited tourists happens quite often here in Tombstone. I hate to say it but it is truly a jagged little pill to swallow, and unlike the song I'm referencing here, truly ironic when consumed with the actual history of Tombstone.

What’s more disturbing to me about this atmosphere and the people that perpetuate it, is that as I was passing one of these gun toting hawkers on the street just two hours after the killing, she was talking to a UPS driver about the incident. I happened to overhear her infer that it was the victims fault for not having a gun at the ready.

What? Did I hear you right? I asked her. 
When she answered the same short-sighted drone, I tore into her and gave her a loud and embarrassing tongue lashing in public.

Folks, It is not an Americans fault for being killed by a gun because they don’t wear a gun. If you feel that you need a gun at every turn you have a sad life. No life at all is better than spending your days on earth clutching a gun in fear. By this failed logic everyone in America should wear a gun because they are paranoid of what another American will do to them. That’s not the America of our forefathers and certainly has nothing to do with the Second Amendment. 

Does anyone else see the comparisons to be made? The lack of respect for humanity and the Americans around them? The lack of Patriotism? YES, lack of Patriotism.

We are all Americans here and supposedly on the same team.

It was a famous American black man that once said “Can’t we all just get along?”

Not while half of us are packing heat we can’t. Don't get me wrong, guns are fine and have a time and place. A guns place is not out in the open on your hip as a daily affront to the Americans around you.

Get training, glean knowledge and respect for others if you want to use guns.

Now back to what was mentioned in the first paragraph...
We as humans inundate ourselves with our favorite things, an embarrassment of riches in many ways. Things attach to the human psyche by repetition of thought, sight, sound, etc. When one of these things are firearms and they are everywhere within our sight and thought, the results are not good. Tombstone, Arizona and the statistics it holds down is proof of this theory. No other small town in the country has as much gun violence as Tombstone. It lives up to its name in many ways.

By-the-way, actual certified gun training teaches you to think of others and to keep your gun invisible in public. 

Open carry is for fools.

LL/ Mac/

Free Irony

A way for people to take the issue of guns in our society seriously is to discuss them thoroughly, to realize that they didn’t just appear on earth for our enjoyment or as a bolster to our sagging esteem. Guns have been around merely a fraction of our human history but in that time we have given them a persona and revered them as a much needed commodity even though the power they wield is only accessed through our own human fears and wants. 

When the first rudimentary forms of firearms appeared on earth they were used to hurl projectiles through walls at close range and now several hundred years later we can and pinpoint and destroy targets from miles away with a hail of projectiles or a single devastating thump. This science of releasing expanding gas in a confined space has gradually been morphed for use as personal killing devices ranging in sizes from vehicle mounted to dinky palm sized pistols that are easily concealed and used to kill in a more personal one-on-one fashion. The bottom line for our killing machines is that their purpose is for use is in destruction. A gun of any size only has two intended uses, to kill (destroy) or threaten death. We do use them in other fashion for enjoyment and work such as target shooting and occasionally as catapults. But these are merely morphs of the technology and cannot be claimed as a purpose since if the intended user turns their back with negligence, those of nefarious intent can use a target gun or line gun to kill or threaten.

Guns aren’t an inherently bad thing even though their purpose is negative in nature, they have actually helped our society by playing a key role in human advancement. In the 1400's we started to use them to gather food and to defend against death and enslavement. This in turn helped to increase our populations and since then, with every use of guns we have been defining the line between righteous and nefarious use.

One of the destructive attributes that is seldom discussed in relation to guns is the effect they’ve had in the dumbing down of our society. This technology has made our lives easier and with that comes complacency and entitlement. In 1776 America was born and we separated ourselves from our oppressors with guns. This set in motion an ideal in the American way of life that guns are a necessary tool to thwart oppression and since then, our numbers have increased immensely until we are experiencing the same crowded house syndrome within America that we struggled against all those many years ago. The problem now is that we have nowhere else to expand our numbers, no new colonies to inhabit, no way to escape our oppressors either with or without guns. At a certain time after the industrial revolution the scales tipped and the purposes for guns skewed to being more negative than positive. No longer actually needing to use them for food gathering we started to use them primarily for threat and killing each other as our populations strove to separate ourselves by different angles of thought. These different angles of thought have now become our oppressors spurned on and nurtured by class through other of our American freedoms, greed and power.

There is no cogent argument that can defend against reasons of maintaining human life but through fuzzy interpretation of our founding documents our guns are still here. We “entitled” their use those many years ago when we were 3 million people struggling for freedom from oppression and now we are ironically 320 million people struggling to be free from ourselves… with guns. We are our own enemies now, we don’t need others to blame. We oppress others and maintain these oppressions with the threat of guns.

We have reaped freedom for others and then sown our own freedom by those lessons to reap our own crop until now Americans kill an average of One Hundred Nine other Americans per day with our freedom.

LL/ Mac/

Introspect

I won't be leaving on my excursion for a little while so in the mean time I will create little essays to spurn thought on the subject... 

For most Americans, the thump of hammer on chest and a debilitating loss of breath are foreign and with luck they’ll never have to experience the feeling of complete human loss it represents. Luck is the correct word in this instance because that’s what we’ve been reduced to as Americans, hoping we’re the lucky ones, hoping everyone we know makes it home safely. No longer can we stand beside the ideals of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness afforded by our country’s founding documents to secure our human rights of freedom. No longer can we rely on lop sided statistics that favor us to calm our minds because every American is now behind the ball. Chances are, that now within our lifetime every American will either intimately know of, or have a victim of American gun violence within four degrees of separation of their own family. 

These are the kinds of things people learn as they are being “comforted” after they have been confronted with friends or family killed uselessly by other Americans, in America with guns. Then we follow through with our conditioning and turn on the TV to see what new object is available to buy, a new i-car or butt-phone will surely help bring closure. How about a new gun to make us forget our loss and feel powerful in our imaginative scenarios against the unknown?

 But how can closure come when nothing changes and you know that the numbers are so great that even though you’ve been touched by this fickle finger of fate your odds are the same for it to happen to you again? The answer; If you’re a thoughtful American closure can’t come because now the intimate knowledge of our American reality has been thrust upon you, and it sickens you… for the rest of your life.

It would be great for nay-sayers to be able to scoff away our truth with any number of self serving pre-packaged excuses but these no longer fit comfortably into our American reality. It would be great if I, as the author of this blog, were a false flag or a far left extremist or even someone making it up as I go but reality bites… hard.

In 2019 guns and death by gun are a part of my American reality and if you are an American they are a part of yours. I happen to know this intimately being that an acquaintance of mine within two degrees of my life was shot and killed on the streets of Seattle in 2012 for her car keys, I feel so sorry for Gloria’s toddler children and her husband. I know this because a good friend of mine in Arizona was shot dead in the street in 2014 over a dispute involving a woman that didn’t really like either man arguing over her attentions. I feel so sorry for Leroy’s family, he was such a nice guy. I know this because in 2012, the day after Thanksgiving I was shot four times with a shotgun by a mentally disturbed man on methamphetamine and although clutched tight, I escaped death only by virtue of an un-trained aggressor, modern medical technology and myself using my thorough knowledge of guns as I was being attacked.

The common denominators between these three incidents I’m intimately familiar with are mental instability, guns and myself. We can all agree that mental instability is a wildcard but guns are not a wildcard at all, guns are easy. As for myself, I’ve been saddled with being both very empathetic and a wildcard my entire life so perhaps I was chosen to journal for a reason.

Any one of these aggressors could have used a baseball bat for their attacks… but they didn’t. Any of these guys could have used a knife for the deed… but they didn’t. They could have used a car but I doubt that even crossed their minds at all. All three chose a gun because it was easy, available, quick, and took very little effort, the perfect killing tool, why choose anything else?

There are many arguments for the promulgation of guns but the truth is that purposeful murder is most often committed with a gun and that is a problem for public safety in America, especially when placed next to another outrageous statistic. FBI statistics show that for 2018, an average of more than 109 Americans were killed every day in America by a gun in one fashion or another.

 Simple math shows that is roughly 39.5 thousand deaths per year to be divided into roughly 320 million Americans which leaves every American with a legitimate chance of death by gun at any moment, and those odds don’t go down if your child is killed, or your Mother….

With this in mind I recommend you call everyone in your family and all your friends and tell them you love them because statistics also show that owning a gun won’t help you.

LL/ Mac/

Introduction

Hello !! 😀
Welcome to a thought provoking exploration of Americas attitude on firearms.

I wish I were somewhere else. I wish there were no need. I wish my mind would rest...
But, I'm not, there really is, and it won't.
These are all Druthers. "I would rather" is what druthers means. It is a squish of three words that I first heard of in the tales of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. It's a lazy mouth way of getting to the end of a sentence, yet still conveying the intent of the sentence. It is a colloquialism of middle America lightly used when thinking back on situations we wish were different.
Like everyone reading this, there are a lot of things in my life and my surroundings that I wish were different. 
I'druther things were different but they aren't.

You may have stumbled upon this blog or you may have been pointed here by a person or my book "American Druthers." Either way, you've come to a place where deep thought, compassion, patience, empathy and ideas including these things will be given their proper weight. 
For many different reasons, things we can't see are more important than those we do.

My name is Mike McNaney and I am a victim of American gun violence. I am also a card carrying American, U.S. Navy Desert Storm veteran, father of two, former small business owner and most important of all, a person with friends and family that I love and that love me.

Let's set the stage,
This will not be a rant blog or a hate blog or a whiney blog and I will refrain from as much negativity as possible. Although inherently negative on its own, this blog is about presenting our American attitude on firearms and exploring that attitude and the results without taking sides. Well, that's not exactly true, I am taking sides. I'm taking the side of those Americans that are tired of American gun violence. I am going to be a champion for the Americans killed here in the US by other Americans. I am going to champion the cause of those maimed by our gun violence issues and I am going to champion the friends and families of those killed and maimed.
I started this blog to write down the thoughts of the victims in conjunction with passing out my book all over the country. In a month or so, in the beginning of 2020, I will be traveling around the US on a pilgrimage to pass out as many books as I can.  I am going to follow our trail of domestic gun violence all over the country to try and ensure that this issue does not fade away until the next. I of course will be very busy. I am going to show up at vigils for victims, at town hall meetings, at wakes and at the steps of our government.
And it will all be covered right here in scribble, pics and video.
This of course sounds like I am possibly an anti-gun zealot, but I am not. I am a pro American life zealot and a pro humanity zealot. This blog is not so much about guns but rather, about the results. It's about our American attitude about guns and the people that use them.
I won't fixate on the tool, it's people that kill people with firearms. It's people that leave them available for inappropriate use by others. And it's people that seem to be incredulous on this subject.

On this blog I will allow all comments. I will not restrict people's ideals or thoughts. Just please think them through before posting. If you post a comment and it is worded in a negative way, it may be removed and you personally blocked from further comment or I may make it permanent and berate you at my leisure. Your choice. All positive comments and interactions are invited and welcomed.

If this topic is important to you or you want to know a lot more, may I recommend my latest book? I will be handing out as many as I can afford each month, or, it is available Here for purchase.

Travel by car is fairly cheap, I will be handing out books at my cost which is fairly cheap. I will be doing all of this at my cost, from my pocket. If you find my efforts acceptable and are in line with these efforts would you consider a donation to my trips across the country? I am not doing any of this for money. I have a monthly VA Disability pension that keeps me going. It is not much but I can live on it and no longer aspire to have a lot of money. I aspire to help America. If you can help and want to, you can make a small donation via PayPal to my efforts at macztuff@gmail.com Mark the gift as a donation or gift so I can keep track. Thank You... sincerely 😊
That email address is for my PayPay account only and will get no replies otherwise. I don't look at it for correspondence.
If you want to be heard, post a comment here on the blog or at sanegunsforamerica@gmail.com

Mac/