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/