Guns and the American Culture of Death

Twenty students of the Chicago Public School system have been murdered this school year, eighteen of them shot to death. And the school year is not nearly over.

That's an awful lot of kids getting gunned down. But other than Mayor Daley and a few others, I'm not seeing much outrage.

Children get slaughtered in the street and there's not a lot of commotion? That seems odd to me. There seems to be a resignation on the part of many, a feeling that this is just the way life is.

The way of America is the way of the gun. That's just a fact, not a positive or negative judgment. Guns, from the Pilgrim musket to whatever the heck they're using in Iraq, have always and constantly played a role in the history of this nation. The matter of the Washington, DC gun ban now before the Supreme Court will most likely be resolved by striking down that particular ban. The US constitution pretty much guarantees the individual right to keep and bear arms, and even if the constitution doesn't spell that out clearly enough for some, there is precedent going back to the time of Plymouth Rock and Jamestown of individual gun ownership. That's a whole lot of precedent. Individual gun ownership will never go away in the US. It's never going to change. Americans will always and forever have the right to have a gun. Mayor Daley and other advocates of gun control need to accept that fact and change course.

Washington, DC has a gun ban. It has not stopped gun violence. The city of Chicago has a similar gun ban , and it has not worked either. Gun ban or no gun ban, unless guns are no longer manufactured anywhere in the world and all existing guns are melted down to make swing sets for playgrounds, criminals will find a way to get guns. And so will otherwise law abiding citizens.

It would be good to have a nationwide discussion of gun violence. Or at least it would be if people didn't become so overheated on the topic, reducing their arguments to screaming irrationality.

More to the point than a discussion of gun violence, a discussion that would produce even more heat than the gun conversation, would be a discussion about the American culture of death. There is obviously a gun culture in the United States, but beyond that there is a death culture, or perhaps a sub-culture if you will. Many of these children shooting children on the streets of Chicago have no fear of their own death, much less incarceration in prison. Why is that?

That's what we need to talk about. Why is there a sub-culture of American society that thinks it is ok to kill? Further, why do the members of this sub-culture think that it's alright to die themselves? We in this country rightly accuse fundamentalist Islam of being a death culture, bent on bringing horrific death to as many as possible while the individual Islamist terrorist commits suicide. But we Americans need to turn the spotlight on ourselves. We need to ask why there are so many amongst us bent on killing.

Now that's going to be a tough discussion for this nation to have, so tough it may never happen. It is a discussion that will be bogged down by side issues of racial oppression, economic oppression and a whole host of other things. It would be a wrenching discussion, bringing age old animosities and fears to light, in a way that we can't even imagine.

I think, however, it's a discussion that needs be had. Children trying to get to or from school but instead being gunned down like rabid dogs in the street is an abomination. It is an horrific blemish on the soul of humanity. But taking away all guns won't change the minds of killers intent on killing, it would merely take away the easiest and most dispassionate dispenser of death. We need to find why killers, who are quite often no more than teen-agers or young adults, think it is acceptable to kill.

Bear in mind, I have no ready answers. I am barely smart enough to string together words to make sentences to clump together in paragraphs. I am, however, smart enough to know that something needs to change. If all Americans don't at least try to do something, than all Americans should consider themselves part of the death culture.