The Heavily-Armed Elephant in the Room

After the shooting rampage in Binghamton that left 13 people dead, the city’s police chief – the man charged with protecting the citizenry – said in a moment of stupidity:

“If some crazy lunatic decides to pick up a gun and go someplace and start shooting people, I really don’t have the answer how…[to] prevent anything like that.”

Really? Because the answer seems pretty self-evident to me:

Stop letting people just “pick up a gun” like they’re picking up milk and eggs from the supermarket.

The Binghamton massacre was just the latest (and, as of this writing, no longer the most recent) in a spate of firearm homicides. Over the last month in the U.S., 53 people have been killed in mass shootings (that doesn’t include the firearm homicides with only one victim).

There were the four Oakland Police officers who were gunned down by a convicted felon.

There was the Indian techie in Santa Clara that slaughtered his family, his relatives, and then turned the gun on himself. Good thing he was able to purchase two semi-automatic handguns to “protect” his family two weeks before the murders (in a neighborhood that had recently disbanded the Neighborhood Watch because there was no crime…).

There were the three Pittsburgh police officers that were ambushed by a gun-nut who thought Obama was going to take his AK-47 (which had previously been illegal until former President Bush decided that automatic machine guns were guaranteed by a 235-year-old constitutional amendment and let the assault weapon ban lapse).

There was a man outside of Tacoma, Washington, that shot his family of five because his wife was allegedly going to leave him… the list goes on.

Gun violence has become such a part of American life that I think we forget just how absurd the idea of arming citizens really is. Nor do we realize the effect this has on our collective psyche.

A couple of weeks ago, I was inside a DVD-rental store in my neighborhood of Mumbai. As I gazed through the lack-luster selection of titles, a heated argument broke out between a service clerk and a customer. The customer was shouting irately, berating the clerk for God-knows-what (it was all in angry Hindi).

My first instinct was to move away – part of my subconscious was even considering where to duck if he pulled a gun.

And then I realized that my reaction was a product of growing up in America where gun violence is commonplace. We Americans are so used to shootings that when a fight breaks out, our first instinct is to protect ourselves because “who knows who’s carrying a gun.” None of the Indians in the store were worried; in fact, they got closer to watch the argument. Why?

Because you can’t just “pick up a gun” in Mumbai.

Allowing Americans to “pick up a gun” has created a dangerous society – one more dangerous than many of the locations in the world that our own government tells us to avoid with their color-coded terror warnings.

Metropolitan Mumbai has about 20 million people, comprised of all kinds of races and religions. In 2007, Mumbai experienced 228 homicides.

The San Francisco Bay Area, which includes more than a dozen large cities, has about 7 million people. There were 358 murders in the Bay Area in 2007.

That means that Mumbai had approximately one murder for every 100,000 people in 2007. The SF Bay Area had one homicide for every 20,000. Five times higher.

What is the cause? Are Americans simply more violent? More aggressive? Are we, by nature, more murderous than other people of the world? Doubtful.

The simplest explanation is also the most likely: America is dangerous because we have flooded our country with guns – not only at Big 5 Sporting Goods, but in our movies, TV shows, and popular culture. Watch an American action movie and keep an eye out – we revere guns so much that they get a solo close-up in movies so that we can admire them without things like actors getting in the way.

While the U.S. government warns Americans that terrorism is a threat to their way of life, they have effectively distracted us from the real threat. Sadly, we have accepted these mass shootings as a “way of life.” Columbine, Virginia Tech, Binghamton, and so many countless others that we have already forgotten.

When we are so good at destroying ourselves, why would any terrorist even bother trying to attack us?

Then again, maybe the terrorists have already figured this out. After the Binghamton attack, Pakistani Taliban leader Baituallah Mehsud publicly claimed he had ordered the shooting in retribution for US drone attacks. It’s not a good sign when Taliban terrorists are eager to claim responsibility for our own actions.

We are killing ourselves, and we’re only able to inflict such mass casualties because of guns.

It’s not like we are seeing a rash of mass stabbings (yet there are plenty of knives available). There aren’t any epidemics of mass strangulations (everyone has hands). Americans aren’t walking into their places of work and covertly mass poisoning co-workers (yet dozens of cheap household chemicals are available). But with guns, death has never been more efficient - or acceptable.

And yet our leaders look us in the eye and say “If some crazy lunatic decides to pick up a gun and go someplace and start shooting people, I really don’t have the answer how…[to] prevent anything like that.”

Binghamton’s police chief knows the answer. But in America's culture of guns and violence, it’s just not politically acceptable to say it.

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Peace Y'all