is this the time to stick to our guns?

Please read and comment.  Mahalo.

It’s on everyone’s minds this week. Amid all the other serious issues facing our country, the Las Vegas shooting has once again put guns in the middle of the national conversation.

Crisis creates trauma. This affects our decision-making in a variety of ways. Some people respond heroically, like the husband who died shielding his wife from a hail of bullets. Other people go into shock. Still others respond in fear and recoil from the public. Public figures have also reacted differently; late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel offered a serious, heartfelt message to the nation and our political leaders. Our political leaders offered empty, ritualized condolences — even as they contemplate legislation that will open more land to hunting and legalize silencers for guns.

You might think that mass shootings in America would make people realize that we need less semi-automatic killing machines in the hands of people who can snap even if they do pass a background check. But every time one of these tragedies occurs, gun sales go up — investors see this as such a sure bet that gun stocks soared after the Las Vegas shooting.

And these shootings are happening more often. In the last 1,735 days (since January 1, 2013) there have been 1,516 mass shootings. As of August of this year, there were more mass shootings than days in the year. They are so common that sometimes the news doesn’t even bother to report them all. Did you know that there was a shooting in Kansas on the same day as the Las Vegas shooting?

What happens to one of us happens to us all. Even if you didn’t know anyone in Las Vegas, the event caused you to think or talk or feel or listen or look. It caused me to write this. Which led you to read this. There is a ripple effect. Call it the collective unconscious, or interdependence, or empathy, or mirror neurons, or ubuntu, or whatever your belief system suggests. But know this: There is a link that joins us all. It doesn’t matter how we identify with race, or politics, or gender, or whatever. Today we are simply human. And we are all affected by Las Vegas.

 

Yesterday afternoon I was driving my eight year-old daughter home when she said something that made me wonder, so I asked: “Have you heard anything recently about Las Vegas?” She said yes, that the iPad she plays with at her mother’s house has a news app and that she saw pictures of dead people and a headline that didn’t make sense. “Daddy,” she said, “Why did that happen?” I looked at her in the rear view mirror and I told her the truth. “I don’t know, sweetheart. I’m not sure that anyone knows. What I do know is that there are ways we can be safer and hopefully stop it from happening again.”

I wonder whether our leaders have what it takes to make those changes. Even a superficial glance at our laws, culture and behavior — have a look at these charts, for instance — prove beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt that, when it comes to guns, the United States of America is out of its mind. Some people can’t even take things like this seriously anymore so they resort to coping through humor (which in this case is explicit, so please don’t click the link if you’re sensitive to profanity).

Whether I can change anything or not, I can’t afford to stop trying. My daughter, my students, and all the young people in this country deserve better. We have to do a better job of valuing what’s good for Americans (think healthcare, clean drinking water, freedom from police brutality and deportation, access to the Internet, and about 500 other things). We have to force the politicians who work for us to enact and enforce laws that support our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of not being shot.

For some strange reason, we Americans admire figures who stubbornly refuse to change their minds in the face of all reasonable evidence. “Good for you, man,” we say, “Way to stick to your guns.”

Learning is nothing if we don’t change our minds. New information adds neuronal pathways that didn’t previously exist — when you learn a new idea or a new skill, you change the shape of your brain. You literally change your mind. Deliberately resisting this is self-destructive.

I want my daughter — and you, dear reader — to grow to a ripe old age in a society where you can go out to a concert without getting your brains blown all over the sidewalk.

Maybe it’s finally time for us to reconsider whether we should stick to our guns.

(Also published on Medium.)