GUNS
The motto of New Hampshire, where I spend some of my time, is “Live Free Or Die,” and a significant number of its residents are rabid anti-Federalists, hence ferocious upholders of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution. They tend to forget that the Amendment, drafted by the Founders not long after the Revolutionary War, safeguarded every citizen’s right to bear arms specifically so that a citizens’ militia could be called up in time of national peril to bolster the Federal army, not fight against it.
Some of the local Tea Bag termites who crawled out of the woodwork after the subversive liberals put a black man in their White House have formed what they call militias to prepare for the day when Obama sends Federal troops to take their guns away in order to turn New Hampshire into a socialist state like Denmark or Vermont. They hold rallies under the Don’t Tread On Me flag, and some of them sport Confederate Stars and Bars decals on the bumpers of their pickup trucks, ostensibly in the name of states’ rights, but actually because they truly think black folks ought to go back to being servants, if not outright slaves, and leave politics to the white folks. Jim Crow is alive and well in the Granite State.
They have a grand old time preaching to each other at their rallies, for of course no gun-control advocate who voted for Obama would dare show up at one of them. But so far these homegrown militia maniacs are few in number, and most of the gun-toting folks I know in New Hampshire shoot deer, not humans from the blue side of the political spectrum.
We don’t post our back woodlot against hunting, though we’ve posted our additional acreage on the other side of the state road at the recent request of a neighbor (a local cop, as it happens) whose wife feared a stray bullet might hit her while she was outside during deer season. My own wife and I are of two minds about hunting in general. We don’t try to bag our Bambis each year, because neither of us cares for the gamy taste of venison, and we don’t own guns, anyway. Also, killing a stag with a high-powered rifle equipped with a scope, after laying down the concentrated scent of a doe in estrus to lure him within range seems a trifle obscene to us, as if a female undercover cop posing as a hooker to entrap a john shot him dead instead of just arresting him. But to their credit, the hunters we know eat the bucks they kill, rather than saving their racks as trophies and leaving their bodies for the coyotes and crows.
And our hunter friends might fairly accuse us of hypocrisy for being sanctimonious about hunting deer, but eagerly devouring beef from cattle rounded up and slaughtered under conditions of unspeakable cruelty. For despite the efforts of such worthies as Temple Grandin to mitigate the monstrosity of the process, the corporate beef industry continues to subject steers and cows to horrible misery during the last days of their lives, because it’s cost-effective. If it weren’t, your Whopper or Big Mac would cost three times as much as it does.
But there’s another aspect of contemporary hunting in New Hampshire that troubles us, and that’s the nature of the guns themselves. There is a black-powder hunting season, before the regular one, in which the deer hunters take to the woods with single-shot rifled muskets the mountain-man Jim Bridger might have recognized. However, these purists are a tiny minority. Far more common are people like the guy who lives just down the road from us. We’ve never met him, but each year in late August, just before deer season, we are deafened by the racket he makes as he sights in his weapons by firing off dozens of rounds in his back yard as fast as he can squeeze the trigger. It’s evident to me, from my Army service, that his main rifle is an AR-15, the civilian version of the military M-16, with a fifteen-round magazine. The AR-15 differs from the military gun only in that it’s incapable of fully-automatic fire. And that difference is actually negligible, as the psychotic kids reponsible for the ongoing epidemic of mass shootings have proven to ghastly effect.
So Daddy keeps a semi-automatic rifle in the house, locked in a gun cabinet where he thinks his kids can’t get at it. Each year he takes it out and carries it into the woods to blow deer away, rapid-fire, dressed in a camouflaged outfit exactly like that of a soldier. It’s as if in his mind, he’s declared war on the whole species Odocoileus virginianus, and regards his sortie into the forest as a bold raid on the enemy (well, the deer can’t shoot back, but never mind).
And kids can always get at Daddy’s (or Mommy’s) guns, one way or another, especially kids raised in a culture that regards gun ownership as an essential part of its proud national tradition. Or if they’re sixteen or older, they can buy their own weapons without any questions at gun shows. So there will be many more Columbine, Sandy Hook, and Orlando massacres staged by maniacs. As I write, President Obama, faced by a Congress in thrall to the NRA lobby, has recently used executive privilege to establish manditory background screening of anyone who tries to buy a gun. The screening process will cost a bit of money, and the current Congress will simply refuse to fund it.
And of course there are thousands of firearms already floating around in this country, and easily available, legally or otherwise. It’s estimated that there are three times as many guns as there are people in America. As the Beatles once sang, “Happiness is a warm gun.” Mark David Chapman showed John Lennon how true that was- and that was before gun ownership really took off.
With so many heavily-armed people tromping around in the woods every fall, hunting accidents are bound to happen. One of the saddest ones I’ve heard about occurred in southern New Hampshire not long after my wife and I bought our house there. A French chef known as Maître Jacques, who specialized in Norman provincial cooking, especially dishes involving wild game, had established a gourmet restaurant in a nearby town, and one evening at dusk, he went into the forest to shoot a stag. During a previous walk in the woods, in a clearing at the top of a slope the chef had seen a flattened place in the grass where deer had bedded down a couple of nights before. He began to climb back to the clearing.
But in early autumn, in the brown-gray gloaming before nightfall, the light is tricky. There’s an old Appalachian folk-song about a hunter who shot his lover by accident:
“She’d her apron wrapped about her,
And he took her for a swan,
But it’s oh, and alas, it was she,
Polly Vaughan.”
Unbeknownst to Jacques, his young hunting companion was on the way up to the clearing when he saw something large moving toward him in the dim light. Assuming it was a buck Jacques had spooked down within range of his rifle, he pulled the trigger. Adieu, Maître Jacques.
Crime novels often feature hunting accidents which prove to be far from accidental, but in this case, no crime was involved, as far as the cops were concerned. Gun ownership is a fact of life (and death) in the Land of the Free, and until the day when Americans get serious about gun control, death by gunshot, deliberate or accidental, will continue to rank not far below car crashes on insurance companies’ actuarial lists. Chekhov wrote that if you introduce a gun in the first scene of a play, it has to be used before the final curtain. He was right: as I write (July, 2016), we’re in the last act of America’s gun play, and the bodies are heaped up all over the stage.
A lot of them are men and women of color, the victims of trigger-happy, paranoid white cops, but more than a few cops have been shot, too, as young, angry black men start to go on shooting sprees in retaliation for the free-fire zones the police have turned their neighborhoods into. The cop-killings, though far less frequent than incidents involving cops shooting black civilians for the crime of existing while black, has whipped the right wing into frothing contempt for the “Black Lives Matter” movement, which is described by conservative Republicans as racist, or at least exceptionalist, since, as they insist, all lives matter. However, what goes unsaid, but is clearly implied by that statement, is that the lives of police officers, most of whom are white, matter a skosh more to American society than those of young men and women of color, especially those from neighborhoods in which the cops feel, rightly or wrongly, like soldiers on patrol in enemy territory. To the right wing, black people gunned down by cops who are trying to do their jobs under hostile conditions are merely collateral damage.
There is malice on both sides of the racial divide, without question, but so far people of color have exhibited more patience and forgiveness than whites. I suspect their forbearance will change in the near future, when non-white people become a majority in cities and states across the nation. For the moment, however, the tension is still perilously high, and when tempers snap, out come the guns.
The NRA has long maintained that guns don’t kill people, people do. What that shamelessly venal front for the gun manufacturing industry has always left out of its mantra is that without easy access to guns, people wouldn’t be able to kill as easily as they do. Doing someone in with a knife, a blunt instrument, a garotte, or your bare hands, is a lot harder than blowing his or her brains out with a firearm. And committing suicide with a gun is the most common method among men. Women are more apt to choose pills, but they shoot themselves, too, now that there are so many light-weight hand guns available.
There may be a legitimate argument in favor of the possession of long guns – rifles and shotguns, e.g. – for hunting purposes. But the number of hunters dwindles every year, as increasing numbers of people move from the country to the cities and their suburbs. Hunting is becoming something of an elite sport, restricted to rich guys who can afford trips to places like Wyoming’s Absaroka Range, where they pay through the nose for a guided pack trip that almost always results in a trophy elk or moose. Or for those not as well heeled, whose blood-lust is slaked by killing birds, other areas in the not-so-Wild West offer quail and partridge hunting under strictly controlled conditions: the birds are lured in advance to feeding stations, and when the hunters arrive, the guides just spook them up into the air. It’s skeet shooting, only with live birds instead of clay pigeons. There are also wild boar hunts which are just as carefully rigged against the prey. I once suggested to a boar-hunting friend that it might be even more manly sport if he and his hunting party went out on horseback armed with spears instead of rifles, the way the gentry did in the middle ages. He thought I was kidding, so the friendship survived. And I must say, the smoked boar meat he us after one of his hunts was delicious.
But there is no credible excuse for a private citizen to own a hand gun, unless he or or she is a hunting guide taking people on elk or moose hunts in bear country. Our Wyoming friend in the Absaroka Range carries a holstered .45, a “stopper,” in case of a bad encounter with a bear during one of his hunts, though he’s rarely had to fire it, and even when he has, he’s shot into the air to scare the grizzly away. The NRA, however, maintains that owning a pistol or a revolver is vital to self-defense against burglars, home invaders, and other nasty types, and it insists that the various bad people with guns who have gone on shooting sprees in public could have been stopped before they did any harm by good people with guns.
Both statements are lies. I have yet to read a credible report of any upright armed citizen preventing a robbery or a massacre with his or her trusty pistol. There was an off-duty cop at one of the recent scenes of mayhem, but he stated that he was afraid to draw his service weapon because in the general confusion and panic, he wasn’t absolutely sure who was doing the shooting, and feared he might hit the wrong person. On the other hand, police records nation-wide assert that domestic squabbles nowadays often result in death or serious injury, because of a hand gun kept in the house. And because too many pistol or revolver owners are careless about locking their weapons away from their children, little kids sometimes kill or wound their playmates or themselves while fooling around with the family peacemaker.
But you have to hand it to the NRA for its brazenness. Faced with these undeniable facts, its spokesman simply ignored them, and urged Americans to buy more guns, in case Obama – or Hillary Clinton, if she wins this November – rams a ban on them through Congress. The warning sank in: gun-shop owners report record sales for the current quarter, with even rosier prospects for the pre-Christmas season.
So there seems no end in sight to the murderous madness in this gun-besotted nation. A stringent, fully-enforceable gun control law will pass both houses of Congress shortly after the Second Coming of Christ. And if Christ is anything like the angry, vengeful god His fundamentalist, gun-worshiping followers believe in, He’ll appear on Judgment Day packing serious heat.