In 1992, my son was killed in a school shooting in
Massachusetts, a random victim of a disturbed fellow college student who’d
purchased a semiautomatic rifle at a local gun shop and smuggled it onto
campus. College officials had been warned that this student had a gun, but they
didn’t know how to respond; school shootings were still too new.
How could we have imagined then the cellphone videos of the
carnage in Las Vegas? Or Thousand Oaks, Calif. trending on social media because
a dozen people, including college students, were slaughtered in a country music bar?
America’s response to our gun problem has taken some strange
turns since 1992. We no longer ask, “How could this have happened?” Gun
violence has become reliable content in the 24-hour news cycle.
Survivor activists work toward the cultural change we’ll need
to eradicate the virus that’s grown bone-deep in us. Lucy McBath, a black woman
whose 17-year-old son was shot and killed by a white man for playing loud
music, got angry enough to run for Congress in Georgia — and last week
she won the seat. Manuel Oliver, whose son was killed in the Parkland,Fla.,
school shooting, makes public art related to gun violence, including a 3-D
printed model of his son.
endorsed by Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education, that putting guns in
schools will reduce school shootings. After the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting,
President Trump seconded the motion: “If they had some kind of protection inside
the temple, maybe it could have been a very much different situation.”
I think of the crowded school library in which my son died.
I try to imagine a librarian drawing her Glock and returning fire.
This scenario resonates for me. A few years ago, tired of
being told by gun rights people that I knew nothing about firearms, I bought a
handgun and learned to carry and use it. I found the transgressive nature of
the exercise stimulating. Survivors of gun violence are not supposed to walk
around with guns. I also discovered, to my surprise, that shooting was
therapeutic. I was mastering the instrument of my suffering. Now I
reckon I’m at just the level of casual knowledge that a gun-owning janitor or
history teacher might be expected to have attained. What if I’d been in that
library in 1992, charged with keeping my son safe?
I put the question to a man I know, a retired Alcohol,
Tobacco and Firearms agent who specializes in training people to use guns
defensively — the kind of training that this administration might want to give
teachers, the kind that the National Rifle Association imagines could stop the
killer in a mass shooting.
This man spoke with me about the low proficiency of the
average gun owner: “Imagine shooting hoops in your driveway and thinking you
can play in the N.B.A.” He spoke of the hundreds of hours necessary to achieve
the Zen-like level of expertise in which, in the midst of chaos, responses are
instantaneous and instinctive. He spoke of the continual training necessary to
maintain those skills, and he generously agreed to take me through an
abbreviated version of that curriculum, training intended to turn an average
shooter into, well, what exactly? I wasn’t sure.
To read more CLICK HERE
No comments:
Post a Comment