A New Hope

As I saw my 10,000th post approaching, I began trying to think of a worthy topic to expend it on. A few nights ago, one fell into my lap.

A seemingly deranged individual opened fire on a crowd of concert-goers in Las Vegas, NV with an arsenal of industrial-strength killing machines, modified to maximize their lethality. His brutal barrage ended the lives of (as of now) fifty-eight people, and wounded nearly five hundred more.

Let that sink in for a moment. Almost six hundred people killed or injured by one man. Bad enough, of course; but scale it down a few notches, and you have Sandy Hook, Orlando, Virginia Tech, and a long, painful litany of other events of mass bloodshed.

If you're a human being with a whit of compassion for your fellow man (that rules out NRA members and republigans), you've probably said (or at least thought), "Please, God, this has to STOP!"

What are we going to do about it?

We can wring our hands and wail and gnash our teeth and rend our garments, as we've been doing, but remember: if you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you always got--which is nothing. We can write letters to our Congress-critters, but the responsive ones are too few and far between; the rest, as Jimmy Kimmel said, have their balls in a money clip owned by the NRA. And even if we got something through Congress, we'd never get it across the AnusMouth's desk. Even if we miraculously got the pResiDunce's signature on a law, I seriously doubt that a Supreme Court owned by RobertsAlitoThomasGorsuck would uphold it.

So what does that leave us? I'm led to believe that we need new strategy, new tactics, like some groups on the other side have employed. (No, I'm not going to advocate assassinating gun company executives, like anti-abortion fanatics do (see George Tiller), tempting though it might be….). But maybe there are some stratagems from the dark side that might get the attention of the media and make the lives of our hoplosexual (gun-humper--"one who enjoys sex with weapons" ) crowd a little more difficult. Changing the vocabulary, a favorite repuglikan tactic is one way. I no longer call these toys "assault weapons," because that doesn't necessarily form a bad image in the reptilian minds of the NRA fan-club; I call them "industrial-strength killing machines," a term that magnifies their most evil property. But we need to go further.

Have we ever staged a rally at a gun factory to remind them that real people die because of their product, or at the very least, divert their attention from their production and their profits? If we haven't, maybe it's time we started doing it. Block their shipments in and out, make it a bit more difficult to move their arsenals of death. Make them feel some of the pain that the rest of us feel (if they are capable of feeling pain). Have we ever stopped a customer from walking into a gun shop, screaming in his face that he is a murderer? In the civil-rights movement, we sat at lunch counters to protest segregation. Why can't we sit-in at gun-store counters to protest their murders?

Here's another thing. Walk into any Walgreen's pharmacy/store, or CVS, or local supermarket, go to the magazine rack (where they sell publications, not the one with bullet-holder add-ons…). Count the number of gun-related publications they sell. I would almost bet they outnumber every other type of pubs, except horoscopes and celebrity-worship rags. Why do we tolerate this? Why aren't we hammering these stores to get rid of these rags??

I'm not joined at the hip to these specific tactics (though I do think we need to work hard at getting the gun-porn publications off of the shelves), but I do want to encourage the anti-death-by-gun forces to think "outside the tesseract" about new tactics--because, quite simply, the old tactics have gotten us nowhere. We need to find new levers to move public opinion more toward making the gun culture anathema to civilized human beings. We cannot keep going on as we have been. As I wrote earlier, if you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you always got--and all we've gotten is: murdered.