From the Editor: The voices shooters are hearing
The shootings in El Paso and Dayton over the weekend were unusual quantitatively but not qualitatively.
Thirty-one people died, and the two shootings occurred in 24 hours. Otherwise, the scenarios are depressingly familiar.
And you didn’t have to wait for the media, Twitter and Facebook responses. By now, you could have written them yourself.
Thoughts and prayers. Cowardly attack. It’s the president’s fault. It's the liberals' fault. We need to ban guns. We need more guns. Mental health. Video games. Assault weapons.
We’ve heard them all before. Reality doesn’t seem to be paying attention.
But that’s not to say reality hasn’t been affected.
If you want to go to a St. Mary Parish School Board meeting, you’ll have to empty your pockets and walk through a metal detector.
East St. Mary public schools have been retrofitted so that when visitors come in, they enter an area that is separated from the corridors where they might run into kids.
The schools already had cameras at the doors, and you had to be buzzed in by someone in the office. But that wasn’t enough.
Last year, I went to the federal courthouse in Lafayette because a closed session item about a federal lawsuit had appeared on a School Board agenda. Courthouse entry required emptying my pockets, having my legal pad X-rayed and walking through a metal detector.
My only trip to a foreign country was to Canada in 1997. I was questioned more extensively getting into the Lafayette courthouse than when crossing an international border.
My suspenders usually make metal detectors go off, so don’t ask what happens at the airport. The TSA could at least buy dinner first.
But despite all our precautions, and despite an overall violent crime rate that has declined since the 1990s, we still live with school shootings, nightclub shootings, concert shootings and now big box store shootings.
I don’t have much to contribute to a solution. But that hasn’t stopped our elected officials, so here goes:
If you want to make guns safer, make everyone listen to their grandpas, uncles and dads.
Everyone learned how to act with a gun in the place where I grew up. That would be Gasconade County, Missouri, all 500 square miles of it, where the only two towns of any size have a combined population about half that of Morgan City.
Even though Gasconade is among the smallest of Missouri’s 104 counties, it has traditionally been one near the top in the harvest of white-tail deer.
Everybody goes deer hunting. A great-nephew killed his first deer at age 7.
So every house has at least one rifle, and some have locked cabinets full of them. Yet I can remember only three homicides in all the time I was growing up, and only two of them involved firearms.
That’s probably because when a boy gets to the cracking voice and fuzzy upper lip age, somebody — Grandpa, Dad, an uncle — will give him The Lecture.
This is a rifle. Hold it. No, this is how you hold it.
This is how you load it. This is how you clean it. This is how you carry it. This is what you do with it if you have to climb over a fence.
And I love you, Son, but if I catch you acting the fool with a gun, I’ll knock you into the middle of next week.
There was another lesson, too, which may not have had anything to do with deer: Don’t pick up a gun unless you’re ready to use it.
Others get the same lecture from other kinds of people, maybe a police firing range instructor or a gunnery sergeant.
If you’re like me, you hear their voice in your head every time you’re even thinking about touching a gun.
Heaven knows our many mass shooters seem to hear voices. They just don’t hear the right voice.
Grandpa can’t solve everything, of course. As the movie “Full Metal Jacket” memorably explains, both Charles Whitman, our first bona fide random mass killer, and JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald were trained by the U.S. military.
But teaching a kid respect for a gun means teaching a kid to respect people. That sort of respect is in short supply.
There’s a debate over what the Second Amendment is really about, but it’s now held to establish a more or less universal right to bear arms. It’s our bad luck that it doesn’t require someone to teach people how to act with one.
Bill Decker is managing editor of The Daily Review.