Morning Thoughts: October 5, 2017

May I make a modest proposal on the violence imposed on America from firearms? After all, everyone else has.

Thanks. Now these are just my personal thoughts. You are welcome to yours. If we don’t agree, we can still be friends. Okay? Here goes.

First, our congress will not seriously consider passing any legislature involving gun control anytime soon. Emotions are too high, potential political repercussions too drastic, fear of strangers too endemic, and the firearms lobby too rich for there to be any serious discussion.

Let’s just shut up about legislation? Okay? I know the majority of Americans desire it. But, the majority of Americans would like for women to be treated as equal to men. See what that’s gotten us?

Second, the violence will continue. It is too tightly woven into our country’s emotional fabric. Just watch the movie trailers. Any problem that can’t be solved with a car chase and shootout isn’t worth addressing. Violence is not, it would appear to aliens, our best solution to failed human interactions—it is the only solution. Now, the bar has been set even higher. “Only 58 killed? Hold my spare Uzi and watch this.”

Can we do anything? Perhaps. Consider the following.

Americans don’t urinate or defecate in public. Why not? It’s a natural thing to do, after all. They do it in some societies. The Vietnamese do. At last they were doing it the last time I was there. My first memory of the country was standing by my sea-bag at the airport staging area, waiting for a mortar round to land, whistling “Popeye the Sailor Man,” and watching a local worker “hist up” one leg of his silk pajamas and take a leak in front of everyone. It didn’t rate a second look. Going to the bathroom in public, or anywhere, is a natural thing.

Face it, any American would do it under the right conditions. For “the happy few,” of us who still believe in biology, it is one of humankind’s most sacred rights.  Nonetheless, we discountenance the public practice of the act to the point of passing laws and regulations against it. Those laws result from no intrinsic threat to the health, safety, welfare, or morals involved. We simply choose, as a society, to deny the public practice of a completely natural function granted our bodies by (take your pick) a benevolent deity or 4.5 billion years of genetic descent through modification.

So what? Here is my thought: if we can, through the force of social abhorrence, deny display of a natural bodily function in certain places, a function that is necessary, unavoidable, and a right, why couldn’t that same technique be applied to firearms?

See, we don’t deny ourselves the right to go to the bathroom, we simply say that it’s not fitting to do it in certain ways. That works, generally, with the exception of babies, and southern males feeling the call of nature within a specified driving distance of a beer joint.

Anyway. Suppose society begins to say, “Keep your guns. Collect your guns. Shoot your guns. Hunt with your guns. Sleep with your guns. Fondle your guns until your heart’s content. Protect your home with them if necessary; I would with mine.”

“Just don’t:

- Expose them to view or pull them out in public,

- Wave them around it public,

- Empty them out in public,

- Talk about them in public, particularly in a bragging manner,

- Tell young children what you would like to use them for (your guns, that is) in public,

- Or use them to be a jerk in public.”

We are talking about social approbation, not legal stricture. Why goodness, in a few years, the violation of the any of the above would be as socially unacceptable as describing one’s female problems while yelling into a cell phone at Walmart. Uh, wait ….

Let me use another example. It would be as socially unacceptable as “dropping trow” at a Sunday School picnic. Yeah, that’s better.

I won’t go as far as to suggest registering repeat offenders. Someone very close to me did, but she always sets higher goals for society.

At any rate, for gun worshipers, go at it. If you feel the need for heat or the smell of cordite, go inside and blast away. Outside? Hold it in and don’t talk about it. It will be hard, but take Hamlet’s advice:

“Refrain to-night,

And that shall lend a kind of easiness

To the next abstinence: the next more easy;

For use almost can change the stamp of nature …”

You will soon be welcomed back into polite society.

Just thinking.
Pardon the length - complicated topic