I’ve been kicking around the idea of this post for a while. Yesterday I almost put it on Facebook, but then didn’t. It seems like a heavy story to carry though.
In April 1990, just before my college graduation, my now-husband’s brother was murdered with a handgun. Brother was a battered spouse who had recently left his wife. She had lured him to a wooded location, where she shot him a total of nine times, once point blank in the forehead, three times to his body, and, after reloading, five times in the back after he was on the ground.
Husband’s brother was 27 years old. He worked on the COBE project at NASA. He was a talented artist and cartoonist.
None of the measures being debated now would have saved his life.
The woman who shot him had never been diagnosed with a mental illness. She had never committed a crime before. The gun she used had been in their home for a long time (they had been married for 10 years) and when he left he didn’t want it, so she kept it. She was certainly not on a terrorist watch list. He had never even reported the domestic abuse. On one occasion she had slammed his head in a door, giving him a concussion. Another time she stabbed him with a screwdriver. And because he was a man, no one would have taken it seriously anyway.
I guess I have a couple of points here. I think that not allowing people on the no-fly or terror watch list to buy guns won’t solve any problems. Here we are, pretending to think the Orlando shooter was a Muslim terrorist when we all know that it isn’t true. He had no ties to any terrorist group; he’d been interviewed by the FBI because of the way he talked.
And being anti-gay isn’t going to get him put on the watch list. Even though maybe it should.
So what am I saying about the current issues?
I suppose what I’m saying is that keeping people on the terror watch list from buying guns isn’t a real solution. There’s no due process involved with being on the list or with being taken off of it. And it wouldn’t have kept the Orlando shooter from getting a gun. It wouldn’t have kept any of the rest of these guys from getting guns either.
This is the fake excuse for what happened in Orlando, the thing we can blame this time. Before, it was the Confederate flag. Now we’re talking about depriving Americans of rights because someone suspects them of wrongdoing.
But, it’s better than nothing?
I think it’s just an easy fix for a problem that is way more complicated. A band-aid when a quadruple bypass is needed.
I think I want meaningful gun reforms. I want there to be funding for studies on gun violence. I want to have actual solutions, choices, other ways to solve the problems of gun violence. If my would-be sister-in-law hadn’t had access to a gun, she might have mowed him down with her car or poisoned him or taken some other path to kill him. If we’re going to leave guns in people’s hands, we need to find ways to keep them from being used to take lives.
ellen mcbee 