When the Chief Goes Bad

You should know—click on the video below, and you’ll be exposed to a level of vitriol and hatred rarely seen. Your gut may wrench—mine did. Your blood pressure will rocket. When the madman fires his automatic weapon—which you knew was coming—after the explosive, profanity-laced rant, it’s like being kicked in the stomach.

And the madman is Chief of Police Mark Kessler.

And on 1 August, the town board of Gilberton, Pennsylvania, attempted to hold a meeting to decide what to do about this nut. The video had gone viral, with half of the country loving it, the other half horrified. And there was a problem—sure, most of the town loves their guns, but even this was a little extreme.

But not as extreme as what Kessler did, which was to get a hundred other crazy people from all around the country to run into Gilberton, and block the doorway to the meeting. And they were all weaponed-up.

This had, as you can imagine, a slightly chilling effect on the citizenry, many of whom opted to stay home—presumably under their beds. Nonetheless, the town board voted to suspend Kessler for a month, without pay. Here’s what Michael Morrill, an activist who had a petition of 20,000 signatures asking to fire Kessler, had to say:

In an email Morrill told me, “I have been organizing for four decades. I have faced Klansmen in Kentucky, Ustase in Bosnia and police indiscriminately beating demonstrators in Italy. [Wednesday] night in Gilberton was more frightening than any of those situations.”

Nor was it the first time that Kessler had got himself in trouble. In 2010, he illegally arrested a councilman and did a strip search on him. The reason? Kessler said it was the profanity the councilman allegedly used. The councilman turned around and sued—and the taxpayers forked up $15,000 in an out-of-court settlement.

There was also a little incident in a crowded bar, during which the off-duty cop shot himself in the hand. There was a brawl going on at the time; the event is still under investigation.

Well, the town is scared; many people who might have spoken out at the meeting feared retaliation, nor is it hard to see why. Here’s what one woman had to say:

You know why there’s not more residents here? The threats. That’s why. Because they’re afraid. They’re afraid they’re going to have their windows shot out.” – Lifelong Gilberton resident Rose McCarthy speaking about Police Chief Mark Kessler and his supporters on July 31, 2013.

Wanting to be fair, I went into Kessler’s website, and I bring you this:

"FREEDOM ISN'T FREE" 

I will sacrifice all I have defending my country, our constitution, OUR FREEDOMS

NEVER AGAIN WILL I BE RULED BY TYRANTS, DICTATORS, OR SCUM POLATICIANS

 For I am jus one man who stood against many and said, NO MORE!

OK—spelling is not his long suit. But let’s talk straight. This guy brought a hundred armed people and barred the way to a public meeting. The moment he did that, there should have been arrests. In fact, where is the United States Justice Department?

A month ago, the feds came to an agreement with the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico about the reforms needed and the plan of action established to improve the police department of the island.

In fact, the feds might address another situation: Kessler’s Constitutional Security Force, the group that provided the 100 gun-toting crazies last Wednesday night. According to one Internet source, the CSF has members in 38 states. Is it true? Who knows….

This is insanity. We have heavily armed nuts who are convinced that there is a dictatorship and who will, at the drop of a hat, blow the bejusus out of everybody.

We’re on the brink of catastrophe.

Big Tobacco, Step Aside

Warning, first off. If you watch the video below, you’ll be in for two minutes of vitriol that, despite all you know of emotional hijacking, will leave you shaking with rage.

Now then, here’s how it started. I wrote a post about guns recently, in which I stated that some gun owners are amping up the rhetoric to fairly high levels. So much so that a college professor wrote an op-ed for the Charleston Gazette; here’s the quote I used:

In a bizarre op-ed in The Charleston Gazette last week, journalism professor Christopher Swindell argued that the National Rifle Association “advocates armed rebellion against the duly elected government of the United States of America.”

I went on to say that the new president of the NRA, Jim Porter, had called Obama a “fake president,” though I didn’t say, as did Swindell, that the NRA had called for an armed rebellion. I did say that the one motivating emotion associated with the gun owners I had spoken with was fear.

A reader reacted in disbelief through Facebook—was I serious? And that set me thinking—what is it about guns? Having a talk about abortion is tea party conversation next to the typical discourse on gun control.

So I got curious—what happens when you shoot a gun? Do you get a rush? What goes on neurologically? Well, the last gun I shot was a BB gun, so I turned to somebody with more recent, and authentic, experience.

Yo, Eric, step into the blog!

“Depends on the caliber,” said Eric, after I had posed the question. He then went on to give me the advice about preparing / preventing kickback. Then he wanted to know, “what are you thinking of shooting?”

Well, we went on to have an interesting conversation. He thought it was possible, suspected dopamine was at play, and mentioned video games and gambling machines.

Bang on, Eric!

In the wake of recent tragic events, there have been a raft of articles about new reasons for gun-control and the psychological make-up of mass murderers (See NYT or WSJ), but the authors of this piece (co-authored with neuroscientist James Olds) believe there’s a critical component missing from this discussion: the very addictive nature of firearms.

That’s Steven Kotler, writing in Forbes Magazine. And let me say this up front: the following is conjecture, a theory.

But Kotler and Olds also believe that dopamine might have a role, and they too adduce the large amount of research on first-person shooting video games, which leads to increased levels of dopamine. (Tangentially, by blocking the reuptake—just what the SSRI antidepressants do.) And what does dopamine do? In the brain, it’s an upper, a motivator. We feel pleasure, excited, and eager to explore the world. Oh, and what drug floods the brain with dopamine? Cocaine, the most addictive of all.

The problem? The first hit of dopamine is always the best. So the brain seeks higher and higher of whatever the addiction is—cigarettes, booze, cocaine, shopping—to get that initial high.

Second, well, let the authors explain:

Two things make this even more alarming. First, because the human brain evolved in an era of immediacy—when threats and rewards were of the lions, tigers and food variety—the dopamine circuitry has an inborn timing mechanism. If the reward follows the stimulus by roughly 100-200 milliseconds, it’s sitting in dopamine’s sweet spot. Firing a muzzle loader—for example—would certainly release dopamine, but it takes too long between multiple firings for a significant reward loop to be created. Firing an automatic weapon, though, sits close to the sweet spot—an assault weapon can fire a round every 100 milliseconds. Meaning not only are guns addictive, but automatic weaponry is far more addictive than most.

Well, as I said, all of this is conjecture. What about anecdotal evidence? I googled “gun addiction,” and came across thefiringline.com, which bills itself “the leading online forum for firearm enthusiasts.” Here’s a sample:

Is there a 12-point program for gun addiction?? I retired two years ago and firearms and shooting has become my major hobby and obsession!! In the past 24 months I have purchased on average one gun a month. Now I have traded some that I already had but my purchases seem to be growing exponentially. I enjoy buying a new gun as much as shooting them.

I can't pass a gun shop without checking it out. I go to Cabelas and Bass Pro every week to see if they have anything new. Whenever my wife and I travel the first thing I do is check out the local gun shops. I go to every gun show within a 200 mile radius and that's at least one a month. I spend probably 2 hours a day online searching auctions and forums.

My wish list grows daily. Now, I have sufficient discretionary income to support this addiction but if things continue at the current rate that could be at risk.

Please tell me that I'm not alone and this behavior is perfectly normal. Is there such a thing as firearms obsessive- compulsive disorder and how do you treat it???

Best answer? Get a wife with a shoe addiction, and you’ll never have a problem.

Lastly, I turned to another source, Tim Dickinson of Rolling Stone. Here’s what he has to say:

For the moment, that strategy is paying handsome dividends. Handgun sales have jumped 70 percent since 2008, racking up an estimated $1.5 billion in sales last year. Powerful pistols – sold under brands like Beretta, Glock and Ruger – have replaced traditional hunting guns as the industry's cash cow. Revenue from assault rifles is growing at an even faster clip – having doubled in the past five years, to $489 million. Gaudy profit margins have become the norm: Top gun makers enjoy gross profits of 30 percent or more. Ammunition manufacturers, too, boast of being fat and happy. And it's no wonder: AR-15 enthusiasts brag they can fire up to 400 rounds in 60 seconds. Paying roughly 50 cents a bullet, such shooters are blowing through $200 worth of ammo in a hot minute.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-gun-industrys-deadly-addiction-20130228#ixzz2VM6g4vPV

Well, if it’s true that assault rifles fire at a rate that’s within dopamine’s “sweet spot,” then it’s no wonder that they’re selling so well. And if a little addiction isn’t enough, how about this?

For a younger generation raised on graphic video games, shooting at paper targets or "plinking" bottles and tin cans doesn't carry much appeal. So the industry has come up with some new ways to make shooting more like playtime. A firm called Zombie Industries manufactures life-size mannequins for target practice. Some models "bleed" fluorescent goo when shot. Others respond to gunfire in a more lifelike fashion, opening up gaping chest wounds and "bursting into little pieces of blood-soaked zombie matter when you shoot them." The manufacturer offers a wide line of "zombie" targets, including "the Terrorist" – an undead bin Laden – and, more troubling, a blood-soaked, buxom woman-target called "The Ex."

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-gun-industrys-deadly-addiction-20130228page=2#ixzz2VM8EYnQP

I rest my case.

Treason, Anyone?

Readers will know—a group of people and I have been reading 30,000 randomly generated names for weeks now. Why 30,000? That’s the number of people killed by gunshot every year; using information from the CDC, I compiled a list of 720 pages.

I had been nervous about doing the reading, since I don’t do confrontation well. And I had thought that I would run into a lot of NRA supporters. So in all these weeks of talking to people, how many card-carrying NRA members have I spoken with?

Two.

And I have spoken to many, many people. So what’s the story? Yes, I am in Puerto Rico, but there are many tourists here. There are days, in fact, when two or three cruise ships come into the harbor—the city becomes Des Moines, linguistically and culturally.

The two cases of pro-NRA folk were identical; they were white, middle-aged men. They didn’t want to talk, one saying frankly, “I’m not interested in your views,” after I had asked him why he was in favor of the NRA. The other engaged briefly in debate, but declined to sit in front of the camera and give his point of view.

Generally, I would prefer to be wrong rather than right—you learn something. And if someone can tell me, for example, why gun shops require background checks but gun shows do not, I’m willing to listen.

And I started out this project wanting to know—what is it that fuels this debate about guns and gun control? What is it that stirs such strong feelings on both sides?

I’m hard-pressed to think of a more potent symbol than a gun. Yes, I considered briefly the image of Christ on the cross, or the swastika (please note—I’m not likening the two) or the sickle and hammer. Strong, yes—but as strong as a gun?

And I’ve come to believe—the NRA advocates, based on my brief encounters personally and my longer encounters electronically, are deeply fearful people.

And whom do they fear?

The government.

They see their guns as the only thing stopping the government from tyranny. And I’ll go further.

They see their world disappearing. There’s a black guy in the White House. Gay people are getting married, and Spanish is spoken everywhere. Hillary may well be president in 2017, and that will drive them nuts.

They see their guns as protection, and each day brings with it added urgency; more need for bigger, more destructive weapons.

But there’s a problem. And a journalism professor at the University of Kentucky brought it out, as reported by the Daily Caller:

In a bizarre op-ed in The Charleston Gazette last week, journalism professor Christopher Swindell argued that the National Rifle Association “advocates armed rebellion against the duly elected government of the United States of America.”

Bizarre? How so? The most extreme gun advocates quite openly state—their guns are their defense against the government. And how far is it that defense become offense?

A Libertarian wants to get 10,000 people carrying loaded weapons to march through Washington DC on the Fourth of July. He says it will be peaceful, but who knows? To me, it’s a pretty provocative act.

It’s also provocative to argue, as the new president of the NRA has, that Obama is a “fake president.” In olden days, it would be called unpatriotic; I still think it is.

People are reacting to a series of threats to our liberties. The media calls it fear. That’s not it, that not it. It’s a sense of rational outrage that’s been building for a very long time. It’s not going to diminish. It’s not going to go away….

I hear some Americans say with the last election the country is lost. No. No. An election was lost. There’s another election more important to the Second Amendment right around the corner. With the U.S. Senate and the House up for grabs, we as individual N.R.A. members can direct the massive energy of spontaneous combustion to regain the political high ground. We do that, and Obama can be stopped.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2013/05/jim-porter-and-the-nras-challenge-to-america.html

That was Porter speaking recently at the NRA national convention, and it’s clear—the NRA is playing out the demagogue’s favorite trick: create a false crisis and stir up the masses.

God save us all.

The Trigger that Pulls the Finger

If you watch the video clip below—and there may be reasons not to—you may have the opposite effect than the title suggests. The video is called “The Liberator,” but might better be called ‘The Enslaver.”

The worlds of technology and computing have merged into something truly frightening: the world’s first printable, plastic gun. Yes, you can now download the file for printing a gun from the website…nah, you won’t get it here.

You may be wondering how a “printer” can print a gun. Well, it seems that there are printers that lay down threads of melted polymers—basically liquid plastic—in precise patterns. It’s just like a regular printer, except this one is 3D, with the layers being placed on top of each other; instead of ink, the printer uses plastic.

So a 25-year old law student at the University of Texas got it into his head to create the thing, and joined up with a young engineer to do so. And as you can see in the video below, it worked. So now, anybody with 8,000 bucks to buy a 3D printer from eBay, can download the file for creating the device, which has one metal part, completely inessential but placed there for the purpose of triggering metal detectors.

This is hogwash, of course: anybody who wishes to avoid detection would be able to do so in seconds.

You could also point out that $8000 will buy you a lot of guns more powerful than a plastic gun, but that isn’t the point. Sure, it’s 8000 bucks now, but in five years time? We’ll probably be making our kids’ dolls at home from files downloaded from Mattel, not running out to buy Barbie at Toys ’R Us.

So that means that anyone, any man / woman / and-especially-worrisome-child will be able to get a cheap, lethal, anonymous gun. And that means forget gun control, because there won’t be a chance of that happening. In fact, here is the (un-named) website’s comment on the impact of this gun:

This project might change the way we think about gun control and consumption. How do governments behave if they must one day operate on the assumption that any and every citizen has near instant access to a firearm through the Internet? Let’s find out.

“Hey, dude, let’s make a cheap, lethal weapon available to absolutely everybody, and see what happens!”

“Cool, dude!”

I would call this attitude irresponsible, but to Cody Wilson, the 25-year old mastermind of this affair, it’s not. It is, in fact, all very cozy with his radical libertarian / anarchist beliefs. Everyone, you see, should have a gun because the government can come at any moment and infringe on our God-given rights.

Oh—just one problem. Having all the guns in the world is useless, because the government has far more, and far more resources. Remember the Branch Davidian Siege in Waco in 1993? Guess who won?

Several thoughts come to mind. Readers will thrill to hear—the “30,000 Lives Project,” debuted in New York City’s Central Park last Sunday, with five volunteers and me reading names and distributing flyers. It was a beautiful spring day, and I felt a little bad about intruding my agenda into it: isn’t it enough to have survived a grueling, cold, dark winter? Can’t a person enjoy the sun and flowering trees without some guy putting gun control into my face?

But we did, and one of the volunteers got a hostile reaction—a gun nut who was completely against the project. But she’s a tough and persuasive woman, that volunteer, and she prodded the guy gently, and told the story of her husband’s nephew, who had used his father’s gun to shoot himself. The family, as you can imagine, was not distraught but destroyed. And in the end, the guy came around—he began thinking.

Unlike John and I, who stopped thinking after we saw a piece on the plastic gun—as well as the video below—on the McNeil Lehrer News Hour.

“You know what,” said John angrily, “Let’s all just fucking arm ourselves! Let’s completely fucking forget about gun control, because these bastards have completely changed the game, and if we don’t arm ourselves we’re just poor sacks of shit waiting to get snuffed out!”

Or words to that effect…..

At least John could speak, I was stunned into wordlessness (not a common state for me….).

Well, I looked it up today, and I’m happy / sad to report that research done at my very own alma mater—the University of Wisconsin—that just by seeing a gun, test subjects react more aggressively than others who have seen a neutral object. And in another experiment, drivers honked more at a van with a visibly loaded rifle rack stalled at a green light than a van without the rifle. Which is crazy—logically, drivers should honk LESS at a load vehicle than a (presumably) unloaded one. Oh, and a further thought—it seems that the human eye can detect snakes and spiders—potentially venomous agents—faster than we detect other stimuli.

But guess what?

We also detect guns at the same speed as the snakes and spiders. So it may not be the case that we evolved to detect the snakes / spiders. Or it may be that we have evolved to include guns as well.

I think I have my answer, now, to my question—why am I spending two hours a week reciting names in public places? I wanted to know what was behind this weird American obsession with guns.

A Dutchman explained it to me in Central Park last Sunday.

“We’re sill getting used to the American obsession with the three G’s.”

And that would be?

“Guns, God, and Government,” he replied.

And it was true, I thought. Some of us are pretty crazy on all three—they believe that the government is going to tyrannically enforce their Godless agenda on them, and the only chance of keeping that from happening is…

…a gun.

Actually, a lotta guns.

Because I’ve come to believe, guns are a positive feedback cycle. Like pornography, they’re addictive. The number of gun-owners may be down, but the number of guns those owners possess is way up.

I guess I should be used to living in my nutty country, afflicted with its obsession with the 3 G’s.

Cancel, I am used to it.

The question is how much longer can anyone live with it. 

The Rich Get Richer

There are days when nothing works, or seem not to work. I am writing this in a café, since the Internet decided to drift off somewhere, and the cat decided to catch and subsequently torment a pigeon. So the music is too loud, and there are two Russians—also very loud—and two Oriental kids—still louder—all talking away. There is, however, the Internet as well as air conditioning.

And there is Kelly Ayotte to consider. She’s a Republican senator from New Hampshire who voted against the expanded gun control check in the Senate two weeks ago. And yesterday she had to go home and explain that vote to, among other constituents, the daughter of a woman killed in the Newtown massacre.

She’s getting heat, is Kelly, and she clearly isn’t happy about it. Her approval rating dropped 15%, and 50% of voters say that her vote on the issue will be a consideration for them in the next election. So some people held up “SHAME ON YOU” signs, and the senator stammered out something unintelligible and completely illogical about an undue burden. Later, she refused to speak after the meeting privately with two women who wanted to pursue the topic.

I made a promise to myself, several months ago—I would not let the NRA into my day. There is something called mental hygiene, which means that you resist the urge to focus on the negative, to lick old wounds, to obsess on whatever festering issues resonate most for you.

Right, scratch Ayotte.

Well, what about Sandra Day O’Connor? She sat down with the editorial board of the Chicago Tribune, recently, and revealed that she’s been rethinking that little decision about Bush versus Gore. Not, mind you, that she thinks she voted the wrong way. No, she now thinks that the Supreme Court should never have agreed to hear the case at all.

It didn’t do the Supreme Court’s reputation much good, she says, and that can’t be denied. It also did do her reputation any good, and that must pain her. But she said something interesting: "There were at least three separate recounts of the votes, the ballots, in the four counties where it was challenged, and not one of the recounts would the decision have changed. So I don't worry about it."

Well, she was always portrayed as a pragmatic, matter-of-fact kind of lady—not a theoretician or an intellectual, though of course she was no fool. But given that the decision convinced all but the die-hard conservatives that the court could be bought, why isn’t she more concerned? I’d be kicking myself still….

Right, so maybe O’Connor wasn’t the best person to turn to.

Right, scratch two.

So how about Nick Hanauer? He’s the guy in the clip below, who takes on the issue of the huge disparity of wealth distribution in the United States. And what he says makes intuitive sense, though Forbes Magazine pans his theories. But what else would you expect?

And Hanauer comes through with a refreshing idea—taxing the rich and using the money to help the middle class benefits everybody, the rich included. Oh, and by the way, the rich don’t create jobs—the middle class does, by running out to the stores and spending money.

Hanauer makes the case that like most guys, he buys a couple pairs of pants, some shirts, goes out to eat once in awhile. But his income is perhaps a thousand times the average. For him to spend proportionate to his wealth, he’d have to have 3000 cars.

It’s nice, you know, finally to hear someone say it. It’s past time, really.

According to a TED talk I heard recently, 997 billion dollars was lost in one year in corporate fraud in the United States.

Two questions…

Was it the CEO and executive directors who did it?

And if there had been more equity in salary distribution, would that figure have been lower?

Doña Ilia Charms the Plaza

We’re forty lives short of California.

It took us an hour and 45 minutes to read through Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, and Arkansas.

It felt like a performance—mouth was dry, hands were shaky, my focus had narrowed. Pablo picked up on it, and asked if I was OK.

“Nerves,” I said.

So what was there to be nervous about?

Raf carried the camcorder, I carried the materials: the two books of the 33,050 names; the information flyers; two chairs, one for reading, the other for the 33,050 people who are not there.

“You’re such a drama queen,” said Pablo, as I was clothes-pinning the shirt to the back of the chair, and the blue jeans to the seat. “I love it….”

“Let’s go around the plaza and tell people about the project,” I said. So we did for fifteen minutes or so.

“You know, it’s really important to engage with people—that’s what I’ve been learning,” said Pablo.

He’s a social anthropologist, but that’s incidental. He’s also my Puerto Rican brother, who went away for a while and now is back.

So he started the reading the names—Robert Schneider, Marc Perry, Frederick Hogan…. He read for fifteen minutes, and then went off to his next project or commitment. Just before doing so, I ran into my first, and only, gun rights advocate.

“I wonder if you’d read the list of people whose lives have been saved by guns,” he started out.

“No, but if you want to compile the list, you’re more than welcome to sit on the other side of the plaza and read it….”

I’d been dreading meeting this guy or one of his ilk—a full-fledged, card-carrying member of the NRA who recited the Second Amendment word for word, though transposing the militia clause from front to back.

Which he may have done on purpose, since he immediately asked me why we need guns.

“Protection.”

“Yes, and protection from what?”

“I think you’re gonna tell me…”

“The government,” he exploded. “From a tyrannical government. We need to have guns so that in the event of a tyranny, we can rise up and protect our rights!”

I had forgotten one of the great American crazinesses—this wild belief that the damn Federal government is plotting away back there in Washington to take away my rights and my land and my children but by God they step one foot on my land I’ll blow the brains out of them fuckers!

It’s completely irrational, although maybe not. Thanks to George W. Bush and the war on terror (decided not to cap that term….) we’re probably less free than we’ve ever been as a nation and as citizens. But somehow, I don’t think that was what he meant.

“Hitler killed 30 million people and never fired a gun,” he said.

I didn’t get it.

And still don’t. He said that words kill more people than guns.

So guns don’t kill, words kill!

OK—the talk was cordial, respectful. Did he want to go before the camera and give his point of view? This is all about fostering debate.

“No,” he said quickly. And I wondered—what was he afraid of? Because there were many “noes” yesterday—the “no, I’m shy,” the “no, I’ve got to meet someone,” the “no, this isn’t my thing.”

Into the scene improbably walked Nydia, Raf’s sister, who had completely panned the whole idea two days previously. But there’s a thing about Nydia, she’s totally loyal. So if I’m out making a fool out of myself under the hot Caribbean sun, well, she’ll be there.

“I’m here to read names,” she said, kissing me, and then, having heard a bit of the conversation, dropped the news “but guns kill,” onto the man.

“Go give Raf a break,” I said. Somehow, the combination of a strongly emotional, passionate Nydia and a fearful gun owner didn’t seem like a good idea. So she went off to read.

And then, into the plaza and into the picture stepped doña Ilia, Raf’s indomitable 83-year-old mother. Who is here to read as well, and does so, sitting in her walker.

She’s full of charm, this rheumatoid-arthritis-wracked lady who went, almost seven years ago, into cardiac, pulmonary, and kidney arrest, met God and told him to go to hell—she wasn’t ready yet. And so she was moving about the square, telling little girls “Ay, ¡qué linda, m’hija!” and patting them and beaming at the parents. Or she was standing behind Nydia, and proudly holding the sign that announces the project—“30,000 Lives.” Or she was telling the two visitors from Wisconsin about how many of her children went to the University of Wisconsin—three, plus a grandchild.

Nydia more or less trapped a girl into reading—she did so for five minutes and then joined her friends who would do a flash mob and dance. Then the Wisconsin kids took over, the girl reading, the guy holding the sign. Lastly, there was a guy, don Miguel, walking through the plaza and carrying two signs—one in English, the other in Spanish. So he read some names, and then talked about his project—the proposed plan to sell the airport.

It was hot, we were tired, we were done for the day. People had drifted by, taken pictures of us on their cell phones, stopped to chat. The only person who doesn’t have a picture?

Me—completely forgot to bring the stills camera.

No matter—stay tuned for the YouTube clip that will instantly go viral.

How do I know?

Who can resist an 83-year-old lady who told God to take a hike reading names in the middle of a square in San Juan, Puerto Rico?

If anyone can get a message out, doña Ilia can….

Out There

She’s a nice kid, and she’s very good to me, as they all are. I give her two dollars and she gives me change and excellent coffee, which is a fair deal. Or I give her more money and she brings me food, and I sit and munch and feel that there are people around me. I need that—an empty house can be menacing when the husband leaves for work, and you remember a life that got shredded on a Friday morning two years ago.

So I like Nicole, and Nicole, it turns out, likes guns. I know this because I had printed a copy of the list of 33,050 randomly generated names and was showing it to her and Sebastián, her coworker. Sebastián is in my camp, Nicole is not.

Her father is an armed guard, and there are guns all over the house. Well, no—she says that her father keeps his guns in a safe at all times, except for the gun he keeps in his bedside table. And he taught her gun safety from an early age, even before she got a gun license at age thirteen. Keep your safety on at all times, he told her. Point your gun at the ground always, he advised.

The problem, said Nicole, is irresponsible people, not guns. She and her father are responsible people. And her father tells her repeatedly, “I hope you never have to use a gun, but I want you to know how in case you do.”

I told her—your dad’s a responsible guy. And at some point I began to see the difference between the gun people and the gun control people. I think I see it now, why there’s this gulf between us. Simply put, the gun people are living in and with fear, with the possibility of danger and violence. The rest of us are not.

Even on an island where crime is rampant and violent crime no less, it never occurs to me to be afraid. I did the trot this morning, greeting my neighbors, walking briskly towards a stranger. Did I think for a moment that he was anyone else but a guy getting exercise like me? Did it cross my mind—it’s just him and me. What if he’s packing?

Nah, I was too busy listening to Bach. 

But for some people, the possibility of danger and violence is real—so real that these people literally and figuratively arm themselves. And they regard the rest of us with a mix of incredulity and derision—can we really be so stupid about the world around us? Hey, it’s not always pretty, the stuff that goes down….

No, it’s not. But I have lived over half a century—more than half my life—and never been in a situation where I needed a gun.

I have been, however, in many situations or more precisely states where it would have hugely inadvisable to have a gun. There’s a reason for the term “murderous rage,” and I might not have seen dawn, those days when I was deeply depressed, if there had been a pistol in the nightstand as I rolled sleeplessly around in bed.

Taí writes an E-mail with some advice her friend gave to her. Get a bulletproof vest and wear it visibly, she says. And goes on to say—she’s a little uneasy too. There are a lot of nuts out there, as well as a lot of guns. And if a murder can happen at a public square at midnight—as it did a month ago, and no one has yet been arrested—it can just as easily happen in broad daylight.

The logic of this goes by me, since anyone who wanted to kill me could simply shoot me between the eyes. Or better, from behind me, at the base of my cerebral cavity. But that’s not my real fear.

My fear is of having to deal with the anger and scorn of people who feel threatened, who see me as an enemy, and who are in the mood and mindset to fight, not take flight. By good luck, I’m a tall guy, which has served me well. Nobody pushes me around.

Be honest—I hate fights. I hate raised voices and widened eyes and the chin thrust belligerently out. Even now, my stomach churns a bit, thinking about it. There are people who thrive on conflict—I do not.

So why do it? Why not sit home and write the letters and make the calls and post on Facebook? Why put myself out there, when I am so much not an “out there” kind of guy?

Maybe the answer is somewhere in the document below.

The bound copy of the list of 33,050 names

Plus ça change...

Well, well—time to dust off the high school French, which I did by consulting, as always, Wikipedia. So here it is: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Or I suppose I could tax my brains a bit and figure out who said—in Latin—that there is nothing new under the sun.

Certainly not the Caribbean sun, shining so brightly on tourists and dropping conveniently away when it’s time to do what we do very well down here.

Smuggling.

Here’s how it works. We send up the drugs. You send down the guns.

That white powder that isn’t talc but is occasionally mixed with it has to come through somewhere. It used to be Mexico, but then things got a little hot up there. So the game changed to Puerto Rico, which famously, in the words of an early 20^th century US Supreme Court decision, is not the United States but “pertains” to the United States. (Anybody up there who can explain that, please give me a call. Been wondering for years….) In other words, no customs. If you can get the drugs in, you can send them in any aircraft, cargo container, or package through the US mail or FedEx.

So the drug traffickers have recreated the Middle Passage, though in this case it’s South America to the Caribbean, not Africa, and now it drugs, not slaves. But don’t imagine that it was Sam Walton who dreamed up logistics, though he did further it a bit. Nobody loves an empty ship.

And here, I take a deep breath and concede—maybe—a point to the NRA. “Outlaw guns and then only the outlaws will have guns!” they cry. (Nice turn of phrase, hunh? Great little marketing slogan….) Because Puerto Rico has probably the strictest laws in the nation about guns.

For one thing, they’re not considered a right. But let the Orlando Sentinel tell the story:

Buying a gun legally in Puerto Rico takes six to 18 months to complete paperwork and convince a police board that the applicant needs a gun. Puerto Rico does not consider gun ownership a right, said Edgardo Nieves, Rossello's spokesman.

By comparison, Florida residents only need to turn to a flea market, gun show or their newspaper's classified advertising section to buy without restriction.

And happily for everyone but the victims, it’s quite profitable. You buy a gun from Craig’s List for three hundred bucks, and you can sell it for three or four times as much on the streets of San Juan.

Well, with a deal like that, everybody wants in, right? So you’ve got your own little business started and established—a punto that is selling cocaine and heroin and god knows whatever else. And then some punk decides to move in on your territory. You gonna let that happen?

Fortunately, there are people who can help you. Sure, it costs, but money is not a problem. This is a business expense.

Now there used to be a little honor—the hit man killed in the punto, not stores or restaurants, or anywhere they could find the intended victim. So if you weren’t suicidal, you stayed away from the puntos. Now, if you’re not suicidal you stay home.

Two points. I may not be ready to concede the logic of “only the outlaws will have guns” to the NRA. It may be if the rest of the nation had our strict gun laws, there wouldn’t be the price difference that makes trafficking them into Puerto Rico so attractive. It might also be that there would be far fewer guns in the fifty states.

Second point—I read yesterday about the Mayors Against Illegal Guns. They are a significant group of 800 mayors; the mayors of Clairon, Clarks Summit, and Felton—to name three towns in Pennsylvania—have all signed a pledge. They’re gonna fight illegal guns, which make up the vast majority of weapons in Puerto Rico.

Well, we have a new mayor in San Juan, a lady who is busy trying to come up with the 800 million dollars that she needs to run the city. That’s daunting.

But what about the old mayor? The guy that put up all the signs announcing the projects that never got the money to get done? He’d been around for 12 years; in that time, why hadn’t he signed on? The group, by the way, is headed by the mayors of New York City and Boston. So they found the time…..

I’ve written about two of the three ingredients in this explosive stew. Here’s the third…

…money.

Question Time

It seems to be my destiny to have a callus on my thumb. For years, it was the left thumb, and the callus was the result of playing the cello for three or four hours every day. This week, it’s the right thumb, and it came about when I decided to compile a list of 33.050 randomly generated names, representing the 33,050 genuine (and nameless, officially speaking…) people who in 2010 died as a result of a gunshot wound.

There was a time about ten years ago when I was a computer idiot—in fact, I had a theory that my own electric-magnetic field collided with any electronic device, especially computers. The moment, it seemed, I tried to use one, it crashed, almost always fatally. So it was a big event, the day I announced to Mr. Fernández and doña Taí that I had done a copy / paste. Their eyes rolled like a drunken sailor at sea.

Well, on a Mac laptop, the only or at least the best way to copy / paste is with the thumb. And the list, which took over ten hours to create, took massive copy / pasting.

So what did I learn from the experience?

Here goes, in random order:

·    The list is in size 12 font (20 for the state), single space and occupies 724 pages.

·    California has the most gun deaths—slightly above Texas, which has, however, ten million more people.

·    There’s a huge range in mortality rate—lowest is Hawaii at 3.3, the highest in the fifty states (hear something coming up?) is Arizona at 20.3.

·    Puerto Rico lo hace mejor is the official tourist slogan assures us, but if we do it better, we don’t do it the best. Yes, with a gun mortality rate of 24.3, we’re pretty high. But unbelievably, the US Virgin Islands has a gun mortality rate of 59.7.

“Why are you doing this,” asked John with genuine curiosity.

And it is bizarre. Look, it is statistically more dangerous to send your kid to sleep over in a friend’s house if the parents have a swimming pool as opposed to a gun. Death by gunshot is about number fifteen on the list of leading causes of death—more people die of pneumonia that gunshot, so why aren’t I out protesting against Staph aureus? As well, there are more suicides by gunshot than homicides—though death is death, no matter who pulls the trigger.

And though the attention always goes to the crazy people with semiautomatic weapons, the reality is that most deaths by gunshot occur by handguns—the very weapons that we are earnestly (and ineffectively) reassuring the NRA we would never, never even THINK about banning.

So why spend all this time and energy—reading thirty thousand names in public?

Is it that guns are such a potently masculine symbol? Am I still, at the age of 56, dealing with being a man?

Or is it the randomness of the act? But wait, most victims know their assailant, and anyway a Staph infection is also random.

If we were going to be honest, we would be forced to admit—seeking a ban on semiautomatic weapons probably isn’t going to do much good. Every gun fanatic has gotten his hands on one or more now, and it’s the handgun that kills more often. So really we should be talking about increasing mental health funding and figuring out a way to reduce handgun deaths.

“So why are you doing this,” asked my brother. And here’s my question—at the end of reading 30,000 names, will I have found the answer?