Jeremy Barnes has been haunted by gun violence since 1994. He wishes for all who can make a difference to grab a case of beer, build a campfire, and work it out. Here is his story.
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By the time I’d reached twenty years of age I’d been to more funerals than a teenager from a sleepy cow town in Connecticut would expect. Leukemia, car accidents and several suicides had made me well aware of my own mortality. None more so than the murder.
The summer of 1994 was a time before cell phones, before even pagers were commonplace. If your girlfriend was looking for you she had to drive around town, checking the usual hangouts and dragging you away from your friends. If you were smart and wanted to keep that girlfriend you told your buddies goodbye and you left with her.
That night in June of 1994 I was smart but the guys I had been with weren’t. They drove around some, got in an argument with a few younger kids, and chased them across town, eventually following two other boys back to their home.
There were two carloads of older teens, but the younger ones were home safe. No real harm had come of the encounter. The game was over and the two cars turned around, headed back into town and whatever they could find to occupy them next. They didn’t make it. Instead one of the boys, fifteen years old, came back out of the house with his father’s shotgun and fired twice into the back window of a 1987 tan Plymouth. The next night my friend was dead.
This was also a time before the Internet. Before Twitter and Facebook and 24/7 news cycles. CNN had raised its profile with coverage of the Gulf War a few years prior, but it was still a news channel. You watched it to find out what was going on in the world, not to hear the opinions of pundits telling you what they thought about what was going on in the world. Random acts of violence didn’t go viral.
Instead all we had was a bunch of shell shocked teenagers sitting around a beach with a fire and a case of beer, wondering what had gone wrong. What made this kid do that?
We didn’t have the answers then, and I don’t have them now.
At some point, however, we are going to need to find some.
Several weeks ago two Virginia journalists were shot dead on live television, a new twist in a seemingly endless stream of senseless violence in America. Gun control advocates immediately took to the airwaves with renewed calls for increased legislation to keep weapons out of the hands of unstable individuals. Missing from any argument that I heard were details about how they planned to identify these people beforehand or who would be in charge of making this determination. Employees lose their jobs everyday. Very few of them return armed and seeking vengeance.
The other side seems to take the opposite view. Backed by the NRA and funded by gun manufacturers, they call for more guns to be available publicly in the interest of self protection. Any voice that disagrees is infringing on their constitutional rights. A fellow blogger that wrote a piece somewhat critical of the pro-gun lobby had to take down his website and change his private home phone number after an enormous influx of threats against himself and his family. Apparently the first amendment doesn’t count if you are defending the second.
What I don’t see enough of is reasonable debate. People willing to see the other side of this or any other issue and actually TALK about what’s going on and what can be done about it. We need more voices like this one from a pro-NRA blogger at daddyengine.net, or this one from a St Louis police officer at donofalltrades.com who’s sick and tired of the cavalier attitude he sees towards the violence every day.
A few weeks ago on the drive to New Jersey we passed the exit for Newtown, Connecticut. It made me physically ill. They now sell kevlar backpacks for children to take to school. I don’t know the answers, but we need to find some.
Maybe the answer is to take a bunch of politicians and civic leaders and set them on a beach for a night. Give them a fire, a case of beer, then take away the camaras and special interest groups looking over their shoulders. We didn’t figure anything out that night twenty years ago, but at least we had a reasonable discussion.
Originally seen on Thirsty Daddy.
Photo: Flickr/Elvert Barnes
There is a simple answer and it’s a lesson that we in Europe learnt a long time ago. Unfortunately, most Americans don’t want to hear it.
What about the gun violence committed by police and Federal Agents? Do the police in your country have access to guns, and why should they? Let’s make everyone equal.
The police in the UK have access to guns for specific reasons and in specific cases (hostage situations, police raids where firearms are suspected). They do not carry them around everywhere. By the reckoning of most American right wingers, we should all feel oppressed and living in fear of the police, yet we don’t.
We have one of the lowest gun death rates in the world. The US has one of the highest. Live by your Second Amendment, die by your Second Amendment.