When I heard the disturbing news about the Charleston church shootings, I thought about Michael and I wondered how long it would take for anti-gun activists to take advantage of the sad event. Michael is a friend living near Nashville who gave his rabbi a heads-up that whenever he comes to Temple he is packing a firearm. His rabbi said, “Good!”
And it didn’t take long. President Obama called again for tougher gun laws, never mind that his home city of Chicago has an increasingly miserable record of gun violence despite having some of the toughest gun laws in the nation.
Of course we don’t hear details on TV news because Chicago gun deaths are mostly black-on-black violence, not a fit for the current media narrative of cherry-picking incidents of white-on-black violence to emphasize in the televised echo chamber. My guess is the depth of loss felt by the victims’ families in Charleston has nothing to do with the shooter’s race.
Hillary Clinton took an easy shot by blaming conservative talk radio and Donald Trump, the Republican’s very own version of Bozo the Clown, after Trump announced his Presidential run with a promise to build a border wall and make Mexico pay for it. A new Republican prayer is that Trump switches to become a Democrat.
NAACP President Cornell Brooks gathered microphones and cameras to revive an old argument, saying the Confederate flag must come down. It was removed from the South Carolina State Capitol building 15 years ago but still flies over a Civil War memorial on the Capitol grounds, highly visible when approaching the Capitol.
Frankly, I am ambivalent, because honoring the casualties of that war should not be hampered, but there are two major problems. First, some small minds will always display the Confederate flag as an anti-black symbol. Second, black Americans will always see that flag as a symbol of excluding them, and whether intended or not that should be enough to put the flag away as an historical artifact.
However you might split that baby, Cornell Brooks chose the wrong time to re-open the flag issue while families and the whole state were just beginning to grieve and funerals had not yet even been planned.
The most remarkable thing happened Friday at the bond hearing for the shooter, Dylann Roof. Invited by the judge to speak before he ruled, members of the victims’ families one after another told the freak who executed their loved ones that they forgive him.
That reminded me of the grace I was taught in church as a youngster, but I guess my childhood church wouldn’t be proud of me today because some things are unforgivable and I would rather enjoy telling the punk I hope he fries in hell for eternity and I would be pleased to help stoke the fires. If that blemishes my soul, I would be willing to pay that price.
Meanwhile, everyone expected to opine is asked, “What should we do?” And that is part of our problem. Pardon my presumption to say the answer is simple: try him and fry him. We have plenty of laws and he broke a bunch of them. We don’t need to add more laws to the pile, we just need to enforce the ones we have.
So how do we prevent this from ever happening again? We can’t. That’s the bitter adult truth of life. Once in a while a dirt-bag goes nuts and hurts or kills people with a gun, knife, hammer, bomb or other means. All we can do is be vigilant, and if you are as smart as Michael, carrying in church isn’t at all the dirty violation the anti-gun crowd would have you believe.
Before those nine families in Charleston realized this tragedy in their lives, we had a recent version of an idiot with a gun closer to home, here at the Atlanta airport, but at least he didn’t shoot anybody. Jim Cooley defiantly carried his AR-15 into the airport, with a loaded 100-round drum to illustrate his carry rights under a new law, so no harm, no foul, right?
Well, not quite. I should disclose I am a proud member of Georgia Carry, a local group advocating for 2nd Amendment rights, and I believe in those freedoms, but I still think for myself. Mr. Cooley went over the top in two ways.
First, his weapons display was intentionally provocative and upsetting to his fellow citizens in a public facility that has historically been a draw to bad guys with guns. In other words, not very smart.
Second, while flaunting his rights under the new law, he actually demonstrated instead for all to see that the recent law liberalizing carry rules needs some tweaking to more wisely govern carry at the airport. The arguments that will surely follow could justifiably be called the Cooley follies.
One early entrant to the follies is Georgia’s own Congressman Hank Johnson. Continuing what he has already proven repeatedly, that he will never be known as the sharpest knife in the drawer, Johnson admitted his objection to Cooley’s AR is that it looks bad, accidentally putting his finger on the only real complaint about the AR rifle, how it looks, which is irrelevant.
What matters, of course, is the AR is no different than any other semi-automatic handgun or rifle, meaning it fires once for each trigger pull, and that high-capacity magazines can be built for any semi-automatic.
But I expect that emotions overtaking facts will blur reality as it always has when the argument gathers steam, and the news media will be painfully slow to realize, again, that automatic weapons have been banned for a long time but semi-automatic firearms have been owned by the American public for over a hundred years and banning them is a radical notion that will go nowhere.
The argument promises to stay with us. The next time a lunatic decides to use a gun to kill multiple people, anti-gun enthusiasts will seize the chance to push their agenda. So we are on perpetual standby, but even meanies like me can resist government overreach and at the same time grieve for innocent victims.
[Terry Garlock of Peachtree City occasionally contributes a column to The Citizen. His email is terry@garlock1.com.]
