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We Kill 'em At Home And We Kill 'em Abroad
By lindamuralidharan on 2019-12-13 04:39:07
So....in far flung sections of the country, military personnel brought about the deaths of 7 people and the wounding of
several more. The people died of gunshot wounds but the murderers did not use guns because we have it on good advice
from the advocates for more gun purchases: "Guns do not kill people, people do". They have told us over and over again.
I'm not sure how all this could happen just as I am not sure how Babe Ruth could have hit so many home runs without bats
in his hands. But according to the gospel of the people who profit from gun sales and use money and manipulation to limit
the passage and implementation of gun safety policies, it's a fact that guns don't kill people.. And their obstruction of efforts
to limit the willy nilly proliferation of guns includes certain kinds of research that they forbid. Well, yes, I would not make
these snide remarks in a letter to the editor, but here, among friends, I dare to call out the absurdity of modern day gun
advocates. I mean those who want more and more guns to be placed in circulation and want little or no restrictions on their
design or availability. As I have mentioned before a few of my relatives keep locked up guns suitable for deer and bird
hunting. Also, I loved my Red Ryder air gun....I guess that's what they call BB guns nowadays....and I outgrew the pass
time well before high school. My brother became a life long hunter until his senior ailments interfered. And my own two
kids outgrew their toy guns well before middle school. They own no guns and had no desire to join a military which might
at any time be told to fight in an illegal war and kill people of color who never intended to attack our own country. [caption
id="attachment_ 13352" align="aligncenter" width="600"]
Ford Island at Pearl
Harbor[/caption] I mention all this because I don't hate every gun or every use of guns. I hate the apparent love affair with
guns and war and the military and, yes, in some ways violence. Wrestling on a national scale was once a sport. Now it is a
show performance where people apparently like to see other people being hurt, at least in imagination. I actually live within
eyesight of Pearl Harbor, but the dreadful news of the killings there did not surprise me. What surprises me is the people
here in Hawaii who said they never thought it would happen here. People who have varied reasons for picking up a gun or
actually stockpiling means of destruction kill family member, co-workers, law enforcement personnel and members of the
public more or less weekly. How do people think they are immune? And, yes, folks in other regions where mass killings
have occurred have made similar claims. "I never thought it would happen here!"
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It is true that we have better gun safety laws in
Hawaii than is true in many states in the US and that we have fewer gun deaths proportionate to our population. Our isolate
helps since we are not near other states with weak gun safety laws. But "fewer" is not "none" and there are plenty of guns
floating around. Recently there have been a spate of gun related homicides and robberies other than what happened at the
military base. Murder/suicides are commonly accomplished by guns here although this fall we had a spectacular car crash
that was deliberate and killed the two occupants immediately in a fiery outburst as the car hit a concrete pillar at a high rate
of speed. However a recent national report giving our relatively good statistics informed us that a gun death occurs here
once every 8 days. As the recent statistical report on gun deaths in HI was published in the paper, the illogical defenses of
more guns was immediate. Letters to the editor complained that the report was dishonest because 72% of those deaths were
suicides. I hate having to so often point out to the uninformed that you are just as dead if you put a gun to your own head
and pulled the trigger as if your 4 year old found the family gun in a closet and accidentally killed his sister with it. You are
just as dead if your neighbor shot you in a fit of pique over the boundary between your two properties. Same dead if you'r
are caught in the crossfire of a drive by shooting. Same dead if a sniper in Iraq had fatally shot you. Also, the people who
want to ghost the fact that 1 person dies of gunshot wounds every 8 days in HI are ignoring or not bothering to pay attention
to the research that shows people living in a house with a gun present are more likely to die than those living in a house with
no gun. And that risk applies to suicide, homicide, and accidental deaths. Already got you covered there folks, got you
covered. It does not matter in which proportion these deaths occur. You probably would not have died by any manner of
gun shot if a gun had not been in the house. We continue to get reports from defense officials about investigations into the
two recent killings on military bases within the continental USA. These comments are accompanied by claims procedures
will be studied beyond the actual events of those days to see if procedures need changing. Maybe some will help. We know
there were signs of disgruntled thoughts and behaviors from both killers. Here in the Pearl Harbor case, the fellow had some
disciplinary issues and an apparent referral at some time in the past to anger management treatment. Beyond that, we ask
why he was carrying lethal weapons. Beyond that we ask what other mental health interventions might be available to any
member of the military in such a situation. Beyond that we might ask who is more mentally dysfunctional, the shooter or
the people who approved his being assigned armed guard duty.
a ,
will As far as Florida is concerned,
of course we ask why are we training the military of such an oppressive, aggressive, dictatorial regime in any case. Saudi
Arabia? We are pre-answered with claims about how it is traditional to train the military of our so called friends. With
friends like these, who needs enemies? We know the horrors of training and arming such regimes in Central and South
America. In this decade we see the dreadful conditions of countries with such regimes and we get pay back in the form of
thousands of legitimate asylum seekers knocking at our door. I still want to return to a set of murders that happened around
the time of the El Paso and Ohio and California mass shootings.
‘These murders were not so eye
catching since "only" three people died. It happened to to the family of minor league (Tampa Bay farm team) baseball
player Blake Bivens. His family only lost three people (and one to possible life in prison), and it was at home and not ina
public space so it got very little press at the time. But the gun deaths of these people is still a torture form the surviving
family members including Bivens himself. Matthew Bernard, the 18 year old brother-in-law of Bivens, shot and killed his
mother, his sister, and his infant nephew before police captured him. Those people are the mother-in-law, wife and son of
the ball player. It has been reported that the killer has mental health problems. I have not been able to determine where he
got his gun or what kind of treatment he had. Skilled talk therapy and proper medication can control symptoms in many
cases, and in my experience (and what we often read of tragedies in the news) it is extremely unwise to have an ill family
member living at home if the symptoms are not well controlled, preferably over a period of time. The right kind of group
home or apartment with regular service from a competent case manager can prevent both suicides and homicides. From
what I read, this family belonged to religious systems which blame the devil and have fantasies about the infant being happy
in heaven with great grandmothers. You can have whatever religion you want, but real world mental illness and family
dysfunction needs effective real world help. I never can quite understand the folks who, after a sad unwanted and untimely
death of a loved one say the person is in a better place. Then why isn't everybody in that belief system shooting themselves
to get to a better place? One more time I will explain I started off my early childhood in a fundamentalist Christian church
and migrate during grade school to more mainline Protestant churches of the day. I often attended Presbyterian, Methodist
or Dutch Reformed services and Sunday schools. But in those days, the fundamentalists and even the others basically said it
was the deity who decided who would go to their heaven and who not. And most of my teaching said you had to earn your
way into the heaven and away from their idea of hell. I think blaming the devil and/or saying every loved one is "in a better
place" is the opiate we have heard about for people who are anxious and insecure and not willing to face reality and join
others in society and find solutions. One really positive thing I noticed in the linked report was that the police in question
used to recommended de-escalation techniques in the face of a mentally distraught suspect. Mathew Bernard was behaving
irrationally and had actually attempted to restrain some by standers. Nonetheless the police did their jobs without any
further injuries. So...we have gun deaths all the time and still we can't speak with a loud enough voice as a nation that
violence is wrong and that guns cause more problems than they solve. We act that way on the international stage where
diplomacy gets short shrift, we have pulled back from the promising efforts with Russia to mutually and gradually reduce
our stockpile of nuclear weapons. It may not be totally true in every instance, but as a general and world wide rule, no
nation of people want a war with anybody, much less with the United States. Leaders of many nations including ours
(Democrats and Republicans all too often) act as if war is the answer, when it is not. And we have individual citizens who
promulgate the value of violence whether it is family violence ("he deserves to be beaten for that, spare the rod and spoil the
child"), police violence, bombings and drone strikes in other countries, or support for a bloated military. As luck would have
it there was a police involved shooting near my house yesterday just as I was writing part of this. . Actually in a civilian area
between me and the edge of Pearl Harbor (the waterway itself which is not entirely on the military base). At some point,
police had put the nearest (to me) elementary school on lock down and cordoned off a section the huge shopping mall that is
within walking distance of my home. Also a pre school at the end of my condo complex driveway was on lock down. It is
said they have opened an attempted murder case. After a traffic stop, the suspects found they were in a cul de sac so drove
at the who was by then on foot. The officer shot and damaged the care and maybe wounded one of two in the car butAlso
the news is covering yesterdays deaths in New Jersey where the carnage has included police, by standers, and the killers. By
last evening, one of the two occupants of the car had been apprehended. Wouldn't you know. Just as I was finishing up this
post, the news reported the apprehension of four people involved in stealing a car at gun point. A cross island chase ensued
with more school lock downs. There is always crime in Hawaii, but in the last few weeks in Honolulu we have had an
unusual number of violent crimes although the Pearl Harbor shooting was the only one of the recent ones resulting in
deaths. In a number of cases tourists or senior citizens have been injured in purse snatching incidents. Some of these crimes
were committed in broad daylight in public spaces. I do want more and better gun laws and eventual repeal or
reinterpretation of the Second Amendment. Even without the current interpretation people could own guns under certain
regulations. We don't have a Constitutional right to drive a gas guzzling type vehicle or to own a microwave oven, but
millions do anyway. And, of course, knives, poison, strangulation, autos, heavy wooden objects, etc. sometimes cause
violent deaths. It's just that guns have no other real purpose than to kill and certain of them can kill many people in a short
period of time whereas such things as strangulation generally take a lesser toll. Every life saved is a blessing for the planet
even if some of those lives will need to spend much time away from the rest of society. Nonetheless, I think gun deaths will
shrink more dramatically when more people change their attitudes towards guns and violence in general. What is in your
heart? Do you wish anybody bodily harm? Do your friends or neighbors threaten people or wish they could harm people
they know or read about in the news?
