Tergiversation

If I can joke about being able to walk into a sporting goods store in Houston, Texas, and walk out with ammunition for all kinds of guns then I have no choice but to talk about the shooting at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. yesterday. Right?

I did joke about buying boxes of bullets on a Saturday afternoon. I was with a group of people (a wedding party, truth be told) buying ammo and they didn't check our IDs, they didn't ask questions; I'm don't think they are allowed to do either.

Are these two things connected? Not directly. Is yesterday's shooting some kind of clarion incident highlighting the need for gun control? No, it's really not.

But here's the rub. We went to a shooting range in south Houston where people were lined up firing automatic weapons, shotguns, handguns, rifles. We shot through a few hundred rounds on a .45 handgun, a 9 millimeter glock, and a 12 gauge shotgun. There were paper targets for us to shoot at, ones that were circles within circles and bulls-eyes, others resembled human figures with point distributions for the deadliest spots to fire on a figure representing the human body.

The guys at the range were comparing gun laws in their respective states, one man bragging that gun laws in Virginia were even more lax than they were in Texas. Another talked painfully about how he singlehandedly dispersed a riot following Hurricane Ike in Houston by firing at a group of violent looters. He was then easily acquitted by a jury. They explain how guns keep us safe because more righteous citizens are able to stop criminals and murderers from committing harm.

And one of the paper targets was a bandit with a ten-gallon hat and his pistols drawn, clearly the enemy. But what if your enemy wasn't doing harm by robbing a bank, what if, in your worldview, your enemy controlled the banks and fabricated a historical genocide to control a country's political agenda? Clearly, if you believe your enemy is doing you harm then you must act against him. Right?

Meanwhile, our President is at Buchenwald, talking about how his great uncle helped liberate the camp (laud the man, a hero of Eisenhower's army), and about how both Obama and his uncle will never forget it what either saw at the camp, and then Elie Wiesel is quoting Camus' The Plague to expound on the possibility of human dignity after a tragedy, an existential sickness (his WWII allegory).

Does it feel possible? Human dignity? That's not the question either. No one is asking questions even while you shop for ammunition.