Guns and the Two Americas, by: T. Egan

From the Tuesday’s attached New York Times International Weekly…

The waves of mass shootings continue to roll over the United States like surf o the ship of state’s prow.  Every few weeks now we get hit again.  We shake and shudder, and brace for the next one.

So we beat on—a nation whose people are twenty time more likely to die of gun violence than those of most other developed countries.  The only thing extraordinary about mass shootings in America is how ordinary the killing grounds are—elementary schools, high schools, colleges, military recruitment centers, theaters, parks, churches.

Is no place safe?  Actually, several places are.  You want protection in a country that allows a deranged man to get an assault weapon to hunt down innocent people in a public space?  Go to the airport—that bubble of gun-free security.  Or go to a major-league baseball game, or a stadium in the National Football League.

Our big league venues may be engaging only in security theater, but their owners don’t think so.  They now mandate metal detectors to snag weapons, and most of them even ban off-duty police officers from bringing guns to the games.

Nationwide, if you want to lessen your chances of getting shot, stay out of the South.  The South is the most violent region in the United States, and also the place with the highest rate of gun ownership.  More guns, easily obtained by the mentally ill, religious fanatics and anti-government extremists, mean more gun deaths.

Better to go to a city or a state with gun restrictions, at least if you’re playing the odds.  Most of the states with tighter gun laws have fewer gun deaths.

That’s one America, the slightly safer one.  It includes government gun-screened zones like airports, courthouses and many high schools.  But more significantly, it also covers property used by our most popular obsession, pro football—the free market at work.

The other America is an open-fire zone, backed by politicians who think it should be even more crowded with average people parading around with lethal weapons.  Just after the recent tragedy in a Louisianan theater—a shooting by a hate-filled man who was able to legally obtain a gun despite a history of mental illness—Rick Perry of Texas called for gun-free zones a bad idea.

In his view, echoing that of the fanatics who own the Republican Party by intimidation, everyone should be armed, everywhere.  Once a shooting starts, the bad guys with the gun will be killed by the good guy with the gun, somehow able to get a draw on the shooter in a darkened theater, or behind a pew in church.

This scenario almost never happens.  The logic is nonsense, the odds of a perfectly timed counter-killer getting the drop on the evil killer unlikely.  And even when such a situation does happen, as in the Tucson, Arizona, shooting of 2011, the armed citizen who jumps into the melee can pose a mortal threat on others.  In Tucson, an innocent person came within seconds of getting shot by an armed bystander who wasn’t sure whom to shoot.

Most gun-free zones, like the theater in Lafayette, Louisiana, are not gun-free at all.  They have no metal detectors or screening—that would cost too much, the theater owners claim.  Gun-free is a suggestion, and therefore a misnomer.  Eventually, the more prosperous theaters the better communities will pay for metal detectors, further setting apart the two Americas in our age of mass shootings.

The Mall of America—over five hundred stores of retail space, drawing forty million annual visitors to a climate-controlled part of Minnesota—is trying to be a gun-free zone.

If the mall took up Rick Perry’s suggestion, shoppers could roam among the stores packing heat, ready for a shootout.  The owners of that vast operation, similar to those how stage concerts and pro sports, think otherwise.  The mall has a security force of more than a hundred people.  Yeah, I hear the joke about the feckless mall cops.  But the Mall of American trusts them more than well-armed shoppers to protect people, as they should.

Surprising though it may seem, gun ownership is declining all over in the United States.  We are still awash with weapons—nearly a third of American households have an adult with a gun.  But that’s down from nearly half in 1973.

What we’re moving toward, then, are regions that are safer than others, and public spaces that are safer than others, led by private enterprise, shunning the gun crazies who want everyone armed.  The new reality comes with the inconvenience and hassle of screening and pat-downs similar to the routines at airports—enforced gun-free zones, not mere suggestions.

As a way to make everyday life seem less frightening, the new reality is absurd.  But that’s the cost, apparently, of an extreme interpretation of a constitutional amendment designed to fend off British tyranny, a freedom that has become a tyranny in itself.

So, this is how the Second Amendment IS backfiring, sure, there’s that right to STAND your GROUND, to protect your homes, your loved ones from intruders, but, think about how unsafe it is, to keep a gun at home, even IF you manage to keep that concealed weapon locked UP inside a passcode protected safe, who’s to say, that a kid won’t get her/his hands on it???  And, this is still, both sides of the story, presented, by someone with strong feelings and beliefs, and thoughts on the matter here.