Ready and Loaded for Bear

This past week I was deep in the heart of East Texas, traveling between Nacogdoches and Austin, and I didn't listen to any news while I was on the road. Not until I turned on NPR near Baton Rouge on the way home Friday evening did I hear about the shooting in the theater in Aurora, Colorado. I no longer get television reception at my house, either, so I'm isolated from the 24-hour, hyped-up news cycle of cable and network news. I read all my news (and watch my movies and television dramas) online, so whatever I read has had some time to be filtered, to be evaluated and checked.  And when I do watch a news video online, I have usually accessed it through a link provided by a journalist who has also provided context and additional detail to the original story. Thus, I miss the endless speculations that fill the air immediately after a tragedy. 

But I have now read most of the online news stories of the major newspapers that have covered as many details currently available about James Holmes and the victims of his horrific attack, and I've also read commentary of several journalists who have raised the issue of gun control and of the powerful hold that the National Rifle Association has on politics in this country. Should we all be, as the NRA seems to think, always ready and loaded for bear?

I'm not opposed to gun ownership. I grew up in the country, and every man (and some women) I knew owned at least a shotgun. I never fired a gun, myself, but I've loaded a shotgun and been prepared to fire. (Thank God there was really no bogeyman outside that door in Denham Springs, Louisiana, those many years ago!) I'm not opposed to hunting for food (and I'm happy that we have public lands where hunters with no access to hunting grounds of their own can hunt in season). I'm not much of a meat-eater these days, but I've eaten venison many times in the past, and when I was a child, I ate squirrel that my father shot in the woods of Old River, Texas. He still uses those guns to protect his corn from the wild hogs that can devastate a garden overnight in East Texas--though the guns aren't much use unless one is prepared to stand vigil all night for nights on end, in hopes of catching the wily creatures.

And so, I am willing to entertain the idea that the NRA and its myriad spokespersons (many just private citizens in love with their guns) put forth: that we should always be ready and loaded for bear, that if only someone in that theater or classroom or campus or courtroom had a gun, that person could put a stop to a madman with an assault weapon. Is this claim feasible? Should every teacher in every classroom pack heat on the off-chance that some mental case is going to burst in and start mowing down students? Of course, who would be the first to be targeted? Derangement does not preclude craftiness and high intelligence.

And what about the gunman who is loaded for T-rex instead of bear? James Holmes entered a dark theater dressed in black, covered in body armor, armed with a semi-automatic AR-15, a Glock handgun, a 12-gauge Remington Model shotgun, and canisters of smoke or gas.
 

What kind of society expects its citizens to be loaded for bear? What kind of society would that be? I just traveled hundreds of miles on interstate and state highways and was threatened repeatedly by angry people in cars in a hurry to get nowhere worth killing people to get there. (And I was driving the speed limit or just a tic or two below.) Those aggressive people are already using their cars as weapons. Imagine if they had a gun handy, too.
 

No, I'm appalled by the idea that there should always be someone (me? you? all of us?) in our public spaces ready to take down a potential mass murderer--it's an idea that has totally given up on a civilized society.
 

Ta-Nehisi Coates best describes the thoughts that have been rolling around in my own brain the past two days:

It's worth considering the wisdom of waging a shoot-out in a crowded theater with a mad-man in body-armor. More than that, we should consider the import of the argument's implication--a fully, and heavily, armed citizenry. If we all are going to agree to be armed, surely I don't want my arms to be inferior to the arms of my potential adversaries--a category including virtually any other citizen. The Aurora shooter was evidently in full body-armor. I need to upgrade to hand-grenades. And so we arrive at a kind of personal arms race,

And we arrive at a world with minimal trust in the state's ability to deploy violence on our behalf--a distrust of the authorities whom we pay to protect us, a cynicism which says those authorities are beyond reform, and that only through this personal arms race, can a person sleep at night. 

And too we are left with the deeply held belief that, somehow, we can always outgun those who would do us harm, or at least our end can come at the place of our choosing.  Now we are cousined to immortality. Now we are chin-level with our various Gods. 

It's worth considering what we mean by a safer society, and whether it can be secured through a cold war of all against all. It's worth asking if the world really needs more George Zimmermans. ["The Dream of Maximum Guns," posted 21 July 2012.]