Gunning Down the Easter Bunny: The Weaponization of Everyday Life
By Frida Berrigan, TomDispatch
16 April 18
It's been a terrible year for gun makers. The venerable Remington filed a
Chapter 11 bankruptcy after its sales fell 27.5% in the first nine months of
Donald Trump's presidency. (Its officials had expected a 2016 Hillary
Clinton victory to ensure a burst of gun purchases.) And Remington wasn't
alone. Sales have been ragged across the industry. Gun company stocks have
slipped, profits have fallen, price wars are breaking out, and corporate
debt is on the rise. January 2018 was the worst January for gun purchases
since 2012. (A mere 2,030,530 firearm background checks were logged that
month, down by 500,000 from the same month in 2016!) It was the "Trump
slump" in action.
The good old days for the gun makers -- you know, the ones when a Kenyan
Muslim was in the White House and a mass of Democratic congressional
flamethrowers was preparing to shut the spigot on gun purchases in America
forever with draconian laws -- are long past. The National Rifle Association
reigns; Republicans control Congress; Trump rules; gun control laws are
something to be found in a galaxy far, far away; and all is safe, sound, and
well in the world.
Or put another way, what's often referred to as "fear-based" gun buying is
no longer buoying the industry. One sign of this: in the past, mass shooting
incidents (and the media brouhahas around them) were surefire gun-purchase
inducers. Those background checks (a good measure of gun sales), for
instance, rose 50% after Sandy Hook, 43% after the San Bernardino killings,
and 40% after the Orlando Pulse nightclub massacre. But after last October's
Las Vegas slaughter in which 58 died and hundreds were wounded, they sank by
13% compared to October 2016. And even the recent Parkland school killings
and the gun debate and youthful protests that followed didn't seem to help
sales (at least not until quite recently).
So, fear and guns. After President Obama was elected and the Democrats took
Congress, gun production tripled in this country (and imports doubled),
while, according to recent studies, white men who fit a certain profile --
"anxious about their ability to protect their families, insecure about their
place in the job market, and beset by racial fears" -- stockpiled guns in
record numbers. The gun, as one study reported, feels to them like "a force
for order in a chaotic world," though such owners are significantly more
likely to use a gun in their home to kill or wound themselves or someone in
their family than a burglar, intruder, or anyone else.
Think about a country filled with guns in numbers that should stagger the
imagination, weapons that often have the power to rend flesh in ways that
fit war, not the home. Then imagine the fears that have run rampart in this
country in recent years and read the thoughts of TomDispatch regular Frida
Berrigan, as a mother, as the child of famed pacifists who protested
violence and weaponry of every sort, and as a relatively sane soul in a
country deeply on edge with itself.
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
Gunning Down the Easter Bunny
The Weaponization of Everyday Life
Guns. In a country with more than 300 million of them, a country that's
recently been swept up in a round of protests over the endless killing
sprees they permit, you'd think I might have had more experience with them.
As it happens, I've held a gun only once in my life. I even fired it. I was
in perhaps tenth grade and enamored with an Eagle Scout who loved war
reenactments. On weekends, he and his friends camped out, took off their
watches to get into the spirit of the War of 1812, and dressed in homemade
muslin underclothes and itchy uniforms. I was there just one weekend.
Somehow my pacifist parents signed off on letting their daughter spend the
day with war reenactors. Someone lent me a period gown, brown and itchy and
ill-fitting. We women and girls spent an hour twisting black gunpowder into
newspaper scraps. I joked that the newspaper was anachronistic -- the
previous week's Baltimore Sun -- but no one laughed.
A man came by with a long gun, an antique, resting on the shoulder of his
jerkin to collect our "bullets" and he must have read the gun terror written
on my face.
"Wanna give it a try?" he asked.
"Sure," I said, stumbling to my feet, pushing my gown out of the way, and
trying to act like I didn't have broken-rifle patches, symbols of the
pacifist War Resisters League, all over my real clothes. I felt a surge of
adrenaline as I took the heavy weapon in my way-too-small hands. He showed
me how to wrestle it into position, aim it, and fire. There were no bullets,
just one of my twists of powder, but it made a terrifying noise. I shrieked
and came close to dropping the weapon.
And there it was: the beginning, middle, and end of my love affair with guns
-- less than a minute long. Still, my hands seemed to tingle for the rest of
the afternoon and the smell of gunpowder lingered in my hair for days.
Got Guns?
One in four Americans now owns a gun or lives in a household with guns. So
how strange that, on that day in the late 1980s, I saw a real gun for the
first and last time. I grew up in inner city Baltimore. I've worked at soup
kitchens and homeless shelters all over the East Coast and stayed at dozens
of Catholic Worker Houses around the country -- Providence, Camden,
Syracuse, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles -- every one in a "tough"
neighborhood. I lived in Red Hook, Brooklyn, in the mid-1990s, before you
could get a $4 coffee or a zucchini scone on Van Brunt Street, before there
was an Ikea or a Fairway in the neighborhood. All those tough communities,
those places where President Trump imagines scenes of continual "American
carnage," and I've never again seen a gun.
Still, people obviously own them and use them in staggering numbers and in
all sorts of destructive ways. Sensing that they're widespread beyond my
imagination, my husband and I have started asking the parents of our kids'
school friends if they own guns when we arrange play dates or sleepovers. We
learned this from the father of a classmate of my 11-year-old stepdaughter
Rosena. The dad called to make the arrangements for his son to come over
after school. We talked logistics and food allergies and then he paused.
"Now, I am sorry if this is intrusive," he said, "but I do ask everyone: Do
you keep guns in your house?" He sounded both uncomfortable and resolute.
I almost choked on my urge to say, "Don't you know who I am?" In certain odd
corners at least, my last name, Berrigan, is still synonymous with muscular
pacifism and principled opposition to violence and weaponry of just about
any kind, right up to the nuclear kind. But that dad probably didn't even
know my last name and it probably wouldn't have meant a thing to him if he
had. He just wanted to make sure his son was going to be safe and I was
grateful that he asked -- rather than just assuming, based on our
Volvo-driving, thrift-shop-dressing, bumper-sticker-sporting lifestyle, that
we didn't.
"You know how kids are," he said after I assured him that we were a gun-free
household. "They'll be into everything."
And right he is. Kids are "into everything," which is undoubtedly why so
many of them end up with guns in their hands or bullets in their bodies.
"Do you question everyone about their guns?" I asked the dad. He replied
that he did and, if they answered yes, then he'd ask whether those weapons
were locked away, whether the ammunition was stored separately, and so on.
"Thank you so much. I think we need to start doing that too," I said as our
conversation was ending and indeed I have ever since.
It's a subject worth raising, however awkward the conversation that follows
may be, because two million kids in this country live in homes where guns
are not stored safely and securely. So far this year, 59 kids have been hurt
in gun accidents of one sort or another. On average, every 34 hours in our
great nation a child is involved in an unintentional shooting incident,
often with tragic consequences.
The National Rifle Association's classic old argument, "guns don't kill
people, people kill people," takes on a far harsher edge when you're talking
about a seven-year-old accidentally killing his nine-year-old brother with a
gun they found while playing in an empty neighboring house in Arboles,
Colorado.
Two weeks after we learn this new parenting life skill in this oh-so-new
century of ours, my husband Patrick is on the phone with a mom arranging a
sleepover for Rosena. I hear him fumble his way through the gun question.
From his responses, I assume the mom is acknowledging that they do have
guns. Then there's the sort of long, awkward silence that seems part and
parcel of such conversations before Patrick finally says, "Well, okay,
thanks for being so honest. I appreciate that."
He hangs up and looks at me. "They do keep guns for hunting and protection,
but they're locked up and out of sight," he tells me. "The mom says that the
kids have never tried to get at the guns, but she understands the dangers."
(He had heard in her voice apology, embarrassment, and worry that the guns
might mean no sleepover.)
I grimaced in a way that said: I don't think Rosena should go and he
responded that he thought she should. The two of them then had a long
conversation about what she should do and say if she sees a gun. She slept
over and had a great time. A lesson in navigating difference, trusting our
kid, and phew. no guns made an appearance. And we know more about our
neighbors and our community.
Anything Can Be a Gun
My son Seamus, five, received an Easter basket from a family friend. He was
happy about the candy of course and immediately smitten with the stuffed
bunny, but he was over the moon about what he called his new "carrot gun."
It wasn't a toy gun at all, but a little basket that popped out a light ball
when you pressed a button.
The idea was that you'd catch the ball, put it back in, and do it again. But
that wasn't the game my kids played. They promptly began popping it at each
other. His little sister Madeline, four, was in tattle mode almost
immediately. "Mom, Seamus is shooting me with his carrot gun!"
"Mom, mom, mom," he responded quickly, "it's a pretend play gun, not a real
play gun. It's okay." He made popping noises with his mouth and held his
hand as if he were grasping a genuine forbidden toy gun. It was an important
distinction for him. He'd been a full-throated participant in the March for
Our Lives in Boston on March 24th, chanting with the rest of us "What do we
want? Gun Control! When do we want it? NOW!" for four hours straight.
At the march, he pointed out that all the police officers managing traffic
and the flow of people were wearing guns on their belts.
"I see a gun, Mom," he kept saying, or "That police officer has a gun, Mom."
Repeatedly, he noticed the means to kill -- and then four days after that
huge outpouring of youth-led activism for gun security, Stephon Clark was
indeed gunned down in his grandmother's backyard in Sacramento, California.
The police officers who shot him were looking for someone who had been
breaking car windows in the neighborhood and they fired 20 shots into the
dark in his direction. The independent autopsy found that he had been hit
eight times, mostly in his back. Clark turned out to be holding only a
cellphone, though the police evidently mistook it for a tool bar, which
could have done them no harm from that distance, even if he had wielded it
as a weapon.
Maybe the police saw a weapon the same way my five-year-old son sees one. He
can make a stick or just about anything else, including that little basket,
into a "gun" and so evidently can the police. Police officers have killed
black men and boys holding pipes, water hose nozzles, knives, and yes, toy
guns, too.
Where Does the Violence Come From?
Parkland (17 killed, 14 wounded). Newtown (28 killed, 2 wounded). Columbine
(15 killed, 21 injured). School shootings are now treated as a structural
part of our lives. They have become a factor in school architecture,
administrator training, city and state funding, and security plans. The
expectation that something terrible will happen at school shapes the way
that three- and four-year-olds are introduced to its culture. Part of their
orientation now involves regular "shelter in place" and "secure-school"
drills.
At my daughter's pre-school, the kids are told that they're hiding from
rabid raccoons, those animals standing in for marauding, disaffected white
boys or men roaming the halls armed. As parents, we need to do more than
blindly accept that these traumatic exercises are preparing our kids for the
worst and helping them survive. Kids are vulnerable little beings and there
are countless dangers out there, but they have a one-in-600-million chance
of dying in a school shooting. We endanger them so much more by texting
while driving them home from school.
After every episode of violence at a school -- or in the adult world at a
church, night club, concert, movie theater, or workplace like San
Bernardino's Inland Regional Center or the YouTube headquarters -- there's
always a huge chorus of "why"? Pundits look at the shooter's history, his
(it's almost always a guy) trauma, and whatever might be known about his
mental health. They speculate on his (or, in the rare case of those YouTube
shootings, her) political leanings, racial hatreds, and ethnic background.
The search for whys can lead to hand wringing about hard-driving rock music
or nihilistic video games or endemic bullying -- all of which could indeed
be factors in the drive to kill significant numbers of unsuspecting people
-- but never go far enough or deep enough.
Two questions are answered far too infrequently: Where do the guns come
from? Where does violence come from?
Guns of all sizes and description are manufactured and sold in this country
in remarkable numbers, far more than can be legally absorbed in our already
gun-saturated land, so thousands of them move instead into the gray and
black markets. Evidence of this trend shows up repeatedly in Mexico, where
70% of the weapons seized in crimes between 2009 and 2014 turned out to be
made in El Norte. We have an estimated 300 million guns in this country,
making us first by far in the world in gun ownership and some of them
couldn't conceivably be used for "hunting." They are military-style weapons
meant to tear human flesh and nothing but that -- like the AR-15 that
19-year-old Nikolas Cruz legally bought and used in his grim Parkland
shooting spree.
This country, in other words, is a cornucopia of guns, which -- honestly,
folks -- doesn't have a damn thing to do with the Second Amendment.
Where does the violence come from? I've already shared my inexperience with
guns. Now, let me add to it my inexperience with violence. I don't know what
it's like to have to react in a split second to or flee an advancing
perpetrator. No one has ever come at me with a gun or a knife or a pipe, or
anything else for that matter. And I count myself lucky for that. In a
nation in which, in 2016 alone, 14,925 people were killed due to gun
violence and another 22,938 used a gun to kill themselves, it's a
significant thing to be able to say.
And yet, I know that I'm the product of violence (as well as the urge, in my
own family, to protest and stop it): the violence of white privilege, the
violence of American colonialism, the violence of American superpowerdom on
a global scale... and that's no small thing. It's a lot easier to blame
active-shooter scenarios on poor mental-health screening than on growing up
in a world layered with the threat of pervasive violence.
Power is about never having to say you're sorry, never being held
accountable. And that's hardly just a matter of police officers shooting
black men and boys; it's about the way in which this country is insulated
from international opprobrium by its trillion-dollar national security
state, a military that doesn't hesitate to divide the whole world into seven
U.S. "commands," and a massive, planet-obliterating nuclear arsenal.
And don't think that any of that's just a reflection of Trumpian bombast and
brutality either. That same sense of never having to say you're sorry at a
global level undergirded Barack Obama's urbane dispassion, George Bush
Junior's silver spoon cluelessness, Bill Clinton's folksy accessibility,
George Bush Senior's patrician poshness, Ronald Reagan's aura of Hollywood
charm, and Jimmy Carter's southern version of the same. We're talking about
weapons systems designed to rain down a magnitude of terror unimaginable to
the Nikolas Cruzes, Dylann Roofs, and Adam Lanzas of the world.
And it doesn't even make us safe! All that money, all that knowledge, all
that power put into the designing and displaying of weapons of mass
destruction and we remain remarkably vulnerable as a nation. After all, in
schools, homes, offices, neighborhoods across the country, we are being
killed by our kids, our friends, our lovers, our police officers, our
crumbling roads and bridges, our derailing trains. And then, of course,
there are all those guns. Guns meant to destroy. Guns beyond counting.
So what might actually make us safer? After all, people theoretically buy
the kind of firepower you might otherwise use only in war and pledge
allegiance to the U.S. war machine in search of some chimera of safety. And
yet, despite that classic NRA line -- "The only way to stop a bad guy with a
gun is with a good guy with a gun" -- are we truly safer in a nation awash
in such weaponry with so many scrambling in a state of incipient panic to
buy yet more? Are my kids truly on the way to a better life as they practice
cowering in their cubbies in darkened classrooms for fear of invading rabid
"raccoons"?
Don't you think that true security lies not in our arming ourselves to the
teeth against other people -- that is, in our disconnection from them -- but
in our connection to them, to the web of mutuality that has bound societies,
small and large, for millennia? Don't you think that we would be more secure
and so much less terrified if we found ways to acknowledge and share our
relative abundance to meet the needs of others? In a world awash in guns and
fears, doesn't our security have to involve trust and courage and always be
(at best) a work in progress?
As for me, I'm tackling that work in progress in whatever ways I can -- with
my neighbors, my town, my husband, and most of all my children, educating
them in the ways violence scars and all those weapons just increase our
journey into hell, never delivering the security they promise.
Frida Berrigan, a TomDispatch regular, writes the Little Insurrections blog
for WagingNonviolence.org, is the author of It Runs In The Family: On Being
Raised By Radicals and Growing Into Rebellious Motherhood, and lives in New
London, Connecticut.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The
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American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, John Feffer's dystopian
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and Tom Engelhardt's Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a
Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
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