even*cleveland: guns

Showing posts with label guns. Show all posts

'our moloch'

Few crimes are more harshly forbidden in the Old Testament than sacrifice to the god Moloch (for which see Leviticus 18.21, 20.1-5). The sacrifice referred to was of living children consumed in the fires of offering to Moloch. Ever since then, worship of Moloch has been the sign of a deeply degraded culture. Ancient Romans justified the destruction of Carthage by noting that children were sacrificed to Moloch there. Milton represented Moloch as the first pagan god who joined Satan’s war on humankind:

First Moloch, horrid king, besmear’d with blood
Of human sacrifice, and parents’ tears,
Though for the noise of Drums and Timbrels loud
Their children’s cries unheard, that pass’d through fire
To his grim idol. (Paradise Lost 1.392-96)

Read again those lines, with recent images seared into our brains—“besmeared with blood” and “parents’ tears.” They give the real meaning of what happened ... That horror cannot be blamed just on one unhinged person. It was the sacrifice we as a culture made, and continually make, to our demonic god. We guarantee that crazed man after crazed man will have a flood of killing power readily supplied him. We have to make that offering, out of devotion to our Moloch, our god. The gun is our Moloch. We sacrifice children to him daily.

Garry Wills, "Our Moloch." The New York Review of Books, December 15, 2012.

Firearms deaths are a fixture in American life. There were 1.5 million of them between 1968 and 2017—that's higher than the number of soldiers killed in every US conflict since the American War for Independence in 1775. In 2020 alone, more than 45,000 Americans died at the end of a barrel of a gun, whether by homicide or suicide, more than any other year on record. The figure represents a 25% increase from five years prior, and a 43% increase from 2010.

BBC: "America's Gun Culture in Seven Charts."

The evidence couldn’t be more plain. Other countries haven’t entirely eliminated mass shootings, but they have enacted reforms that helped turn them into rare, aberrational events, rather than the everyday occurrences they are in this country. Is it any wonder that much of the rest of the world considers us mad?

For over a decade now, the data has shown that commonsense gun laws prevent gun violence—but only in the states with courage to enact them.

Melt the guns,
Melt the guns,
Melt the guns,
And never more desire them.

Edited to add:

Cup of Jo has a good list of things to do to stop this madness.

Reading My Tealeaves also has email addresses posted—you can send messages to disrupt the NRA conference scheduled in Texas THIS WEEKEND.

'noble experiment'

If the sadness of life makes you tired
And the failures of man make you sigh
You can look to the time soon arriving
When this noble experiment winds down and calls it a day

Time has come now to stop being human
Time to find a new creature to be
Be a fish or a weed or a sparrow
For the earth has grown tired and all of your time has expired

All the gardens are sprouting with flowers
All the treetops are bursting with birds
And the people all know that it's over
They lay down all their airs and they hang up their tiresome words

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"And you know, he might be going to Toledo, I don't know."

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"Well, we are all equal. We’re all equal. And we’re all vulnerable."

'because of everything'

There is not a word in the American lexicon for such gatherings—the semi-spontaneous assembly of people in the wake of tragedy, who are united by both grief and by anger, and whose public mourning serves to reaffirm their civic bond to one another. But we need such a word, because this ritual happens frequently enough to be familiar—so frequently that its purpose need not be explained to those in attendance. “Are people here to protest against Donald Trump?” I asked a man in the crowd. “They’re here because of everything,” he answered.

Jelani Cobb, "From Charleston to Pittsburgh, an Arc of Premeditated American Tragedy." The New Yorker, 11/1/2018.

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I could not make it to services tonight, but I am sitting here thinking of Joyce Fienberg, Richard Gottfried, Rose Mallinger, Jerry Rabinowitz, Cecil and David Rosenthal, Bernice and Sylvan Simon, Daniel Stein, Melvin Wax, and Irving Younger; of Maurice Stallard and Vickie Lee Jones, each a victim of the poisonous hates that are being encouraged in our country.

odds and ends / 3.23.2018

From top:

'How to Leave Facebook' by Jeremy Deller, at Kettle's Yard.

Bourke de Vries: Memory vessel/Southampton 6, 2013. 19th century English creamware ale jug and glass.

Collaborating with ... a manufacturer of custom laboratory glass, de Vries selected damaged pieces of ceramics and created glass vessels, using the original shape of the broken object. These ‘ghost’ vessels hold the fragments of the original pieces and create a conversation about the history, value, and beauty in something that could be perceived as worthless.

My dream outfit for early spring: Caron Callahan's quilted flower-print jacket + cropped check pants; Brother Vellies shearling loafers.

"our hotel is here..."

Postcard from Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson to Eva Hesse, July 10, 1967, via the Moon Lists.

Detail from a calendar page by Tézzo Suzuki (found thanks to Letterform Archive's Instagram).

Abigail and her partner in counter-fashion, Maura Brewer, have been wearing only jumpsuits for the past three years—to weddings, to job interviews, to teach their classes at art school, and to visit their families over Thanksgiving. Their closets are nearly empty: they each have three jumpsuits, a few jumpsuit-compatible sweaters, workout clothes, pajamas, and underthings—that’s it. They don’t have to buy new clothes or wonder how they’ll look in the culottes that have recently come into fashion. They never have to choose a new outfit because they’ve already picked the one they’ll wear forever.

Heather Radke, 'The Jumpsuit That Will Replace All Clothes Forever.' The Paris Review, 3/21/2018.

'The city of Melbourne assigned trees email addresses so citizens could report problems. Instead, people wrote thousands of love letters to their favorite trees.'

This kind of joy is superfluous and therefore absolutely necessary. It is the deep meaning of revelry and play, as the historian Johan Huizinga wrote in his masterpiece Homo Ludens. Culture itself “arises in the form of play.” “Play cannot be denied. You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.”

Jay Griffiths, 'Skate Fever.' Lapham's Quarterly.

New rules: 'Get news. Not too quickly. Avoid social.'

Heather Abel's essay on writing and motherhood is so terribly, terribly good: 'When I see The Baby Book at bookstores, I want to snatch the copies off the shelves and dump them in the baby’s bathwater.' (YES.)

'An inventory of small deaths.'

These hero children.

We're driving to Washington, D.C., to march on Saturday. You?

(If you, like me, get terribly anxious and emotional in crowds, but feel compelled to be one of the number, here's what I do: stay on the edges. Having a little room to breathe can make all the difference. Looking up helps, too. The sky is always there.)

'the brightest object'

This story, about Fayes Khamal, a ten-year-old-boy in a Rohingya refugee camp who collects plastic bags, trash, and bits of bamboo, to make into kites for younger children, had me crying in the car.

The reminder that humans have the capacity, even in terrible circumstances, to use the broken and discarded pieces of the world to make something beautiful and joyful, to find ways to give and help, was wonderful and almost too much to bear.

And this child, who has found his own way to make something intolerable a little better, is, of course, exactly the kind of person the Trump Administration wants to ban from coming to the United States: young, male, a Muslim refugee, someone from a poor country.

Meanwhile, native-born American men keep finding weapons and murdering schoolchildren, people at concerts, people dancing, people praying, people watching movies ...

Detail from a photo by Allison Joyce for NPR.

this week

A 64-year-old man brought ten suitcases containing an arsenal of legally-purchased rifles to a hotel suite on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay resort and casino in Las Vegas, waited three days for the closing night of a country music festival being held about 500 yards away, and then opened fire on the crowd of 22,000 concertgoers below, killing 58 and injuring 489 ... The White House press secretary said “it would be premature” to talk about gun control; US president Donald Trump said that he was “not going to talk about” gun control; and a 60-year-old man in New York shot and killed his 27-year-old disabled daughter with a shotgun in his back yard and then shot and killed himself, a 46-year-old woman was shot and killed in her mobile home in Florida, a 40-year-old man was shot and killed in a house in Maryland, a 52-year-old man in Louisiana was shot and killed in his back yard, four people attending a vigil for a 30-year-old woman who was shot and killed in Florida were then shot by an unknown assailant, a twentysomething man in Tennessee was shot and killed outside the group home for disabled adults where he worked, a 25-year-old man in Georgia was shot and killed during a bar fight, a 27-year-old man in Michigan was shot and killed while walking his dogs, a 22-year-old man was shot and killed in his kitchen in Michigan while showing a visitor his gun, a two-year-old in Illinois was shot by an unknown assailant while the car the child was riding in was stopped at a red light, a construction worker in New York was shot and killed on the 37th floor of an unfinished building by a co-worker who then shot and killed himself on the fifth floor, an 18-year-old boy in New York was shot and killed three blocks from his home, a 14-year-old boy in Washington was shot and killed by a 13-year-old boy with a handgun he had borrowed from a 12-year-old, and, in Utah, a video was released of a police officer fatally shooting a black man who was running away after being pulled over for erratically riding his bicycle without a rear reflector. “Deadly force,” said the district attorney on the case, “was justified.”

Joe Kloc, Harper's 'Weekly Review: October 6, 2017.'

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'Just three percent of adults own half of America's guns.' The Washington Post, September 19, 2016.

The Constitution is not a pact with the devil, nor is it a suicide pact. It is a formalized, legalistic ritual of blood sacrifice. There are some things that we as a society, alas, must tolerate in order to stay true to our founding beliefs and to remain free. Schoolchildren shot to pieces is one of those things. The massacre of country music fans is another one of those things, the 273rd blood sacrifice to that one provision of the Constitution this year.

Charles P. Pierce, 'If Newtown Wasn't Enough, Why Would Las Vegas Be Enough?' Esquire, October 2, 2017.

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'It feels like someone has opened a window into hell.'

Jimmy Kimmel, October 2, 2017.

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"Responsible" gun owners:

A grandmother with a loaded gun in her purse.

A police officer.

A father cleaning his gun.

A father of a two-year-old (the child found the gun and took off the safety.)

An in-home daycare provider.

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Call your representatives; learn and share.

wear orange

June 2 is the day to #WearOrange:

Orange is the color that Hadiya Pendleton’s friends wore in her honor when she was shot and killed in Chicago at the age of 15 — just one week after performing at President Obama’s 2nd inaugural parade in 2013 ... Orange is what hunters wear in the woods to protect themselves and others from harm. Orange is a bright, bold color that demands to be seen. Orange expresses our collective hope as a nation — a hope for a future free from gun violence.

We are not headlines or statistics. We are mothers, sisters, fathers, brothers, and friends. We are teachers, dancers, athletes and activists. We are here and we are united. We demand to be seen and we demand to see change. There’s no more important time to get involved than this year, this summer, this day. Our country is at a turning point, and now more than ever, we have to fight for what we believe in. June 2nd is National Gun Violence Awareness Day and Americans across the country will be wearing orange. It may seem like a simple statement — but when we all act together, we can’t be ignored. Our social networks, television screens, and communities will light up orange, standing together for a future free from gun violence.

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Key statistics from The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence:

In one year on average 114,994 people in America are shot in murders, assaults, suicides & suicide attempts, unintentional shootings, or by police intervention. 33,880 people die from gun violence.

Every day, 309 people in America are shot in murders, assaults, suicides & suicide attempts, unintentional shootings, and police intervention. Every day, 93 people die from gun violence.

Every day, 48 children and teens are shot in murders, assaults, suicides & suicide attempts, unintentional shootings, and police intervention. Every day, 7 children and teens die from gun violence.

In America, 1 out of 3 homes with kids have guns and nearly 1.7 million children live in a home with an unlocked, loaded gun.

Wear Orange tote by The Maryn and Anna Ullman of A.E.U. Studio.

'to do nothing while others are in danger is not the american way.'

On Wednesday, a minority of senators gave into fear and blocked common-sense legislation that would have made it harder for criminals and people with dangerous mental illnesses to get hold of deadly firearms ...

I watch TV and read the papers like everyone else. We know what we’re going to hear: vague platitudes like “tough vote” and “complicated issue.” I was elected six times to represent southern Arizona ... I know what a complicated issue is; I know what it feels like to take a tough vote. This was neither. These senators made their decision based on political fear and on cold calculations about the money of special interests like the National Rifle Association, which in the last election cycle spent around $25 million on contributions, lobbying and outside spending.

Speaking is physically difficult for me. But my feelings are clear: I’m furious ... I am asking every reasonable American to help me tell the truth about the cowardice these senators demonstrated. I am asking for mothers to stop these lawmakers at the grocery store and tell them: You’ve lost my vote. I am asking activists to unsubscribe from these senators’ e-mail lists and to stop giving them money. I’m asking citizens to go to their offices and say: You’ve disappointed me, and there will be consequences.

Gabrielle Giffords, writing in the 4/18/2013 NYT. Full text here.