Where's The Safety On This Thing?

A little less than a year ago, I had the pleasure of taking a road trip through the Southern U.S., a region that many of us left-leaning folks from cooler climes tend to imagine as a kind of Dante's Inferno of handguns and hatred. For the most part, though, the Inferno was literal - the people were friendly, but it was too damn hot.

Which is not to say that there weren't some disturbing conversations and images. The racial tension was palpable, and the guns seemed as easy to purchase as a pack of gum. I remember walking into a gun store and seeing everything from small handguns to military-style assault weapons, ranging in price from a couple hundred bucks for the former to a couple thousand for the latter. Frighteningly affordable, I thought, but I tried to console myself with the idea that, hey, at least one had to pass a background check.

Headlines from the past couple of weeks have stirred up memories of those casually hateful conversations and that spooky gun store visit. Just days after abortion doctor George Tiller was murdered in Kansas, an elderly white supremacist walked into a Holocaust memorial museum in Maryland and gunned down a security guard before the guard's colleagues brought him down with their own bullets. It's fair to say that James von Brunn's targets weren't the uniformed security, and only some good luck and bravery prevented a more massive tragedy. 

Kansas and Maryland might not belong to "The South" in the strictest sense (maybe Maryland?), or at least aren't lumped in with the states, such as Mississippi and Alabama, that I visited last year. But my intention was never to pick on the South. What these headlines illustrate is the continued existence of violent, hateful people and the ease with which they can act on their rage pretty much anywhere in the U.S. 

In America, finances aren't much of an obstacle to getting a firearm. Or two. Or an entire weapons cache. Nor do the background checks seem to present a significant hurdle. If von Brunn, a very public and avowed anti-Semite and racist with a long history of convictions for violent offences, can legally own a gun, who can't? What exactly does one have to do to get red-flagged? Now, I'm assuming that von Brunn, as well as Tiller's accused murderer Scott Roeder, legally owned their guns. Perhaps not. But someone did, and the killers somehow got their hands on them, and that to me suggests that guns are altogether too accessible.  

History shows that it's difficult to defend the 1st Amendment and call for the abolishment of the 2nd, which is why guns seem destined to be forever part of the American cultural fabric. But perhaps one day people there will get tired of reading headlines like these and recognize that not all constitutionally enshrined values remain useful in perpetuity. The British left America a long time ago, and they're not coming back, except as tourists.

I know that guns don't kill people, people do. But guns sure do help people kill people, and killing people shouldn't be easy.