The day was long, its shadows stretching their elongated forms across the road. To the left of me at a car mall along the interstate, a super-sized American flag too heavy to fly full was at half-mast, its drooping symbolic of a nation weighed down by grief and bewilderment about what to do next about the blood-madness unleashed by guns in our society. I wondered if the political system could bear the responsibility of steering the nation around and through what has become a moment of turning, when we as a people are presented with the opportunity to grow. This, after all, is not like the attacks of September 11, 2001. Those attacks were of an enemy foreign to our land; there was no reason to doubt anything. Connecticut was an attack from within. The question now is whether we can react against those who attack us every day and then attack us all at once on a campus of innocents.
The faces of the murdered children and of the little survivors in Newtown crack and crush the heart. Their shadows should be enough to haunt a feckless Congress into action. And much can be done, such as banning the nasty assault weapons that to many are a symbol of right-wing extremists but that for me are about something else, something difficult to explain. It can be best told by a story of many years ago.
The house on Capitol Hill that I lived in had been robbed for a third time in one year. A couple of months before, I had been mugged after parking my car two blocks from the Supreme Court. Crime was endemic in Washington at the time. I was almost 25 and having been raised in Texas had been around guns but had never been taught to use them. I remember my father cleaning his rifle at the height of the Cuban missile crisis when no one discounted war with the Soviets, and I remember the jackrabbits and deer he used to bring home to feed his family at times. Nothing on earth beats venison tamales. And so, I had never been opposed to guns and given the rising threat to my personal safety from the near-useless D.C. government, I thought it was time to inquire about getting a gun. So I called a friend in Virginia who was a gun enthusiast.
And so he came over the following Saturday morning. I told him I wanted to learn how to fire a gun and maybe get one, and so it was determined we would go to his shooting range later that week to start the process. But as he talked I saw him get more and more excited. There seemed to be something else at work in his personality, in his identity. He began to talk in a way that made me realize that for some people guns are more than, well, just guns. I remember to this day the relish with which he said, “Yeah, they make you feel so powerful. It’s a rush. All that power.” I italicize that word not to take literary license. It was he who emphasized the word by bringing his hands up to his chest as if holding something of greater value than himself. The image of Adolf Hitler gathering his arms to his chest while speaking in near ecstasy to a bunch of fanatics comes to mind. I did not keep the appointment. The rapture in his voice makes me nervous to this day but it also provides me with what for me is an insight to the current lunacy.
In the reports after Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora and Sandy Hook, speculation suggests that the exercise of power was at the core of what motivates young men of similar psychological makeup to embark on such violence that almost always includes their own destruction. What an amazing moment if we as a society are producing individuals who feel such powerlessness as to trigger such madness. Are they just the extreme of any of us who sometimes futilely battle insurance companies and banks and government and cable companies and oil and gas companies and drug gangs?
Have we reached a point when personal rage is refracted routinely into personal identity? But my father was not a gun nut. He would have defended us if the Russians had parachuted into West Texas. And if he were still alive today and his family needed food, well, a deer in the Texas Hill Country would not be safe. I doubt my father every savored the idea of power rushing from his rifle.
All of this is about something else. Something is afoot not valid years ago. To me, the difference is the wave of violence in movies, television and music that has permeated all of life. Exposure to violence is synonymous with the increase of massacres in other countries as well. It is not an American phenomenon. It is about the need to satisfy helplessness through a sudden lunge for power even at the cost of self. We have too many guns amidst too many young men not connected to life but to violence.
We do not have to reassess the meaning of the Second nor the First Amendment. The purveyors of violence and irresponsible gun owners must reassess the impact of their vice and their personal shortcomings on the rest of us, including the children.
The gun lobby is not all wrong; neither is the other side, of which I count myself a member. We must transcend absolutist thinking.
We all have to come out from under the shadows.
Jesse Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.