Guns and US – 1

Something is clearly wrong in this country. Too many people are dying from gunshot wounds.

In this and four brief essays to follow, I will explore some facets of the issue and ponder possible solutions. I do not pretend to know many answers. I also do not imagine that this exercise will win me many friends. It may, in fact, alienate more readers than it pleases. Such is the emotional power of this issue.

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“Mass” shootings aside, here are some reports of shootings in recent months.

In Kansas City, Missouri, a 16-year-old black youth knocks on the wrong door and is shot through the door by the white homeowner. He is shot twice, the second time after he has fallen.

In Elgin, Texas, near Austin, two cheerleaders are shot after one of them mistakenly gets into the wrong car at their carpooling site.

In Tampa, Florida, a man shoots and wounds a 6-year-old girl and her parents after several children try to retrieve a basketball that rolled into his yard.

In Upstate New York, a 20-year-old woman is shot dead after she and her friends accidentally pull into the wrong driveway while looking for a friend’s house. They never even got out of their car.

A Florida couple delivering groceries for Instacart is shot at when they go to the wrong address.

In Annapolis, Maryland, a dispute over street parking turns deadly when a man shoots six people at a graduation party, killing three of them.

In Cleveland, Texas, a man kills five neighbors, including a child, when one of them asks him to stop shooting his AR-15-style rifle in his front yard.

In Detroit, a man shoots three other customers in a gas station after the clerk won’t let him leave unless he pays for an item that’s worth less than $4. One of the shooting victims dies.

In Ocala, Florida, a black woman is shot dead by a white neighbor, ending a long feud over playing children.

Several of these incidents appear to have happened after simple mistakes that anyone could make. But they turned deadly because of guns. For the shooters, guns provided an easy and instant solution to their perceived problem.

This is a national crisis. Why is this so?

According to some people, we can’t even talk about it. Although they chatter incessantly about mental health, Republicans in Congress routinely block any efforts to study gun violence as a mental health issue.

The Kansas State Rifle Association recently threatened several cities for even trying to talk about it. The group alleges that by talking about it, the cities are promoting gun confiscation.

People who tell such lies are one of the reasons gun violence has become a national crisis. Remember when Barack Obama was president? For eight years, gun advocates kept up the drumbeat: Obama is going to confiscate your guns! Did he ever do it? No – never even suggested it. It was a blatant lie from the start.

Why do people believe such lies? Why do people continue to believe such liars?

One of the reasons gun violence continues is that some people are committed to lies and to liars.

Next: Fear sells guns.

Who’s Left to Tell

They must have thought no one would be looking.

That’s the best explanation I can muster for the police raid on the offices of a weekly newspaper in Marion, Kansas.

That, or they are dumber than a brick.

The entire police force of five officers entered the premises of the Marion County Record last Friday and seized computers, mobile phones and other items – allegedly to investigate the “identity theft” of a restaurant owner who had a public feud with the newspaper.

Oh, and yes, the newspaper also had been nosing into the past of the new chief of police.

At least they did it in daylight, rather than under the cover of night. But if they thought they could get away with it, with no one noticing, they were delusional. Not only is it state news and national news. It’s international news.

The whole world is watching. And the whole world knows what ugly small town politics has done in Marion, Kansas. The whole world knows that ugly small town politicians rule in Marion, Kansas. And the local Chamber of Commerce might as well hang up its shingle because that town’s goose is cooked.

Local authorities are hanging tough. What else can they do? Admit their perfidy? There will be suits and countersuits and charges and countercharges. And when the dust settles, the reputation of this town will be as good as gas station toilet paper.

Elsewhere in Kansas on Friday, people were mourning the death of a Fairway police officer who was killed in the line of duty. But in Marion, Kansas, cops were shutting down a newspaper. Last time this happened in Kansas, as I recall, was right before the Civil War, when slavers shut down an abolitionist paper, threw its press in the river and ran the editor out of town.

I get a little steamed about such things because I used to be in the newspaper business. My wife and I once considered buying a small paper. Really glad we didn’t do that, for many reasons.

There’s a country song, “Try That in a Small Town.” You know that most lynchings were done in small towns. And when people were asked who was involved, they just shrugged. They knew. But they didn’t dare tell the truth.

Who’s left in Marion, Kansas, to tell the truth?

Speaking of Scams

I have had it with junk phone calls. About 3 in the afternoon every day all this week, I’ve been hit by a barrage of robocalls, one after another.

I don’t even have time to click them off or turn off the ringer. Two or three in quick succession, claiming to be from everywhere – but what are the chances of three people from everywhere calling me within one minute?

I really want to answer and tell them off, but what good would that do? “Kindly take me off your call list.” Right. They’ll jump on that. I’m already at the top of their call list, so I’m not getting off that easy.

I think my record was 10 or 11 on Monday. Lost count, especially after the numbers got blocked and the calls deleted.

These are calls from spoofed numbers. One, labeled “MENORAH MC,” didn’t have the right area code for Menorah Medical Center. One did leave a message: “This is ____ from the pharmacy. We have a question about your prescription.” As I recall, the area code was someplace in New Jersey. Where I fill all my prescriptions.

There must be money in this somewhere. Speaking of scams…

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Channel flipping on TV the other day, I came across a commercial that had former game show host Chuck Woolery shilling for gold coins.

Gold, the pitch goes, is the answer to economic uncertainty. How? The pitch never quite says. But, you know, it’s gold. GOLD! What can be more secure than gold?

Like so many TV commercials, this one plays on fear – in this case, fear of future economic collapse. First, buy gold. Then buy guns to keep away gold thieves. Then buy a bunker to keep you and your gold and your guns safe. You know how it goes.

They never tell you that the price of gold goes up and down, just like everything else. You can lose your shirt on gold just as easily as in the stock market or the casino.

They also never tell you that we’ve heard the same sad pitch for gold for – well, how long? Maybe a couple hundred years?

The gold standard is illusory, though I guess our currencies have to be backed up by something.

I have an idea. Instead of basing our currency on gold, I think we should base it on first edition Batman comic books.

They’re a bit more destructible than gold but, hey, even gold melts. And instead of sitting around and admiring your gold coins (seen one, seen ’em all), you could at least read the Batman comic books.

It’ll probably never catch on because too many people have a vested interest in gold. But if the idea does catch fire, remember that you read it here first.

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On second thought, maybe Superman comics. How about Archie?

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“Hawaii is a warning,” the Atlantic headline says. Yeah. What happens when we don’t have a sea to jump in to escape the flames?

Stern Reality

Say what you will about the movies of Christopher Nolan (I thought “Tenet” was a disaster), they have a way of getting into your head and sticking around.

I saw “Oppenheimer” a couple of weeks ago. I remain fascinated by movie and the man. It’s a uniquely powerful movie about a deeply conflicted man.

I saw the IMAX version, always a good idea with Nolan’s movies (“Dunkirk” especially). I sat toward the front of the theater, the better to be overwhelmed by the visuals. Alas, the AMC theater had the sound turned up so loud that even whispered dialogue came off as a shout. Nolan always cranks up the sound. No need to boost it any higher.

Maybe I could have understood more of the dialogue if I’d sat further back. Only two or three of us were in Row E, five rows back from where the floor starts to rise.

As usual, Nolan’s narrative jumps back and forth in time. It also moves between color sequences when Oppenheimer is the focus and black-and-white sequences when others carry the action. Despite its complexity, this technique is mostly seamless and more intuitive than confusing.

The acting is similarly flawless. Amazingly, the movie makes Emily Blunt appear almost dowdy most of the time. The last shot of her is devastating in showing the toll events have taken on her character.

As Oppenheimer, Cillian Murphy’s gaunt face and frame, and his hauntingly deep blue eyes, stay in memory a long time. His signature hat will probably start a minor fashion revolution the way Indiana Jones’s fedora did ages ago. It’s apparently a cross between a fedora and a porkpie. Whatever it is, it’s brilliant. With his crisp white shirts and perfectly matched suit and tie, plus the ever-present cigarette, the hat shouts his steeliness of purpose to a world that never marches to the same drummer.

You can interpret the ending as cryptic, or tragic, or both. “The man who invented the atomic bomb” thinks he has doomed humankind. Perhaps he has. You wish Vlad the Impaler and that pudgy goon in North Korea had even a smidgen as much conscience.

Some pundits have found a historical error in the film. It seems that in one scene you can briefly glimpse an American flag with 50 stars rather than the 48 appropriate to the time. Really? Who looks for such things? And how much of the bigger picture do you miss while focusing on such minutiae?

A personal reference: When I started as an undergraduate at the University of Illinois, I was an English major. One of my creative writing professors was Nuel Pharr Davis. He was a National Book Award finalist for his book Lawrence and Oppenheimer. In the movie, Oppenheimer is the theorist and Ernest Lawrence is the practical thinker in rimless glasses whom he’s often arguing with. Friends and colleagues for a time, they were divided by the bomb they both helped create.

Summer Days

We have just returned from a weeklong family vacation near Nederland, Colorado, one of the garden spots of the universe.

We rejoiced in each other’s company, greatly enjoyed poking in town, even did some hiking (despite the National Park Service’s insane policies on trailhead reservations in the back country).

The photo shown here actually is a view from our cabin’s deck last year, but I did such a poor job of taking photos this year that I don’t have much to show.

I can remember coming back from Colorado vacations with hundreds of photos of mountains and trees and streams and moose. Are we seeing less these days, or have memories become more important to me than photos of them?

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I have been busy, though you wouldn’t guess that from my blog output. In the last year I wrote a book, titled Change of Heart: A Wesleyan Spirituality. I think it’s a needed look at our Wesleyan roots in this time of turmoil in Methodism.

It’s already been rejected by Abingdon Press, the United Methodist publishing house. It says it has other similar works already in process. I’ve always given Abingdon the right of first refusal on all my book proposals, and I’ve always been rejected. I think it’s time to put some other publisher at the top of my query list.

And, in fact, my latest has now been accepted for publication by Wipf & Stock. Stay tuned for developments!

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Three KU profs are under fire for allegedly faking their Native American ancestry. Kansas City Star columnist Yvette Walker confesses that her family also had unconfirmed stories about a Blackfoot ancestor.

“For as long as I can remember, I believed I had Native ethnicity,” she writes. “I even thought I knew which tribe I supposedly belonged to because it was a part of my family’s oral history.” To test the family memory, she took a Family DNA test. Turns out family oral history was wrong.

My family also has an oral tradition that a woman several generations back was Native American. Not exactly the classic “Cherokee princess” story, but close enough.

I’m about all who’s left to carry on family oral tradition, and my searches on Ancestry.com have found nothing to corroborate this story. I once assumed that it was because racists in my family conveniently “forgot” about the Indian ancestor until it became more socially acceptable to claim her, but by then all details were lost in time. Maybe it was a myth all along.

I did have an uncle who was Native. He married into the family. Sadly, he died relatively young as an alcoholic.

Whether I have any “Indian blood” in me matters less than how I view and treat Native Americans. Since childhood I have been fascinated by various Indian cultures. The more I learn about the genocide campaign against Native tribes, the more I am appalled by the tragedy of racism.

If you’re interested in learning more, I suggest reading The Rediscovery of America by Ned Blackhawk. Actually, I wasn’t capable of reading all of it. I had to skim parts. It’s well written, but many parts will simply break your heart.

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Back to school time nears already. Where did the summer go? Weren’t summers longer back in the “good old days”? Granted, summer child care can be a chore for busy parents. Maybe advancing age fools me on the passage of time, but I wonder if today’s kids suspect they’re being cheated of days in the sun.

Linda and I just bought school supplies for a Spring Hill 9th grader. We deliberately did not keep track of how much it cost. I can’t imagine the expense of having two kids in high school right now, let alone one. Tell me: Why does any high schooler need five two-inch three-ring binders?