I was heartened recently by this headline on a front-page story in USA Today: “Gay Candidates Gain Acceptance.” I’d stopped by a 7-Eleven for coffee on my way to work and was amusing myself, as I sometimes do, by contrasting the top headlines of the Washington Post against those of the right-wing Moonie rag Washington Times, which typically spins such neutral Post headlines as “Jobless Rate Slows Economic Recovery” and “Afghanistan Blast Kills 3 US Soldiers” as “Ha! Some Stimulus!” and “Defeatist Obama Strategy Kills 3 More Servicemen.”
Anyway, it isn’t often I see a front-page headline that actually cheers me, so I moved in for a closer look at USA Today. The subhead on the gay-candidates story read, “Poll: In Big Shift, Support Among Voters Increasing.” The caption under the accompanying photo of a youngish, bespectacled blonde woman read, “Sinema: The Phoenix Democrat says Arizona ‘doesn’t really care” about her sexuality.” The article’s first two paragraphs explained that Kyrsten Sinema is a state senator considering a bid for Congress who is openly bisexual.
Very cool, I thought, pondering with juvenile glee Sinema’s potential campaign slogans: “Reaching Out to Both Sides of the Aisle.” “You CAN Have It Both Ways.” “Strong Enough for a Man (But Made for a Woman).” Obviously there’d be trademark issues to work out with that last one. Anyway, I then picked up the newspaper to read more, and grinned at the encouraging thought that America at long last is recognizing the irrelevance in the workplace of individuals’ sexual orientation.
But then paragraph three wiped the smile off my face.
“Arizona doesn’t really care,” the 35-year-old lawyer says, dismissing the issue as irrelevant. “They just want to have low property taxes and no gun control.” The implication being that the candidate, who had seduced me with her hipster glasses and sexual liberalism, is just as much of a selfish libertarian nutcase about guns as are the majority of her fellow Arizonans.
A couple of days later an opinion piece in the New York Times caught my eye. Headlined “Lawmakers, Armed and Dangerous,” it highlighted a recent controversy over whether or not one of Kyrsten Sinema’s colleagues in the Arizona state senate, Lori Klein, had deliberately pointed her loaded pistol at a newspaper reporter. The essay went on from there to decry the easy availability and proud—nay, defiant—brandishing of firearms all across the country, the toothlessness of so-called “gun control” laws, the unwillingness of the Obama administration to address an issue that to my mind has got to be Webster’s definition of “political suicide,” and the appalling moral laziness of all-guns-all-the-time attitudes in Arizona—the very state in which crazed gunman Jared Loughner in January killed six people and wounded 13 others, using a firearm with a high-capacity clip that once had been illegal in this country but was reinstated for potential mass murder when Congress allowed the federal assault weapons ban to expire in 2004.
Of course, the most famous victim of the Tucson massacre, Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, herself is a big gun supporter—as anyone hoping to get elected to anything in Arizona had damn well better be. The huge irony there is that, should Giffords ever recover sufficiently from her brain injuries to reclaim her seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, every speck of voter goodwill toward her would vanish the second she started campaigning for reelection on a slogan of “On Second Thought, Private Citizens Need Guns Like They Need a Hole in the Head.”
The New York Times piece, by Frank Bruni, further noted, “You’d think Arizona would be cracking down on guns after the January bloodletting. You’d be wrong. Since then, not only did [state senate president Russell] Pierce make clear that Klein and her colleagues could pack heat as they pleased, but state lawmakers voted expressly to allow guns on college campuses.” (The Republican governor vetoed that bill, but on a technicality, not its merits).
Citing the news reporting of his own newspaper, Bruni added that over the past three years, 20 states have passed measures enabling people who have been denied firearms because of mental illness to petition to have their rights to own guns restored.
You know, there’s this great, happy Marshall Crenshaw song I always think of in the summer, when I’m crawling across the Key Bridge into Georgetown on my way home from work and women in cool summer dresses are strolling past me on the sidewalks left and right. It’s called Girls, Girls, Girls, and one of its lines is, “I fall in love from my head to my feet when I’m watchin’ all the girls walkin’ down the street.” Lately this summer, however, the depressing title that’s replaced it in my mind is my own disgusted parody, Guns, Guns, Guns. (The tweaked lyric there might be, “I’m filled with lead from my head to my feet if I cross some stupid hothead packin’ heat.”)
When that crazy Christian avenger against Islam killed 77 people in Norway last week in a bombing and shooting rampage that shocked the home nation of the Nobel Peace Prize, I at once was struck by both the singularity of the event and the certain reaction of the National Rifle Association and its millions of diehard members in this country—though the NRA issued no statement that I know of. Its stance, I’m positive, based on past comments by NRA president Wayne LaPierre, would be that the Norwegian death toll could’ve been sharply reduced, if not prevented entirely, if only civilians owned guns and could have shot that motherfucker. Which is so ass-backward that it drives me insane. (But still keeps me in line for a legal handgun!)
It never would occur to America’s countless devotees of the Second Amendment (written way back in the 18th century to protect us from the Indians whose land we stole and maybe the Brits whose tea-taxing butts we’d recently booted) that strict laws against private ownership of guns are precisely the reason the Norway killings were such a huge international story. Meanwhile, multiple people wasted by a gunman in Texas, or Florida, or Michigan? If I’m editor of the London Times, I’m relegating that story to the international briefs on page 26A, under the headline, “In US, Another Day, Another Slaughter.”
I wasn’t thinking of guns after my run this morning, but then I started reading a column in the Washington Post about how conservative Christian female politicians in this country no longer are running from the word “feminist,” but instead are re-branding it to fit their worldview. Minnesota congresswoman and Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann and her historical role model Sarah Palin, columnist Lisa Miller noted, enjoy kicking liberals' butts and encouraging female fellow-thinkers to similarly empower themselves. Palin, in fact, has favorably contrasted herself with the old-school brand of feminist who sits around gasbagging about liberal nonsense “in the faculty lounge at some East Coast women’s college.” She casts herself, Miller noted, as a feminist for these sadly directionless and amoral times—what the columnist summed up as “a gun-toting, self-reliant, pro-life Christian who credits her gender as the source of her power.”
Then, maybe 20 minutes later I read a letter to the editor in which the writer took the Post to task for failing to ask and answer the question, in a recent news story out of Fairfax County, of where a patient who had fatally shot her psychiatrist and herself had obtained the gun. The letter concluded with the lines, “This is not necessarily an item lying around everyone’s house, like a knife, a fork, or an ice-cream scoop. It is a gun.”
Ah, but that’s just the point, I sat there thinking. In the United States, in far, far too many households, a gun is just an item lying around, waiting to be fired at whatever time, for whatever reason. And not just an ordinary item, but an item that’s worshipped by everyone from lawmakers to loons (not that the two categories don’t often overlap.) An item that’s prized by men, by women, by women who fancy themselves feminists, and by women like state Sen. Sinema who love both men and women in a hands-on kind of way.
You know how songs you absolutely loathe nevertheless sometimes worm their way into your cranium and refuse to leave, no matter how hard you try to divert your thoughts? They’re often tunes that are beloved by millions of people, but that leave you longing for lobotomy. Well, for me this summer, Guns, Guns, Guns has become that song.
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