Labor Day weekend has always been a lovely juncture in our family. During the waning days of summer, even the hottest days are tempered with faint, dry scents of incipient autumn, at least in our mind’s nose. The anticipation of school, a new outfit and a fresh start, still washes over my wife and me as grandparents, even though our granddaughter started school weeks ago. School before Labor Day should be illegal.
Labor Day weekend in Boulder, Colo., features the Boulder Creek Festival, a minor celebration including antique cars, typical fair food and a band shell with rotating musical acts. We usually go to people-watch — and in a funky town like Boulder, the people-watching is mighty fine, especially the dancing at the band shell.
For perhaps the first time, my wife took a stutter step as we prepared to leave. “Will it be safe?” she wondered out loud. Odessa, El Paso, Palm Springs, Los Angeles, San Jose, Yakama Reservation, St. Louis, Chippewa County, Livingston, Gonzales, Elkmont, Aurora, Dayton, West Chester, Rockmart, Clinton, Sebring, Virginia Beach. These are the sites of just 2019’s mass shootings. “Not in Boulder,” we thought, but these places also thought, “Not possible here.” It’s possible anywhere.
With every new massacre the fading embers of outrage are fanned to new heated rhetoric. And then nothing happens. President Donald Trump supports background checks until he doesn’t. Legislators hem and haw, Democratic candidates preach and posture, the flames die down and then whistling bullets tear through flesh in another community and the cycle begins anew.
The National Rifle Association and gun rights supporters argue that gun control won’t solve anything. The problem is bad guys and they’ll always get guns. It’s mental illness we need to address. We need more good guys with guns, surrounding shopping malls, stationed in schools and on America’s streets.
The various proposals for gun control are useful, I suppose. But gun control doesn’t address the real sickness that infects our country. The loud insistence on the right to bear arms has a cultural corollary: Americans believe they have the right to use arms, not just bear them. We have a man problem, not just a gun problem.
With something like 300 million guns in the country, and a collective male mentality of righteous, rugged, individual entitlement, shooting deaths will continue regardless of gun control efforts. It’s not that we shouldn’t try. But we must also recognize that any concession to the right to bear arms is also a tacit concession to the relatively unfettered right to use arms.
Too many boys and men are infused with this implicit right to use weapons — to defend themselves against imaginary threats to home or person, to get revenge for real or imagined slights, to intimidate others by public carry, to compensate for a sense of inadequacy, to settle minor grievances, to correct injustices based on their own sense of right and wrong, to save their community or country from some vague threat to their sense of superiority.
Every bad guy with a gun believes he is a good guy with a gun — on a righteous mission.
A few boys and men who are steeped in this kind of “right” will find a weapon to use when their masculinity feels threatened or they are persuaded of some unseen menace. And every time gun supporters aggressively insist on the unrestricted right to bear arms they are telling these boys and men that they have a right to use them too. Why fight for the right to carry guns in public or to own military-style killing machines if you’re not also conceding the right to use them?
Sure, let’s fight for meaningful gun control. But frankly, I don’t care whether the gun shoved in my face — or carried to schools or paraded around the mall — is legally acquired, registered, insured or otherwise regulated. I just want the culture to shift so that support of guns is seen as anti-social and boys are raised to be confident and loving, not angry, aggressive and entitled.
Steve Nelson lives in Boulder, Colo., and Sharon. He can be reached at stevehutnelson@gmail.com.