Six years. A moment. A lifetime.

It’s been six years since the Sandy Hook shooting, 20 little kids murdered by an angry white man, and it feels like just a minute ago, and it feels like a lifetime ago.

All the shootings since then, schools and other places, all the angry white men collapse in my mind and I want to run to where my son is and hold him tight and somehow make my body protect him from the violence.

At the same time I feel like I’ve gone through a lifetime of sorrow and loss of illusions that we cannot, as a nation, do anything about this.

We fetishize the Second Amendment, though we have legislative and judiciary branches of government whose job it is to update and interpret the law.

The claim that we already have laws and they don’t keep guns out the hands of criminals is disingenuous. With no nationwide concensus on gun laws, we have ended up with a patchwork of weak laws and loopholes that lets anyone with gas money drive to a neighboring state and buy as much firepower as they want.

We regulate cars and Sudafed, lettuce and Adderal. We regulate free speech and voting. We have, since the original composition of the Constitution, abolished slavery, prohibited alcohol and allowed it again, extended the vote to former slaves and to women.

Yet as a nation, we deem it impossible to create national limits on the sale of automatic weapons, or create national standards for background checks.

And so people keep dying. Children keep dying. People of color, women, gays. Straight white men get killed, too, some of them police officers. People keep dying, and we keep avoiding naming the killers: men, white men almost to the one, a slim majority of them involved in domestic violence.

As a nation, it seems we can’t imagine limiting the rights of these white men to their guns, and so every week we go through spasms of grief about another killing, and then we go right on with our lives. I’ve gone numb. How about you?

An Open Letter

I've seen several compelling pieces of writing today addressed to white people, asking us to figure out how to stop the shootings. People of color shot by police. Hands in the air. Evidence planted, testimony perjured. Boys shot in the back while fleeing.

I don't know what to do. So I wrote a letter.

Dear Secretary Clinton,

I'm writing to ask you to take a strong and vocal stance against police shootings of black and disabled men, and to make it an issue you will attempt to address substantively within the first 100 days of your presidency.

I don't know how to change a culture, within police departments as well as within our broader United States, in which white police officers routinely find it appropriate to shoot young men -- boys, even -- of color.

I do know that it has to stop. 

You will, I hope, soon be in a position to lead a national dialogue of reconceiving the role of the police in communities, retraining individuals and groups, and beginning to heal some of the rifts between black and white individuals and communities in our country.

Please make this a central part of your commitment to the people of the United States, if elected.

Thank you.

Tomorrow, I'll send versions of this letter to my local and national representatives. 

Please, if you're reading this, take a moment to write a letter as well. Write to your local chief of police, write to your state lawmakers, write to whoever you think is in a position to make a difference.

We Need Gun Laws. Now.

More than 355 "mass" shootings already this year. Two, just yesterday. As of today, 12,223 people have died this year from gun violence and 24,722 people have been injured. Millions of friends and family members are affected.

But the NRA has convinced millions of Americans that any amount of regulation attached to gun ownership equals "taking away our guns." They give millions of dollars to people running for government at all levels to push the ridiculous claim that any amount of regulation is too much.

Hey, you know, we manage to regulate cars and alcohol and cigarettes and Sudafed without stopping people from acquiring and using any of them.

Hunters know that there are a bunch of rules about what you can shoot and when you can shoot it. In New Hampshire, deer season this year runs from October 31 through December 6, with different time frames depending on what kind of gun you're using. In Maine, you can't hunt on Sundays. You have to have a hunting license, and there are rules about how many deer you can bring home per year. No one is taking away anyone's right to shoot at animals with a gun, but the rules help protect the safety of hunters and other people using the forests, and they keep the deer population stable.

But it seems to be open season on human beings in the USA today.

I bought a car recently. I needed the Vehicle Identification Number of the car to get my insurance, so I couldn't get that organized in advance, and my insurance company closed before the car dealership, and without proof of insurance -- current insurance on the current vehicle, not last year's policy -- I couldn't drive the car off the lot.

Some states regulate guns. California, where one of yesterday's shootings took place. New York State. But violent people can buy guns with no background check, no waiting period, no regulations at all at gun shows in Georgia. From manufacturers like Glock and Men with orders of protection against them from ex-wives or girlfriends. People with a history of violence, people with criminal records. People with drug and alcohol problems that make them more likely to act and react violently.

If you own a car, you have to pay for insurance on it in case you get in an accident. If you drink and drive, you can lose your license. If you kill someone while driving, you might go to prison. No one is screaming that the government wants to take away our cars.

How we've reached this point when it comes to guns, I don't understand. Why the NRA wants you to think that any amount of gun regulation is unacceptable, I don't understand.

But it's beyond time for change. We need to show up at the polls and vote out the politicans in the NRA's pockets. We need national legislation that eliminates unregulated gun shows and closes the other loopholes to unregulated gun ownership.

We need national laws requiring regularly renewed licenses and insurance policies for all gun owners as well as rigorous background checks and waiting periods for new buyers.

We need them now.

Hope on Guns: Is It Possible?

For the first time in a long, long time I'm feeling a stirring of hope that we can stem the plague of gun violence.

The idea, and I think it's brilliant: when the US Army and the NYPD and all the other government agencies buy guns, put language in the contracts with the manufacturers that holds them accountable for selling to the dealers that evade background checks, which they can do by selling at gun shows or on the internet or in states with lax laws and enforcement.

An interesting statistic: one percent of dealers are responsible for almost 60 percent of the guns used to commit crimes.

I just came from a press conference at Town and Village Synagogue, of which I'm proud to say I'm a member, launching Do Not Stand Idly By. As in, "Do not stand idly by while your neighbor's blood is shed" (Lev. 19:16).

Ten years ago, according to Rabbi Laurence Sebert, the major cause of death among children was car crashes; today, it's gun violence. And Sen. Chuck Schumer pointed out that we have limitations on the First Amendment, guaranteeing free speech; we need limitations on the Second Amendment, guaranteeing the right to bear arms.

This strategy to put direct pressure on gun manufacturers by way of public-sector contracts is the brainchild of Metro IAF, an interfaith coalition of religious leaders. Turns out that 40 percent of guns sold in the US go to the military and law enforcement agencies. That's a lot of buying power, and they want to use it by working with police chiefs and mayor's offices around the country to make manufacturers accountable.

You'd think the guns are all made in the US, right? Hmmm. Turns out that manufacturers from Germany, Austria, Italy and Brazil are making a lot of these guns. And they're giving NRA lobbyists a lot of money to push for unrestricted gun sales.

So what can YOU do? Go talk to your local police chief, your mayor, your council person. Get them to add their name to the Gun Buyers’ Research Group Commitment Form. Write to your representatives in Congress and tell them to get behind this initiative. Let me know what you think.

The Charleston Shooting and Making Medieval Bodies

I've been thinking a lot about Charleston this week, and all the other recent shootings and cop-on-civilian violence. Trying to figure out how I can engage beyond ranting at friends and family.

I'd already been thinking about making my (MA-level) Middle English literature course about bodies -- normative bodies, "other" bodies -- and it occurs to me that I can push that in the direction of figuring out how we got to this place where we believe some bodies are more important than others.

Potential texts for the syllabus:

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Canterbury Tales: General Prologue, Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale, Miller's Tale, Prioress's Tale
Troilus and Criseyde?
The Second Shepherds' Play
Sir Orfeo
The Knight with the Lion
The Hereford Mappa Mundi
The Tale of Two Married Women and the Widow
The Book of Margery Kempe
Travels of Sir John Mandeville
Maybe one or two of Marie de France's Lais

selections from The King's Two Bodies
Karl Steel's essay on making the human
something by Carolyn Dinshaw
selections from Metzler's book on medieval disability
excerpts from Lisa Lampert-Weissig's book on medieval poco
Asa Mittman's essay, "Are the Monstrous Races Races?"
Gillian Rudd on Sir Gawain
An essay from Medieval Masculinities
Something on medieval anti-semitism

It's probably too much. Maybe I'll ask each of the students to choose two of the essays, and report on them for the rest of the class.

I'm open to suggestions. I'd love suggestions, in fact.

Dylann Roof and Mainstream Racism

Dylann Roof: "you've raped our women, and you are taking over the country."

Donald Trump on Mexicans: "They're rapists.... I will build a great, great wall on our southern border."

Jeb Bush on what he likes to read: "I like Charles Murray books to be honest with you." Murray is the author of The Bell Curve. He claims:

social inequality is caused by the genetic inferiority of the black and Latino communities, women and the poor.... disadvantaged groups are disadvantaged because, on average, they cannot compete with white men, who are intellectually, psychologically and morally superior.

The rationale for the Confederacy:

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth...

South Carolina still flies the Confederate Flag. Still think Dylann Roof is a lone wolf?

Things I'm Cranky About Today

If you're following the news from US media, you might not know that Oscar Pistorius is on trial for shooting his girlfriend, apparently through the bathroom door, thinking she was an intruder. Meanwhile, eighty-five people die from gun violence in the United States every day (more than 30,000 a year), and you could conceivably call this a health emergency, but the Senate is holding up the most recent nominee to the position of US Surgeon General because... he supports gun control.

The smog was so bad in Paris earlier this week that they were only letting people drive every other day. Residents were furious and ignored the ban and it was called off after only a day. Meanwhile, the American Association for the Advancement of Science says we need to cut emissions right now. But the US government isn't going to do a damn thing, and if they did, Americans would be screaming about their rights to keep up the same habits that have gotten us into this mess.

Meanwhile in North Dakota, fracking is bringing up more natural gas than the energy companies can handle, so they're just burning it off. Yes, natural gas burns cleaner than oil, but if you're burning a third of it at the point of extraction, it kind of throws off the emissions calculations. Also meanwhile, scientists have confirmed that fracking is causing earthquakes in Ohio, and are asking questions about the role of fracking in yesterday's 4.4 magnitude quake in Los Angeles, in which fortunately no one was hurt.

A high school English teacher has written a letter to college professors on what's wrong with Common Core. It's a great letter on the problems with the Common Core, but the ire at college professors is misplaced: we're not the ones advocating standardized testing, or making billions of dollars by promoting it -- that would be Pearson Education and a few other megapublishers with well-paid lobbyists in Washington.

Catharine Stimpson, former dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at NYU, spoke out against the Common Core at the Modern Language Association meeting in Chicago alongside Diane Ravitch, at a session that was less well attended than it should have been -- but we do get it. We're also resisting a strong push toward the assessment of learning by standardized measures that seem to take Stanford and Harvard as the norm and can't attend to drastic variations in student preparation at the thousands of colleges and universities across the US.

Fighting an Epidemic

It's clear we have a problem with gun violence: the numbers of people who die from guns, whether shot by others or as suicides, are far higher in the US than in comparable developed nations.

We can argue about the causes: is it violent movies, television shows, video games?  Is it laws that allow people to buy guns without licensing or background checks?

The gun makers, it turns out, are willing to spend money on the bet that playing violent games will encourage people to buy guns: they work with the developers of the games to make sure their guns get prominent placement.  Meanwhile, they donate lots of money to the National Rifle Association, whose leaders say the problem is violent video games, not gun ownership.  And other people say the problem is neither guns nor violent cultural artifacts, but untreated mental illness.

In short, we have an epidemic problem.  The more time we spend arguing about it, the longer it will take to arrive at a solution.

If the epidemic involved disease, and there were multiple possible transmission vectors, we'd be addressing them all, rather than arguing about which was the most important factor.

In this case, we have multiple factors that may be contributing to the problem.  Rather than arguing about which is most important, we need to address them all.

We need legislation that requires background checks and licensing, nationwide.  We need research and education about the effects of watching violent video and playing violent games.  And we need better recognition and treatment of mental illness, and a reduction in stigmatization of mental illnesses that leads people to refuse treatment.

Drug Testing and Guns

You might have to submit to a drug test if you ...

Start a new job
Apply for welfare
Play professional sports
Need financial aid to pay for college

But if you want to buy a gun, no drug test, if you're in a state with no background checks.  Also...

Convicted of violent crime? no problem.
Convicted of rape? no problem.
Convicted of selling heroin to minors? no problem
Have an order of protection against you? no problem

Gun laws won't keep guns out of the hands of law-abiding people.  Kind of like car laws don't keep people from driving.

But car laws do help limit speeding, drunk driving, and other dangers associated with car ownership.  Nationwide gun laws will not keep hunters and other recreational gun users from their pursuits.  But they will help to reduce dangers associated with guns.

How Many Deaths Will It Take?

A spontaneous urban memorial sprang up outside the convenience store where Raphael Ward was shot last month.  His friends left balls, a bat, stuffed toys, candles, flowers -- the toys of a young person not far out of childhood.  People wrote messages of grief and solidarity on the wall in sharpie, as high as people could reach, around the corner to another wall.

The wall was painted over some time yesterday.  We've cleaned "RIP Sadonte" (his nickname) off our car.  Most of the things left in his memory have been removed.  All that remains is a box, set up on its side to shield a dozen tall memorial candles from the sleet.

The incident leaves me with an ache in my heart and a chill in my bones.

I ache for Raphael's friends and family, and most of all, for his mother.  I ache for the families of the Sandy Hook children and for the family of Hadiya Pendleton. I hear that as of February 1, 1280 more people have died from gunshots in the US since the Sandy Hook shootings -- that's six weeks -- and I ache some more, and my heart starts to go numb.

I fear for my own son, who lives in a world in which a dispute among teenagers can so easily escalate into deadly confrontation instead of ending in a fistfight.

We must have an end to this plague on our nation.

Background Check

Open a bank account
Get a credit card
Rent an apartment
Buy a home
Buy a car, rent a car, lease a car
Get a job
Get a welfare check
Get admitted to college

For all of these things, you need to submit documentation and submit to a background check.

Don't want a background check?  You can get a library card... and in many states, any gun you want.

Wrestling With Imagination and Realities

Walking The Offspring to school this morning, we passed a shrine.  Someone made a poster, there were several dozen memorial candles, young teenagers were adding their contributions in Sharpie on the building wall.  I hadn't heard, but The Mate said there had been a shooting -- apparently one teenager shot another for his coat.

The Offspring asked a couple of questions, and I pointed out that the life of the killer, too, is ruined.  I pointed out that the lives of both families are affected, if not ruined.  I pointed out that teenagers are particularly prone to impulsive behavior that can lead to terrible mistakes.  And I added that this is why I don't want him playing violent video games, or playing gun games with his pals.

These games seem to happen whether there are nerf- or water-gun props, or not.  A stick gets used as a gun, or just arms and hands.

Zeke was about three when he started talking about Power Rangers.  The kids at school were talking about it, and even though he'd never seen the TV shows, he seemed to have absorbed a great deal of information about it.  That seemed harmless enough.

But now it's shooting.  Shooting games, imitating machine-gun fire, dropping to the ground pretending to be dead.  It bothers me, and in the current context, it's bothering me than ever. Yet I played those games as a kid, too.

Growing up as an immigrant and an outsider in a small town, I wanted desperately to fit in, not to be different, not to stick out. I love living in New York because it absorbs people from everywhere.  I fit in as one marble among millions, each one unique, each respecting the others' differences.

And so I want The Offspring to fit in.  I don't want to wrench him from context, keep him from joining the other kid games, make him an outlier.  We're different enough with no television in the house.  I can't see forbidding gun games, and I don't think it would stop him from playing them at the playground or at other kids' homes.

So all I can do is talk to him.  Talk about real violence, real death, and my discomfort with games of violence.

Can I do more?

One Million Moms

The NRA wants you to think that gun control means you can't have a gun in your house.  But apparently, the NRA also wants you to be free to keep a rocket launcher and a cache of AK-47s in your house.

Sorry, America, the right to bear guns can exist without being an absolute right to as much firepower as anyone wants.  I'm completely tired of the NRA controlling the conversation.

Hunters don't want to think that their right to hunt is going to be threatened.  But state Fish and Game departments already control hunting rights.  Hunting is permitted only during certain times of the year, and hunters are limited in the number of animals they're allowed to kill.

In Pennsylvania, four more people were killed today, and three police officers injured while the head of the NRA was calling for schoolteachers to be armed and saying we need to regulate movies, not guns.

(I'll admit I think he has a point about the movies.  The Offspring and I have seen numerous advertisements for a TV show about a serial killer.  On the side of the NYC bus.  But movie and video game violence need to be curbed alongside -- not instead of -- limiting the availability of guns.)

In Pennsylvania, you have to have a hunting license if you want to go out and kill animals.  You can bring home one deer, two turkeys, and one bear each year.  If you want to get yourself another deer, you can get another license -- to hunt with bow and arrow instead of a gun.  The list of days when you're allowed to go out and shoot things is complex, but limited; it's here if you really want to know.

One Million Moms for Gun Control, on the other hand, wants you to be free of the threat of gun violence. Following the lead of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, which a generation ago finally got lawmakers to get serious about cracking down on drunk driving, One Million Moms is building a nationwide grassroots movement to oppose the gun lobby.

And guess who pays the NRA organizers's salaries?  The people who manufacture and sell guns.  It's not your right to bear guns they particularly care to protect -- it's their right to keep selling guns, even though this country already has more guns than people.

Join One Million Moms, even if you're a dad.  Let's put real pressure on lawmakers for real change.

What If?

What if a woman, 20 years old, had shot her father and six other men, and twenty children, with dozens of rounds of ammunition?

Would that change the rhetoric around gun control?

Gloria Steinem pointed out a long time ago that the unnoticed and unmentioned feature of these mass killings is that the shooters are always male.

Women are constructed by significant segments of our society as weak.  Women are subject to male gaze, male desire, male appropriation, male violence.  What if a middle-aged woman -- a mother, maybe, a wife, a daughter, an employee -- opened fire?

If guns were associated with out-of-control estrogen instead of out-of-control testosterone, would lawmakers be scurrying to limit access?

If mentally ill women were inclined to violence, would that change access to and treatment of mental illness?

Culture of Violence

When The Offspring was a baby, I swore there would be no toy guns in the house. Nine years later, somehow he owns several water guns and nerf guns.  I caved.

We have no television, we turned off the radio when he was a baby and never really turned it back on, and we're careful about violent movies.  Yet somewhere, T.O. has learned to cock his hands and make machine-gun noises.  All summer, the neighborhood kids played "Hunger Games."  Before school started, we finally let him read the book.

The news about the shooting doesn't seem to have filtered down to the younger kids. At pick-up from school, T.O. was holding a piece of graph paper, and said he wanted to go to Staples and get a whole pad of graph paper.

"Sure, what for?"

"I'm making a death maze."

"What?!?"

"It's a really hard maze."

Then he said something I didn't catch (it's noisy among hundreds of kids who've just been freed for the weekend) about "ammo."

His imaginative world is full of weapons and violence.  It's a big feature of the books he reads -- Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, Artemis Fowl.  He's growing up in a culture where violence is constantly represented as exciting, honorable, and fun.

And that culture has been around us for millennia.  Last year, I read him The Odyssey, with all its depictions of death and destruction.  I lingered a bit over the scene where Odysseus scolds Eurycleia for her joyous reaction to the death of the suitors.  In Fagles' translation, Odysseus says: "No cries of triumph now. It's unholy to glory over the bodies of the dead" (XXII. 436-7).  Yet this is one line in a long narrative in which Odysseus' survival depends on death upon death upon death.

The anti-war hippy tunes that form our family soundtrack are lost in the winds of this culture.  Anything I've said about peace, pacifism, the wounds of war -- it's drowned in a cultural message that makes violence so much more engaging.

I don't really know, aside from moving to a remote island, how to insulate T.O. from that culture.  I can only hope that he will never find himself at the wrong end of a gun, and that at some point he'll turn aside from killing games and find other ways to express his energy and creativity.

And maybe, in my wildest dreams, he will use that energy and creativity to help to change the culture.