Apocalypse Again
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
You would have heard the shots from our backyard.
The hunter who stalked our supermarket last week in my home town, Boulder, favored a Ruger AR-556 semiautomatic pistol.
I call him a hunter out of my deep and abiding respect for the NRA, which says we need this type of weapon to preserve our right to hunt game without too much trouble, and has hired a ton of United States Congress members to help.
The pistol lets you take thirty shots in one go. Everybody knows the credo of the deer hunter: one shot. The whole neighborhood could bag its limit with one magazine before hunting season wiped the sleep from its eyes.
It let him take the lives of ten of our neighbors in almost no time at all.
You can fire thirty shots quicker than you can read this sentence, perfect for the hunter with a tiny vacation window.
Sure, yeah, these guns are for hunting, the NRA likes to tell us. Or for home protection (I keep one under my pillow; don’t sleep much, and my wife wishes I weren’t right-handed, so I could point it the other way). That people get massacred is unfortunate collateral damage. We need them for hunting. It’s worth it.
There’s a promotional video for this gun. It’s the affordable weapon of mass destruction, about the cost of an iPhone. It’s good to go right out of the box, so a guy who buys it six days before he wants to kill as many people as he can is good to go, too. It can make ragged holes at a hundred yards. We don’t have to imagine what it can do at a few feet.
It can make ragged holes, too, in the fabric of our society.
As soon as people learned the shooter had so many vowels in his name he had to be Muslim, Facebook blew up.
Lots of people railed that the gunman probably wasn’t even a citizen, had sneaked across the border like all the other murdering immigrants. Americans would much rather be murdered by other Americans.
Lots of others said what can you expect from a Muslim.
This is Obama’s America, they said; Biden’s fault. A full-throated defense of all the white supremacists who didn’t do this.
There was a lot of talk about butt rape.
No question this murdering bastard should face the full weight of justice.
But when you write hate like this, when you Tweet bile, when you allow weapons of war on our streets, in our homes, in our schools, at our jobs, in our churches, in our movie theaters, in our hotels, in our nightclubs, in our spas, in our groceries, you are planting seeds.
Someday those seeds may sprout, in your backyard.
Thing is, we don’t have to keep sowing these same seeds, season after season, reaping this same crop, gun massacre after gun massacre.
We can plant different seeds.