Warning: this column contains adult ideas, graphic politics and explicit proposals. Ideologues should read this only with adult supervision.
As an American, I have an inalienable right to own as many guns as I want. I also have an inalienable right to express myself in whatever way I please. Any effort to restrict those rights places us on a slippery slope that leads inexorably to a fascist police state. As surely as flour, water and yeast produce bread, this political stalemate produced the B-movie known as the Columbine High School tragedy and all the mass murders that preceded it.
Two facts about Columbine stand out loud and clear. The killers used guns, not fists, knives or bombs to kill their victims. The argument that metal detectors, more guns or armed guards might have saved the day is an obscenity, an insult to my intelligence and an affront to the memory of the dead. It would be a waste of time to argue the point.
Less trumpeted, but equally important, these two boys did not imagine the details of their murderous rampage in a vacuum. From their very earliest years, both have been avid students in the multimedia, continuing education course in sadistic violence known as the American visual entertainment media.
The details of this crime, the glorious, technicolor details are sickeningly familiar to even the most casual television and movie viewer. Taunting the victims (“Do you believe in God?”), choosing the prettiest, happiest, most attractive victims, shooting them in the head with a shotgun as they cower and beg for their lives, reveling in the splatter of blood and victims innards ... have you seen this on television? I have. It is an indisputable fact that graphic, detailed depictions of these behaviors is a required element of almost every B-movie and at least half the A-movies made today. It’s protected speech. We apparently have an inalienable right to watch the brains of a shooting victim ooze out of his head.
In a neat bit of policital symmetry, the opponents of gun-control and speech-control find themselves deeply entrenched on opposite sides of both issues. Gun-nuts, in general, favor strict limits on your free speech rights and blame the tragedy on the media. Speech-nuts, in general, favor strict limits on your right to bear arms and blame the tragedy on the easy availibility of guns. The two sides sit comfortably in their trenches, proudly clinging to their favorite right and lobbing righteous pieties at each other. In the no-man’s-land between the two camps, fourteen people forfeited their most basic right – life – without even knowing there was a war on.
The gun-nuts and speech-nuts are both right. Without the sadism training films provided by Hollywood, these boys would not have been able to imagine this crime and without the guns that pervade every corner of this country they would not have been able to act out Hollywood’s script. As a member of neither camp, I say a pox on both their houses.
When two rights conflict, one gives. The right to free speech and the right to bear arms are both impinging on the right to life. If regulating speech and weapons is a slippery slope, then we must get out our pitons and pickaxes and venture out on that slope. It is either that, or resign ourselves to an endless series of televised slaughters.
Societies that are unable to fairly mediate the interests of conflicting groups invariably fail. If we are so in thrall to these two ideas – unlimited speech and unlimited weaponry – that we can’t prevent our children from being hideously executed in batches of ten, then our society too will fail. It will have earned that failure. By our inaction, we will have caused it.