Nefarious Landslides

Us: Today at DRNORMALVISION we welcome Mr. Willard Bunckhorne, of the NRA.

WB: Thank you.

Us: Your exact title is Assistant Executive Director of Media Relations and you are based in Louisville, Kentucky; is that right?

WB: Correct.

Us: What brings you to the New York area?

WB: The NRA decided to hold an emergency meeting to address the events at the Covenant School in Nashville.

Us: The shootings.

WB: Er, correct.

Us: Is it usual for the NRA to hold an emergency meeting after mass shootings? Did the NRA hold one in 2015 after the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church murders?

WB: No. Them’s Blacks.

Us: How about in 2018 after the shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh?

WB: No. Them’s Jews.

Us: The Pulse nightclub in Orlando?

WB: Them’s gays.

Us: The Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas?

WB: Them’s Latins.

Us: The Star Ballroom Dance Studio in Monterey Park, California?

WB: Them’s Chinese.

Us: So, if you didn’t feel the need to hold a special meeting over any of those previous shootings, why now? What is the difference?

WB: The Covenant School—them’s Christians. Something had to be done.

Us: So what did the meeting do?

WB: We reiterated our belief that guns don’t kill people. And we will mobilize to inform the country of what really is to blame for people getting killed.

Us: Like what?

WB: Doors—school side doors. That was pointed out by former FBI agent Nicole Parker on Fox News. “That seems to be a common pattern in many of these shootings, a side door,” she said. 

Us: Anything else?

WB: Yes. Solar panels.

Us: Solar panels are to blame for mass murders?

WB: In a way, yes. Sen. Mike Rounds said that money allocated to installing solar panels in schools could be diverted for security. So, security is compromised by using the money for solar panels.

Us: But still, guns kill people.

WB: Listen. On the same day that six people were killed at the Covenant School, a landslide in Ecuador killed at least 14 people with 67 still missing. That’s 81 people—13 and 1/2 times the number killed in Nashville. At our emergency meeting we drew up model legislation (which we are hoping that Marjorie Taylor Greene will introduce in Congress) that would ban landslides in the United States. Landslides kill people!

Us: And that’s your last word?

WB: No. Looking at my cell phone, I just came across this headline:

Nikki Haley wants to ban TikTok, not guns

That’s my last word.

Us: Before you leave, what do the initials NRA stand for?

WB: “No Reality Assessment.”

Bang, Bang

Imagine you're the toughest, most macho National Rifle Association member. You think that guns should be allowed in schools, churches, bars, and sporting venues to scare away the bad guys. Now there you are, walking down the street, a sidearm holstered at each hip, an Uzi slung over your right shoulder and an AK-47 over your left. I come up behind you (or from the front or side), pull out my pistol and blow your head away.

Your armory was no defense; indeed, even if you could have somehow juggled them, adding a grenade launcher and a flamethrower would have aided you not a whit. Your safety did not rest on your arms—but on my lack of weaponry.

Of course, there is no such thing as absolute safety, for there is always a weapon around. If not the paring knife in the kitchen, there is always, as Clue players know, the candlestick in the dining room. Or that rock at the side of the road.

But relative safety (if not absolute safety) is the issue. I can only increase my relative safety (and you increase yours) by disarming other people as much as possible (even if we can't hide all the rocks from them). Which really means mutual disarmament. I'm safer if you destroy that Uzi and AK-47 and the rest of your stockpile, and you are safer if I destroy mine.

***

“Upon the whole, I never beheld, in all my travels, so disagreeable an animal, or one against which I naturally conceived so strong an antipathy,” Lemuel Gulliver asserts near the beginning of Part Four of Swift's satire. What Gulliver has seen is a creature called a “Yahoo.” After giving the creature a blow with the flat of his sword, Gulliver is confronted by “a herd of at least forty ..., howling and making odious faces.” For safety Gulliver runs

to the body of a tree, and leaning my back against it, kept them off by waving my hanger [sword]. Several of this cursed brood, getting hold of the branches behind, leaped up into the tree, whence they began to discharge their excrements on my head; however, I escaped pretty well by sticking close to the stem of the tree, but was almost stifled with the filth, which fell about me on every side.

The land in which Gulliver is stranded is not populated only by these humanity-in-the-raw creatures, the Yahoos, but also by a race of rational horses, the Houyhnhnms. When Gulliver tells the horse that befriends him (his “master”) about destructive European warfare, his master thinks Gulliver has said "the thing which is not“ [the Houyhnhnms have no word for lying]. After all, says the horse,

nature has left you utterly incapable of doing much mischief. For, your mouths lying flat with your faces, you can hardly bite each other to any purpose, unless by consent. Then as to the claws upon your feet before and behind, they are so short and tender, that one of our Yahoos would drive a dozen of yours before him.

That humans have managed to create a world such as Gulliver describes with

cannons, culverins, muskets, carabines, pistols, bullets, powder, swords, bayonets, battles, sieges, retreats, attacks, undermines, countermines, bombardments, sea fights, ships sunk with a thousand men, twenty thousand killed on each side, dying groans, limbs flying in the air, smoke, noise, confusion, trampling to death under horses’ feet, flight, pursuit, victory; fields strewed with carcases, left for food to dogs and wolves and birds of prey; plundering, stripping, ravishing, burning, and destroying

can only be due, says the master horse, to a corruption of reason that “might be worse than brutality itself.”

***

If we could negotiate a disarmament that reduced mankind's means to fight others only to the weaponry that nature itself has given, such as the act of climbing a tree and shitting on one's enemies, we would be much better off. All we would have to do after a battle would be to jump into the nearest lake and wash ourselves off. We would be soaking wet—but alive.