This is for Christopher Baker.
Chris was nine years old when a friend shot him through the head by mistake, using a gun the friend’s father kept for protection. Chris was a great kid: fun-loving, kind and athletic. In the open casket at his funeral, he wore a baseball cap that covered the fatal wound. The hole in his parents hearts would never be filled. Chris was their only child, and they never had another.
If Chris had lived, he would be forty-two years old now. Instead, for those who remember him, he’ll always be nine.
If you think I’m about to go into an argument for gun control, be disappointed, because I don’t have one. Like millions of others who know innocent victims of gunfire, I feel grief and despair, even after all these years. Unlike many or most of them, I have no answer.
As Gideon Litchfield writes in Quartz, There is nothing more to say. There is no “debate,” no “national conversation.” There are only entrenched positions that don’t influence each other at all. Specifically, the gun non-debate—
echoes another frozen conflict: the one in Israel-Palestine. Four years of covering it made me see that, in certain disputes, the opposing forces attain a sort of self-correcting stasis. Even after a particularly cruel outrage, equilibrium returns quickly, as if neither side can let go of its claim to eternal victimhood. Change does come—many decades-long conflicts have ended—but it takes its own, often mysterious path that neither words nor any single tragedy can alter.
Indeed, instead of “gun-control debate,” we should call it the “gun-control conflict.” There is no debate here, only forces locked in frozen combat.
And the number of cats out of bags are legion. Today there are more guns than people in the U.S. Given that fact alone, it is not much easier to “control” the gun market, or the use of guns, in the U.S., than it is to control the tides. Guns are abundant and loose in human nature. I fear the best we can hope for is not being among the unlucky, as Chris was.
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