Americans, for your perusal. Peace. 

My Little Book of Guns

Book 1

Guns An Introduction

Adults please leave the room for just a sec.

Ok kids, adults are insane but you don’t have to be: assault weapons are bad, and should be completely banned.

Guns chapter 1

I had a Davy Crockett rifle that fired caps and little corks. We’d run out of ammo and have to pretend to bonk the enemy over the head just like at the Alamo. You know, “gun-wielding”. It didn’t occur to us to mow anybody down. There was lots of fake hand-to-hand fighting. My big sister occasionally tried to declare peace but we were unclear on the concept. We actually took turns being the victors or defeated losers. You got to win, or you were told you were dead. Then you had to lie down and count to ten.

Guns Chapter 2

Years ago I had a roommate – a jazz musician – who got a job as a security guard night watch. He told me they gave employees the option of carrying a gun or not. He chose not to, he said, because he might shoot me with it. Of course I thanked him. Then we had beers.

Guns Chapter 3

When I was young and working in North Beach I was held up at gun point at work. He stood between me and the only exit and backed out the door with the gun trained on me. I prayed no one would come in the door behind him. His hand was shaking. 

2nd Amendment, anyone?

Guns Chapter 4

I was also held up at knife point at work. I worked at a liquor store.The man with the knife came behind the counter, between me and the only exit. 

My co-worker was trying to decide whether to try and defend me by hitting the robber over the head with a wine bottle. He chose not to. 

Epilogue.

The knife-wielding robber returned months later filled with remorse. He’d been fired and was trying to support his young daughter. He was desperate.

He promised to pay the money he stole back. 

I know. The moral is unclear. It’s not an advertisement for an assault rifle, however.

Guns Chapter 5

I was actually shot at only once.

I was walking down Haight St in the old days. Back in the seventies. Heard a sound in a window across the street and instantly a handful of leaves were torn off the tree right above my ear. 

They rained down quietly. 

I didn’t think to zig zag or take cover. 

Or wonder, why me?

Why not me?

Book 2

Guns in Everyday Life

I have a friend who owns a gun. I’m sure he distrusts the police, feels at odds with society at large and understands a gang mentality somehow. 

He demonstrated how gunfire sounds in his neighborhood.

It’s a rapid succession of pops.

“Popopop pop pop!”

Then screaching car tires.

-Oh, and a lady I know lives on a block where a five year old girl was killed. Accident. Drive by shooting. Wrong place. Wrong time.

-Oh, and a co-worker who had relatives at a house in Oakland where multiple people were killed by gunfire at a party on a Saturday night. 

In Conclusion

It seems like it makes sense for women to have the right to bear arms. Protect and defend. Men, not so much.

Oh and the Second Amendment. Well Regulated. That would be your National Guard. 

Postscript. 

Instead of a nationally prominent politician, Harvey Milk is a monument. He is greatly missed.

jk

11/7/2017

…
Bonus question: 

Do you have a relative who accidentally shot himself (non-fatally, fortunately)? I do. A couple  of generations back. A little to the right or left and I probably wouldn’t be here.

***

Generations of Lost Time

(11/ 2018)

“On the night of October 1, 2017, a lone gunman opened fire on a crowd of concertgoers at the Route 91 Harvest music festival on the Las Vegas Strip in Nevada. He killed 58 people and wounded 422, with the ensuing panic bringing the injury total to 851. The shooter, Stephen Paddock, a 64-year-old man from Mesquite, Nevada, fired more than 1,100 rounds of ammunition from his suite on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel.”

900 Lost Years. The Generation of Lost Time

What is lost when a person dies through gun violence?

The average age of the those twelve people who had their lives taken through an act of gun violence at today’s mass shooting (Thousand Oaks, 2018) being 20 years, and normal life expectancy being perhaps 75 years; that’s 55 lost years, say, multiplied by a factor of twelve equals 660 lost, unlived years. Potentially.

Yes, perhaps 12 lives lost, and 660 lost years, individually. But 75-year life expectancies x12 people equals 900 potential years of individual living, extinguished. In a few minutes.

Almost one thousand years of actual life not lived due to today’s gun violence here in California.

Think back one thousand years, because that’s what that is.

But listen:

If the median age of the 59 fatalities in the Las Vegas mass shooting a year ago, which some at today’s shooting witnessed, was 40 years, it’s safe to say each victim would have lived out another 30 yrs, so that’s almost a cumulative potential of 1,800 years of living taken away in last year’s Vegas massacre.

A period of 30 years is thought of as one generation, and by definition each generation would progress and procreate, so there is an equivalence, that if approximately 60 generations of life were lost- if thought of as a quantity of linear time, each life standing hand in hand, as it were- it would symbolically stretch back to the second century- to the year 218 a.d. of the common era, so could represent a lost history from that time- including the (lost) emergence of modern Western Civilization.

My co-worker, the former Tibetan monk, says that the generations of Lost Time should be imagined forward- not backward- toward the year 3818, symbolically.

What would this world be like in that advanced (lost) forward time? And, symbolically, any advances would be lost to humanity over that (symbolically) lost time of history, that can’t happen in this scenario.

That’s 59 people standing in a row forward or backward in linear time.

And add today’s 12 people into the calculation of lost time.

And last week, in Pittsburgh. (The Synagogue tragedy).

And now that loss is incalculable.

***

A Child’s Garden of Death;

An Alphabetic Primer

A is for Aftermath:

When something occurs that’s severe

B is for Bathos: politics that’s insincere

C is for Casualties- that’s what you kids were

D is for Dark Ages when false beliefs seem sure

E is for Emergency: mostly predictable griefs

F is for Failure and Flowers in wreaths

G is for Government unwilling to act

H for Hypocrisy feigning to care about the social contract

I is for Inconsequential, lives for which we don’t shed a tear

J is for Japan with less than ten gun deaths per year

K is for Kiss when someone says goodbye

L is for Last on a day with a sigh

M is Mentality like the automatic weapons-toting kind

N is for NRA (out of my mind)

O is for “ oh my god” as after the gunfire’s sound

P is for Plot as in planning, or a spot in the ground

Q is for Quandary what kind of automatic weapon to get

R is for Requiescat en Pace and forever regret

S is for Semi-automatic with a bump stock and extra magazines

T is for Tragedy and the search for what it means

U is for Unidentified until the parents are told

V as in in Violent Entertainment that never gets old

W as in Weapons of Mass Destruction which are used on a school ground

X as in crossroads where our destiny is lost or found

Y as in Young and hopeful- to the future we’re sending

Think well before we reach Z, a message a bit less

Heart rending.

jk

2/15/18

***

:1963 “The Release of the JFK Assassination Files, The Final Frontier”

Or, “Lying to Seven Year Olds”

Children.

The President was shot today. He died.

For a while, we don’t know how long,

your house will be full of ghosts.

Whenever you’re alone, a ghost. Under your bed, ghosts. On the landing: Definitely.

One ghost, the young President. Shot dead. And now he’s a ghost- floating around everywhere. So lonely.

That’s what death is. You become like an image you can’t forget. But everywhere.

The very young president, shot dead and now wandering. Wondering what happened. Longing to tell you something, to know something.

A sad quiet sick feeling in the whole world for days. Thumping drums, horses’ hooves. TV becomes a funeral parlor. A picture of the ghost in every window.

Scary as it is as a kid, you and the ghost have an understanding. That, if you could figure it out, the dead President could be at peace. The president wouldn’t have to wander forever. Not to hope to lead, and to be unable. Not to wish so hard to reassure the people, and to be unheard.

What would help would be the truth.

Just to tell the truth. Just for one person to tell the truth, about what occurred on Nov 22, 1963.

That can never happen.

jk

***

(After a synagogue shooting the survivors requested the President not come to memorial.)

Please wait

Don’t bring the Secret Service,

the NRA,

the black armored vehicles

the rooftop scopes

Please wait

Don’t bring the hate for the huddled masses’ yearning or the lies

Don’t bring your birth certificate or

the ghost of your fascist father

Please wait

Don’t bring your immigrant wife

don’t bring the daughter who turned her back

looking forward to skiing vacations,

the children abandoned in cages

forsaken

through your inhumanity

Please wait

Leave behind your princely son, who does the sword dance with our enemies

Please wait

Don’t mumble a prayer with a prompt from Siri

or Google the sacred tradition at the last minute or read from prepared remarks

Please wait:

we don’t counterpunch at a funeral

or send the migrant ship back

or close our hearts at borders

Please wait to capitalize

to dominate a scene of loss

to dishonor the past

Please wait

jk

10/30/18

***

Our Mall Shooting

1. Our mall shooting wasn’t a very big one. It’s not going to mean much to the public at large, I suppose: only two people wounded.

But the following occurred just down the road from me- where my wife used to work every day. Right by our food court, where everyone hangs out.

“It was like, ‘pah, pah.’ Then it was a pause. Then it was, ‘pah, pah, pah, pah, pah,'” said staff Sgt. Isaiah Locklear who was working at the recruiting office when the shooting happened. He said he ran towards the commotion and saw a 16-year-old boy who had been shot in the stomach.

“He was laying on the floor, waving his arms. ‘I’ve been shot.’ He’s like, ‘Please. Don’t let me die. I don’t want to die. That really hit me.’ He didn’t want to die. I was telling him he wasn’t going to die. I was going to stick with [him] through it,” Locklear said.

That’s the tv reporter’s description of a shooting at the Tanforan mall where my wife used to work, until recently. It was only a month ago, July 2nd.

That was just a week before the Gilroy shooting, which is already receding from media memory- Gilroy, where I have family.

That’s two shootings a week apart that could have impacted my life. Ok, that did impact my life. We are just so good at moving past these incidents now.

The Tanforan incident was not a mass shooting, but a level of gunfire that evacuated the mall and sent a search along the commute route of the rapid transit- and so affected the entire community.

My wife had recently transferred to another department store, and the feeling was hard to repress that things could have been far worse.

***

2. So I want to say something about retail.

Americans, the workers in your stores are under fire in several ways.

These precious jobs are drying up as the tech industry transforms retail into a fully automated impersonally robotic world.

And the workers in those dwindling jobs in department stores that still exist are underpaid, as most workers are, in an overvalued, hyper economy.

So, have you heard whether the victims of the El Paso shooting were workers? Or how a shooting permanently impacts a work environment?

No, because we are conditioned not think in terms of workers and workers’ rights and the well-being of workers.

Workers are expendable. That is the unspoken subtext of this tragedy.

That is why Congress won’t act. Because, for them, you don’t exist.

When the stores and the retail jobs disappear people who can, will buy things, through Amazon perhaps, and so feel insulated from danger.

But those jobs are disappearing- and they are not being replaced.

Mall shootings? Workers’ ability to make a living, to work in a safe environment-it’s not an issue that Congress is worried about.

Do you know that stores are safe havens for the homeless? That those with no place to go find department stores, for warmth, a bathroom, a hiding place, a momentary shelter – and no policing can solve the myriad impacts on that work environment?

So the few workers are sheltering-unwillingly -the many homeless. A symbiosis, of sorts.

No, the homeless and the American worker don’t exist for the US Senate, or the bankers and hedge funds and people in Admin and Finance.

These won’t be the last shootings in a shopping mall. Not until there isn’t a mall, or a store or a retail center with people in it to serve you.

I’m glad my wife is ok, I thank god my Gilroy kin were unharmed. I’m horrified, as is everyone, at the news of more gun violence, every day and in every way. Including murder and suicide.

We aren’t divided on this issue- despite what gun advocates say. They say that whatever we decide to do won’t work.

They’re wrong.

***

Oh here’s a fun fact: the shooters in our mall- they were just kids. Sixteen years of age, and fifteen. So only a potential mini-massacre; it really doesn’t count. Already forgotten.

Kids with guns. Is that in the Second Amendment too?

***

Note to Self:

I don’t wish to offend any animals but.

Did you hear?

The Elephant is leaving the GOP.

Elephant would like to be removed from political logos due to centuries of gun violence against elephants.

Yes. The elephants know all too well.

Usually animals take no stand on political matters, by minding their own business.

Times have changed.

Other animals have refused to be Republican Party mascots:

Snake

Porcupine

Skunk

Jellyfish

Dung Beetle

Buzzard

Junkyard Dog

Chicken

Termite

Cockroach

Lizard

Slug

Animals that object to being hunted down like humans (such as Wolf) have stood with Elephant against gun violence.

They are too numerous to list here. But they know gun violence can pretty much destroy paradise.

WAAG. Wild Animals Against Guns. They have neither website nor social media.

They do have feelings- and intelligence; it was the animals that originally taught humans what to eat and how to survive. They know a lot. We should listen.

***

Lions have asked not to be stuffed and displayed in your penthouse. Thank you.

-So far we have 90% of the humans, and all of the animals, against gun violence and for common sense.

(No animals were harmed in the making of this public service announcement.)