“Think before you speak, read before you think.” Fran Leibowitz

I planned on doing a piece about Katrina, about my time working in a shelter after the hurricane, and how something small I’d seen in the shelter so moved me that I eventually wrote and performed a show about it. After Mr. Kirk’s assassination I initially thought I’d hold the Katrina piece back a week or so and put up what follows instead, but another event of note, and another, stacked up and I felt the need to incorporate additional perspectives. The Katrina piece is no longer timely, so I’m delaying it indefinitely. Pun not fully intentional.

We start with a nice list of Open Tabs before we get to the serious stuff, which needs to be included because we live in serious times. Sheesh, talk about understatement.

And a note to new subscribers (I know there are at least a couple), if you only read the email version of each piece and haven't visited the site, I encourage you to check it out for the past articles, photos, and whatnot you'll find there.

Onward to the...

Open Tabs

Let’s go to school! Fish school! We know they do, but…how? 

Y’know, if someone had just asked the band or the roadies, we could’ve told them about this a long time ago.

Nope, ain’t a special effect, it’s plate tectonics, and if it weren’t so dangerous it would be cool.

“I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.” (if you’ve never seen the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, maybe click here first...)

"General Custer, I assure you there ain't a (Native American) closer than a hundred miles from here..." or why we can't trust AI yet.

Sometimes the headers just write themselves, like this one: Radioactive rhino horns

Here’s one for us geeks and tech heads: just what, exactly, does that QR code say?

So, if I just put a few drops of this in my eyes, I’ll be OH MY GOD I CAN SEE WITHOUT MY SPECS!!!!

Science, working to save the world one gene at a time

With a nod to Dear MisInfo, here are the results

And for those of us who might be feeling big about ourselves…this

(Self) checkout this

I might be the only one who thinks this is cool, but hey, when you need to know what something inside you looks like, what could be better than this. For free!

Here's the serious thing

Things said in these times

I have a self-imposed responsibility to opine about certain firearms-related news or events. I have no checklist, I choose which of the innumerable events to opine upon based on what I know, how I feel, and what the news or event is about.

I feel that responsibility because I wrote a nonfiction book about a gun, a kid paralyzed in an accidental shooting with that gun, and the attorney who came into the young man’s life and won a historic product liability judgment against the gunmaker, which still stands to this moment as the only such successful suit of its kind. In the ten years it took to research and write it, I became well educated as to all the underlying elements of such a tragic occurrence.

I’ll never be able to completely leave it behind, and I’m okay with that. More about this in a few paragraphs. 

I absorb information and stories. I may not be able to recall everything I read, watch, or listen to, but I do take in as much in as I can. My rationale for attempting to keep up with everything that matters is that I don’t want to be blindsided by something I should’ve seen coming.

And I know that can’t always work, because it’s a swirling, anything’s possible world even at the mellowest times, and these ain’t them, certainly.

What someone says can always matter to some degree, from a tiny degree to something catastrophic. If someone says or writes, “I think this…” the degree of appropriateness, acceptance, rejection, introspection, connection, reaction and action to it will be based upon what comes after those three words.

I won’t provide any examples. Think of the nicest thing and the vilest thing. Those are the opposite endpoints on this particular spectrum.

Statements don’t always have serious consequences. Some become little more than minuscule air pressure waves that propagate away from us on their way to infinity, eliciting no more than a generic reply or response, nothing more than conversation, expressed thoughts, rumination, or general, nondescript communication. It’s all grouped at one end of the stated belief spectrum, the ubiquitous noise that populates much of our lives.

At the other end of that spectrum is what the country experienced over the last few weeks: vitriol; use of the most negative descriptions to describe people; incendiary accusations; threats of retribution, and as always but never more dangerous than right now, misinformation. Right against Left, Left against Right, and a President that blames everything on everyone else and the dangerous radical left.

And into this maelstrom said President’s lackey bumps a late night TV show off the air, with a stated ‘reason’ we all know, so I won’t go into that here. That’s a whole level of WTF, and few things during this realm of madness have been as satisfying as being part of a country that came together, finally, to right that wrong.

But I digress.

I have never been someone who doesn’t get pissed off at injustice, or shrugs about it and moves on. I understand how a series of events, whatever form those may take, can lead to a dangerous situation. Ditto on that when it comes to statements made, perspectives and points of view espoused aloud.

Close to nothing about the current discourse surprises me, because I have been part of a situation that was targeted by people with strong to extremist pro-gun views, though I wasn’t one of their targets.

I wrote Move To Fire, a nonfiction book about a kid paralyzed in an accidental shooting that happened due to a series of events and a gun defectively designed by a manufacturer that knew the gun’s design was defective. Whenever mass shootings or other gun-related violence occurs I sometimes post a viewpoint or observation on the book’s Facebook page, but not always, for various reasons.

Reviews and readers have commended the book for its objective but poignant narrative, thoroughness, tension, and revelations. It's about the people directly involved; the industry and government that contributed to a hands-off approach to regulating gun safety; the elements of the accident that made it more than something that can bedismissed by slogans or recriminations about gun handling rules; and the complexity of holding the right individuals and entities accountable for their contribution to the tragedy.

There are aspects of the Move To Fire story directly relevant to the country’s collective moment. At one point in the story, after a unanimous jury finds that the gunmaker and the gun’s faulty design significantly contributed to the accident, the gunmaker files bankruptcy, and the boy’s (by then a teenager) attorney discovers the gunmaker plans to secretly finance a former employee’s acquisition of the bankrupt company’s assets. The attorney and his teen client then create their own counter-plan to form a nonprofit, raise funds, and counter-bid for the assets, hoping to acquire the company’s remaining defective guns — thousands — and destroy them.

This is 2004-2005, years before anything like GoFundMe exists, so a website is created to share the background of the case, information about the nonprofit, and to solicit donations for the eventual counter-bid at a bankruptcy auction. The site and news stories about the effort immediately attract the attention of people who share their extreme views in emails to the site, addressed to the greedy teenager, his greedy attorney, and their attempt to trample gun rights.

I sat in the attorney’s office one day as he scrolled through that day’s emails — good messages, bad, and abhorrent. I am not inexperienced in life. I’ve been around, to use an ancient expression, but that day I learned just how vile someone using the shield of digital anonymity can be. The attorney read aloud from a few, simply shook his head and skipped others, then clicked on one that focused on the teenager and attorney ‘going after’ the gunmaker’s money. The message closed with, “…if I ever see your crippled ass on the street I’ll fucking shoot you myself.”

Imagine yourself putting those words into a message and actually sending it to a now teenage boy paralyzed from the neck down since he was seven, who had no hand in how a tragedy happened to him, to his family, and society, and relying on the law that will allow him to hold the people who did have a hand in his accident to be held accountable.

“…I’ll fucking shoot you myself.”

Now we have a level of ‘corrections’ made in reaction to what people said about Mr. Kirk, people going to extremes who were already there, on the record as having said all along how they felt about Mr. Kirk’s stated perspectives. But people were fired from jobs or in some way excoriated for saying how they felt, and had always felt, about him.

This is all at the disturbing end of the ‘things stated’ spectrum, where sentiments and opinions are so extreme or inflammatory they can elicit extreme actions in response. History is filled with horrible words uttered and actions taken by extremists in power. We know, generally, to whom I refer. Their words and statements live on only as abhorrent, bedrock lessons, whether stated about a race of people, political leanings, or forms of government, or nationalism, all part of an ugly fabric. Horrible events occurred, fueled by statements from people in power, or by people whose followers were of numbers enough to wreak carnage.

Among the multitudes of stories after Mr. Kirk’s assassination, one highlighted a response Mr. Kirk had given to a question about ‘shootings,’ the number of guns in the country, and gun regulation. The irony that he was assassinated while responding to a question about violence doesn’t escape anyone. But before this event he had answered another gun violence-related question, and his answer was something that I have often wondered about in the context of pro-gun pronouncements, especially regarding that the right to possess or carry should not be infringed…ever, no matter what. 

I had wondered how someone with Mr. Kirk’s views might respond to a an extreme hypothetical, to wit: would you accept the sacrifice of an innocent  family member by gun violence at the hand of someone who shouldn’t have a firearm, rather than take an action that you believe weakens the second amendment?

It’s a terrible hypothetical. It is without soul. Without humanity. It exists strictly as an abstract discussion point which allows for a distancing from what the question really asks: Would you allow for the taking of a life that you had directly created, that was a part of you, that person we hear family survivors emotionally talk about, the daughter who will never go to prom, never graduate, who will never walk down the aisle, never show you the screen prints of your developing, eventual grandkid, the person who would be there into your own old age to take care of you.

Would that be preferable to you instead of gun regulation?

The hypothetical lacks the visceral, heart wrench of an actual sudden, horrific, and forever loss. I always imagined I would, sadly, find a minuscule number who would answer yes.

I no longer have to imagine.

Mr. Kirk answered. The question was framed differently, but the answer was right on point, as disappointing as the point is. I first heard a more generalized description of his response via news stories, then searched for and found a transcript from the interview in which he’d been quoted. It’s included a few paragraphs from now.

I have no idea if what he said during that or any other interview has a direct link to this tragedy. But based on the record, from his beliefs to his political views, he enraged those who found some or all of his statements abhorrent. The President’s and his administration’s messaging and pronouncements that emanate from the highest office of this country are inflammatory on a daily basis. Demeaning, derogatory, belittling, name calling, labeling, diminishing, misstating, deceiving, lying, and dismissive pronouncements have been the President’s messaging style since his first presidential campaign. The assassinated young man was, based upon the record and all observations, in lock step with the President’s philosophy. It certainly showed an allegiance between the two.

Now we have this extraordinary situation, where people who made statements about the assassination were in some way punished, their employment terminated, and on and on. We all know how hard it can be to let our humanity rule instead of our biases or emotions. It’s hard, sometimes terribly hard. But the record of things said doesn’t change when someone dies, whether someone dies ‘naturally,’ violently, or tragically. Within the closing paragraphs that follow is Mr. Kirk’s stated view about guns and gun-related deaths. The context within which he stated it aside, it’s telling for more than the obvious reasons:  “…I think it's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights…”

Rationalizing or intellectualizing something so horrible has become too opportunistic. Discourse, debate, discussion, they’re all well and good, but certain things, including ignoring the waves of trauma that emanate from gun violence, are flippant dismissals of something much more important than the nuances of, or the interpretation of, a god given right to have a gun. There’s so much disgustingly simplistic perspective there that I can’t expand any further on it here.

We have entered a phase that has rewritten an old adage: live by the sword, die by the sword.

Live by the words, die by the words.

Enough. Here’s what Mr. Kirk said (emphasis mine): “So we need to be very clear that you're not going to get gun deaths to zero. It will not happen. You could significantly reduce them through having more fathers in the home, by having more armed guards in front of schools. We should have a honest and clear reductionist view of gun violence, but we should not have a utopian one.

“You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won't have a single gun death. That is nonsense. It's drivel. But I am -- I think it's worth it. I think it's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational. Nobody talks like this. They live in a complete alternate universe.

“So then how do you reduce? Very simple. People say, oh, Charlie, how do you stop school shootings? I don't know. How did we stop shootings at baseball games? Because we have armed guards outside of baseball games. That's why. How did we stop all the shootings at airports? We have armed guards outside of airports. How do we stop all the shootings at banks? We have armed guards outside of banks. How did we stop all the shootings at gun shows? Notice there's not a lot of mass shootings at gun shows, there's all these guns. Because everyone's armed. If our money and our sporting events and our airplanes have armed guards, why don't our children?”

Think before you speak, read before you think, be safe, and may we find some sanity in these current times.

MWH