Grief and 'Gun Control'
By L Truett Phillips. August 30th 2015
(Republished April 24th, 2018)
Another hideous murder…. Another burst of horror and grief…and the survivors cry for satisfaction. Grief demands satisfaction…grief is not rational… grief is not civilized.
In its most civilized form grief demands “answers” and seeks somewhere to place blame. Even in its best form, Grief is not a good basis for creating law. Law must be created out of cool, calm, rational reflection on what happened and how it fits into the laws that already exist.
Psychologists Elizabeth Kubler Ross and others have codified several stages of grief: Shock.. Denial.. Anger… Bargaining.. Acceptance and Resolution.
Much of existing societies' codes and laws, are a result of the first stages of grief. Bargaining with ourselves and our own demons and then bargaining with our peers and society at large is where much of lawmaking takes place.
Only after the first three stages have passed can we begin to put anger in place with enough perspective to begin. Because what we seek to do in making new laws out of the anger of grief is to make new laws derived out of the prism of our pain… to inflict our pain on others. Every time we make new law, it in some way infringes on someone else's life and liberty. Usually that goal is to infringe upon bad people.
We want to infringe upon evil but all too often our pain infringes upon the innocent. Whether you call it Murphys Law, or Catch 22 or The Law of Unintended Consequences, laws created out of anger seem to not work as expected. That's why it is imperative to avoid legislation out of grief. We must avoid infringing on the innocent due to our rage against the evil that has taken our loved ones. But instead, we focus on the gun. In our shock and anger we point in wide-eyed horror at the weapon screaming “it's the gun… it's the gun”. We do it every time.
It's the natural emotional reaction of shock.. surprise and fear… but that emotional response is one we must move beyond in order to find real answers. Yet we have not found a way to stop “the carnage”. Why ? Because we keep focusing on …. “It's the gun… it's the gun…”.
I'm reminded of the story of the drunk who dropped his car keys in the dark of the gutter by the street, not far from a street lamp. A man comes along and finds the drunk looking for his keys in the pool of light under the lamp. The passerby asks the drunk “why do you keep looking under the lamp” when you've already seen keys aren't there?” Drunk replies “ cuz that's where The light is”….
So we must move on… beyond the panicked fixation on the weapon. Remember we already have created thousands of anti-gun laws already on the books. From banning of entire classes of guns, to even micro managing thousands of tiny details, none of which have ever caused a death… yet none of those laws has prevented a tragedy.
It's the gun… the gun … we cry over and over again,
I imagine psychologists have a more scientific way of describing it. It has been also described as the definition of insanity: “doing the same thing over and over again hoping for a different result.” And yet we wonder why we haven't figured it out. So it seems we must start looking elsewhere for a solution … we must go into the dark to find the answers to what we seek, if there are any.
Where else is there to look? Here are several fertile grounds to dig into:
- Existing Laws…. Bad guys always seem to get a gun regardless of laws. Laws are only obeyed by the lawful… bad guys don't bother…over and over again…we have already created thousands of laws, Codes, rules and regulations yet … it happens again. If laws prevented bad guys from evil… we would be living in paradise.
- Mental Illness…. The signs are always there ahead of time…what has changed in our mental health care over the last fifty years..? More research here… look here… medical answers… not more laws...in fact there might be too many of the wrong kinds of laws…. HIPPA law restricts information and has severe penalties for mistakes… could it be this is where some “slip through the cracks?” more research here.
- Drugs… Legal ones… Pharmaceutical drugs have unknown side effects more research here… look here...
- Illegal Drugs… War on drugs creates high criminal motivations. Much has already been written… look here…
- Media…. Television , Movies , Games etc… oh boy… look here.There are lots of things to look at here...
- Evil …. Evil exists everywhere, all the time… there is no legal protection against evil… only spiritual protection … and sometimes not even that.
- Spiritual vs Material ... We live in a world that is not the perfection that we think our wealth and privileged lives guarantees us. We have become a country that believes more and more in material things and less and less in spiritual matters. Think about this.. fifty years ago we had guns everywhere… you could buy a gun in any general store without piles of regulation or licensing….. we had shooting clubs in high school… guns were everywhere without such incidents.So what happened ? Have more and more laws prevented or stopped it? NO.
So its not about the gun….. and its not about all the thousands of laws already in place. Its about the spiritual decay in the soul of America …. and the other elements I have listed. We can either accept the possibility this might be the case and begin to think and study and work on these elements….or...we can stay stuck in the stages of denial and anger…. We can deny it at our peril, or we can begin the stages of acceptance to other alternatives. We can keep doing the same thing hoping for a different result…. or begin looking elsewhere. Maybe somewhere we can reach the final stages of grief…. acceptance and resolution.