May 27, 2022
Dear Interested Readers,
What’s Next? I Salute Beto, Chris, Nick, and Joe
It is hard to imagine a two-week period that is so full of horrible domestic news that the war in Ukraine almost seems like a secondary concern. Last week we saw that racism is a continuing source of human tragedy at home. “Replacement theory,” the racist idea that there is a huge plot by progressive politicians and left-leaning intellectuals to replace White voters, the “legacy population,” with minority voters who would cast their votes for Democrats resulted in the killing of ten Black Americans in a Buffalo supermarket.
On Monday, I learned that something that I had already known from the mid-1970s from personal experience had been announced to the world. Southern Baptist Churches have been hiding a problem with clergy sexual abuse for years. In the early seventies, I was a deacon in my little Southern Baptist church in Cambridge, Massachusetts which my family and I attended while I was in medical school, and while I was an intern and resident at the Brigham. I became outraged about the sexual behavior of one of the ministers. About the same time, I was amused to read of a similar situation in one of John Updike’s less famous books, A Month of Sundays. In that 1975 book, Updike’s protagonist, Pastor Tom, like the associate minister at my church was having liaisons with many of the more vulnerable women in the congregation. My response at the time was to abandon religion for a decade. There wasn’t much else to do because by the time the facts were known the offender was dying of acute myelogenous leukemia at the Brigham where he took advantage of the sympathies of some of the women on the staff.
Clergy misconduct, the bloody war in Ukraine, and mass shootings at home seem to share the reality that there is not much that an individual can do. All of these problems require collective action beyond our thoughts and prayers. It may be pop theology, but I must imagine that whatever the character of God is, there is something very wrong with us asking God to solve problems that we should be able to solve ourselves.
What makes the problem of gun violence so frustrating is that It’s easy to imagine solutions and get angry when you realize that there is no chance that they will be enacted any time soon and that once again after “thoughts and prayers” things will return to “normal” and in time it will all happen again. I think that was the thought and emotion behind Beto O’Rourke’s interruption of the spineless explanation for the tragedy that was offered by Governor Abbott.
There have been many “faux” explanations and potential solutions offered over the years in the aftermath of the dozens of horrible murders by assault rifles that along with persistent racism stain our national image. In the aftermath of the murder of nineteen children and two teachers at the Robb Elementary School in little Uvalde, Texas, emerging information seems to reveal that we have been getting misinformation about the effectiveness of the defenses that politicians like Governor Abbott and others offer. Efforts to “harden” the school against the possibility of an invading shooter did not seem to work. A back door was open for anyone to enter. Having a school “resource” officer, a “SWAT” team on the local police force, or doing practice drills are ineffective defenses when the resource officer isn’t on the job or the SWAT team can’t be found or doesn’t act when a shooter shows up. Having the police respond within a couple of minutes was pointless when they did not have the courage to enter the building where there was a shooter picking off little children and their teachers one by one with a military-grade rifle with a high-capacity magazine. One wonders how many of those who were shot might have survived if they could have gotten help an hour earlier.
One must believe that things really would have been different or perhaps would have never happened if it was impossible for anyone to buy the sort of weapons that the 18-year-old shooters in Buffalo and Uvalde were able to buy. We don’t need thoughts and prayers to solve the problem. We need politicians who care more about the safety of little children and people shopping at a grocery store in their neighborhood than they do about the support of the NRA. We don’t need teachers with guns. We do need politicians who have the courage to stop hiding behind the Second Amendment as they suck up to the NRA and the very small number of conservatives who see owning high-powered rifles as a “right.” Justice Alito tells us that abortion is not a right because it was not an issue when the Constitution was written. Well, by his reasoning, there should not be a Constitutional right to an AR15 because those instruments of mayhem did not exist either in the 1780s.
After listening to Joe Biden’s speech, I was wishing once again that we could solve or improve our current problem with gun violence and mass shootings by agreeing that the Second Amendment entitled us to own single-shot rifles that required gun powder and little iron balls or flintlock pistols, and that we were abandoning all other guns, or at least high powered semiautomatic assault rifles with large magazines, for at least a decade like we did in 1994, if not forever. I am not sure how many people know that we actually did ban rifles like the ones used by the shooters in Buffalo and Uvalde in 1994. As President Biden said, after that law was passed we saw a dramatic fall in deaths associated with mass shootings. The bill was called the “Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994.” Some people called it the Biden Crime Bill. The compromise that was required for the law to gain passage included the provision that unless the law was renewed by Congress it would expire in ten years. The law was not renewed during the first term of the second President Bush, and as President Biden reported in his address to the nation following the Uvalde school shooting on Tuesday, there has been a threefold increase in shootings since the ban on assault rifles expired in 2004. Politifact has confirmed President Biden’s assertion.
We have passed gun legislation in the past. The question is whether we can do it again. The Brady Bill was about handguns. It was passed in November 1993 and went into force in early 1994. The Brady Bill was “An Act to provide for a waiting period before the purchase of a handgun, and for the establishment of a national instant criminal background check system to be contacted by firearms dealers before the transfer of any firearm.” It probably would have made a bigger difference than it has but in 1997, in a case manufactured by the NRA, the Supreme Court ruled that the part of the act that required state and local officials to perform background checks was unconstitutional and a matter that belonged to the states. If that reasoning based on the idea of the domain of the state’s responsibility sounds familiar, it should. Justice Alito used similar reasoning in his leaked opinion about Roe v. Wade.
The Supreme Court’s decision created loopholes that have made it relatively easy for those who should not have guns to find ways to get them without much trouble. Background checks are still required by federally licensed gun dealers, but gun shows and private sales are loopholes that allow at least 20% of gun sales to occur without a background check. Texas is one of the states that have very relaxed gun safety laws. This last week The New Yorker published an informative article by Eric Lach based in part on the online comments of the Buffalo shooter about shopping for guns in New York where the law is more restrictive, and in nearby Pennsylvania where the laws are less stringent.
Pennsylvania is a “purple state.” In my mind, except for areas around Philadelphia and Pittsburg, most of Pennsylvania is more like Texas, Alabama, or West Virginia than New York, California, or Massachusetts when it comes to the interface between culture and politics. My state of New Hampshire is in a similar situation. Around the Massachusetts border, the seacoast, and in the Upper Valley near Hanover we are pretty “blue.” The northern part of the state and other areas are quite “red” with a “Texas” mindset. We are a “gun-friendly” state where “open carry” and ‘concealed carry” are allowed without a license for anyone over 18 although I rarely see someone exercising their “right.” Our gun laws are one of the few things that I do not like about my adopted state.
I should add that shootings are good for the gun business. Newport is an impoverished former mill town just ten miles from where I live. The only real industry left in the little town of Newport is the Ruger gun factory. Strum-Ruger stock is up 5.7% since the shooting in Uvalde on Tuesday.
Second only to my disgust with the reality of the Uvalde tragedy was the press conference performance of Texas Governor Abbott. His contention is that there is no law that could have prevented the shooting because it was the result of the actions of a person with mental illness. What he fails to acknowledge is that if we did not allow military-grade weapons to be sold to eighteen-year-olds, or for that matter to anyone, as is the case in most countries, we would not have our unique American disease of frequent mass murders. I am pretty certain that Governor Abbott, Senator Ted Cruz, and former President Trump will be well received at the NRA convention in Houston this weekend.
In case you missed it, the highlight of Governor Abbott’s presentation of the mental problems that were the cause of the tragedy of Uvalde, was the uninvited interruption provided by his Democratic opponent, former Congressman Beto O’Rouke, in the election for the Texas governorship this fall. Beto countered Abbott’s conclusion that the root cause of the disaster was the mental problems of the shooter with the assertion that the root cause problem was the Governor’s failure to do anything significant to prevent future shootings since the tragedy of the Sante Fe High School shooting near Houston in 2018 or the shootings at the Walmart in El Paso in 2019.
Most of us know that death from guns is a major medical problem in our country that is not shared by other “advanced” countries. When gun violence has occurred in other countries there has usually been a swift change of laws, not thoughts and prayers, that make the next event much less likely to occur. In 2017 Nicholas Kristoff wrote what I consider to be one of the best reviews of our chronic disease with guns. The article is full of graphics and statistics that reveal our very advanced disease state. At the time Kristoff, who later resigned from The Times to run for governor in his home state of Oregon which is another story, suggested that we treat gun violence as a public health problem. At the end of the article he writes:
Yes, making America safer will be hard: There are no perfect solutions. The Second Amendment is one constraint, and so is our polarized political system and the power of the gun lobby. It’s unclear how effective some of my suggestions will be, and in any case this will be a long, uncertain, uphill process.
But automobiles are a reminder that we can chip away at a large problem through a public health approach: Just as auto safety improvements have left us far better off, it seems plausible to some gun policy experts that a sensible, politically feasible set of public health steps could over time reduce firearm deaths in America by one-third — or more than 10,000 lives saved each year.
So let’s not just shed tears for the dead, give somber speeches and lower flags. Let’s get started and save lives.
I was delighted to discover in the Wednesday edition of The New York Times that Kristoff had published a guest essay entitled: “These Gun Reforms Could Save 15,000 Lives. We Can Achieve Them.” It’s a terrific follow-up to his 2017 article and suggestions. It’s interesting that his projection in 2017 was that with a politically acceptable public health “safety” approach ten thousand lives could be saved. Now his estimate is fifteen thousand. My guess is that the estimate is up because in the intervening years the annual number of deaths from guns has continued to rise.
I am delighted to hear that a few Republican senators may join Chris Murphy to work on a bill over the next ten days. Chris Murphy is the senator from Connecticut who has been dedicated to gun reform since the 2012 school killing at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown. Murphy made an impassioned plea on the Senate floor on Tuesday for Senate action. Murphy is trying to find some bipartisan support for actions like the ones Kristoff reviews that could form the basis of a limited bill with common sense provisions supported by the majority of Americans that just might find ten Republican votes. I doubt that the bipartisan group will have the insight or courage to consider banning assault rifles. The attempt to find common ground with a bipartisan law is a long shot, but I will apply my thoughts and prayers to the possibility. I hope this self-appointed working group reads Kristoff’s suggestions.
If nothing happens in the Senate, guns should join the cancellation of Roe v, Wade as a very good reason to vote for a better future in November. Both issues are huge healthcare issues.
I Am Inspired By Little Things in Nature
My wife and I bought the house in New Hampshire where we now live in September 2008. It was a good time to get a “deal.” To celebrate my fiftieth birthday in 1995, we had purchased a smaller vacation home “in the woods” at a recreational community a few miles further up the road toward Lebanon, Hanover, and White River Junction, Vermont.
We knew that eventually, we wanted to retire to this area, but we wanted to be on the water, and be closer to a hospital, the post office, a few stores, and the broader social life that a more traditional New England town might offer. New London seemed like just the right place for us. New London has about 4500 residents, a big white Baptist church just off a lovely town green, several good restaurants, a summer theater, one standard supermarket, a hardware store, a hospital, a small college, and good venues for hiking and biking, plus several lakes and ponds.
Each time my wife drove the thirteen miles from our home in the woods to the grocery store in New London she would do a quick trip around Little Lake Sunapee to see if there was a house for sale. In July of 2008, we asked a realtor to help us. He showed us several places “on the water,” but I knew we had scored when he showed us the house where we now live.
When we came down the drive to look at the house my wife was surprised to see that it was not the house that she thought we were going to see. She went inside with the realtor. I walked around the house to the lakeside where I wandered out onto the dock. At the end of the dock, I looked into the clear water and saw two rainbow trout just relaxing in the shade of the dock. I walked into the house and before looking around to see what it was like on the inside, I destroyed our negotiating stance by loudly announcing to my wife and the realtor that this was the house we should buy.
Nothing in my material life has ever worked out better. In time I have discovered some flaws that I might have discovered on closer inspection of the house that first day, but nothing is ever perfect, and “good enough” should be good enough. We closed on the house on the very same day Lehman Brothers failed and went into bankruptcy precipitating a loss of confidence in the banks and a fall in the market. By that time the recession was already on, and properties were not selling. It was a buyer’s market. We weren’t smart, but we were lucky. Lucky beats smart most of the time.
While Lehman Brothers was going belly up, I went fishing the very first day we owned the house, even before we had moved in and before I brought over my canoe from the house in the woods. That recreational community where the house was located had a golf course, a lake, and groomed trails for cross country skiing. We had access to several beaches around the lake and I parked my little sailboat and had a place on a rack for my canoe not far from the house, but for me, none of those amenities can beat walking out the back door and casting a fly from less than fifty feet from where you live.
I don’t exactly remember when I first noticed the little tree growing out of the rock that you can see in today’s header. Was it in the fall of 2008? Perhaps, it was during the summer of 2009 after I bought my pedal kayak. I know it’s been at least a dozen years.
At first, I was not surprised to see something growing out of a stone because on almost any walk in the woods in my neighborhood you can see trees growing over, around, and in the cracks of big pieces of granite. After a few years, I began to marvel that the little tree was there every year without changing. I have imagined this hearty little vegetative force to be like a little bonsai tree that is carefully groomed and protected by some zen master. The zen master for this little tree must be mother nature.
When I first get on the water after the ice is out, I check out the little tree. In mid-April, all there is to see are little twigs standing barren on top of the rock. By mid-May, all the trees along the shore are beginning to have fresh green leaves. As you can see in the header, my little bonsai follows suit with its own sprouting of leaves. Oh, what a joy it is to see that it is alive and well. As the summer progresses, I will watch it closely. In the fall the leaves will turn to join the spectacular display of color around the shoreline, and then they will fall off. The cycle will be complete, and I will be left to wonder if next year it will all happen again. The little tree amazes me. It looks so vulnerable, but it keeps coming back. My hope is that it will be there every spring and summer for as long as I am here. Its persistence is a source of inspiration for which I am grateful in our troubled times.
I hope that you have a marvelous Memorial Day weekend and that there will be no bad news to interrupt your plans. We need a little reprieve.
Be well,
Gene
