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Gun violence, facts & a prayer

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Damned if I understand why some seemingly decent people are about as responsive to facts as a cluster of tree stumps.  On top of that, there is a disturbing instinct in some to protect guns before children. On top of that, there are some who seem to think knives are as much if not more dangerous than  guns (that must be why so many of today’s modern armies are throwing away their firearms and replacing them with steak knives).

I do understand that we are a culture addicted to violence. We are a culture that has come to believe that an accurate measure of one’s strength is one’s capacity to inflict violence. We are also a culture that has taken the Second Amendment and morphed it into meaning something it doesn’t mean. The Second Amendment does not mean the founding fathers, had they known, would think it would be just peachy for citizens to own assault weapons, that it would be okay to buy thousands of rounds of ammunition at a time. They would no doubt be troubled by the fact it is easier in some areas of the country to buy an assault weapon and thousands of rounds of ammunition than it is to get a driver’s license.

As Bill Moyer’s said, and I quoted in a recent commentary for Independence Today, the NRA is “a killer instinct’s best friend.”

The penchant for some to blame the killings at Sandy Hook Elementary School solely on mental illness, or medication (anything but guns),  is disheartening. Yes, without question, the issue is more than simply guns and the desperate need for responsible  gun control measures, but the other elements of the issue must not be used as a reason  to turn our attention away from the need for gun control.

For those who cling to the utterly misguided belief that knives are just as dangerous as guns (assault weapons), consider this: knives are not want these mass murderers of our innocents are choosing, they are choosing assault weapons. (Note to reader: I do not expect this fact to make one iota of difference to those clinging to the knife-worse-than-gun myth. Nor do I expect the following facts to make a difference to those who seek to protect guns before people, but, perhaps in some cases, I’ll be wrong. Let’s hope.).

  • More Americans suffer gun deaths by homicide and suicide in a six-month span than have died by terrorist attacks in the last 25 years and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined.
  • In one year, 31,224 people died from gun violence and 66,769 people survived gun injuries (National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC)). That includes:
    o 12,632 people murdered and 44,466 people shot in an attack.
    o 17,352 people who killed themselves and 3,031 people who survived a suicide attempt
    with a gun.
    o 613 people who were killed unintentionally and 18,610 who were shot unintentionally
    but survived.
  • Over a million people have been killed with guns in the United States since 1968, when Dr.  Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated (Childrens’ Defense Fund, p.20).
  • U.S. homicide rates are 6.9 times higher than rates in 22 other populous high-income
    countries combined, despite similar non-lethal crime and violence rates. The firearm homicide rate in the U.S. is 19.5 times higher (Richardson, p.1).
  • Among 23 populous, high-income countries, 80% of all firearm deaths occurred in the United States (Richardson, p. 1).
  • The estimated  cost of gun violence U.S. citizens $100 billion annually
    (Cook, 2000).
  • An estimated 41% of gun-related homicides and 94% of gun-related suicides would not
    occur under the same circumstances had no guns been present (Wiebe, p. 780).
  • Higher household gun ownership correlates with higher rates of homicides, suicides, and
    unintentional shootings (Harvard Injury Control Center).
  • Keeping a firearm in the home increases the risk of suicide by a factor of 3 to 5 and increases the risk of suicide with a firearm by a factor of 17 (Kellermann, 1992, p. 467; Wiebe, p. 771).
  • Keeping a firearm in the home increases the risk of homicide by a factor of 3 (Kellermann, 1993, p. 1084)

For those who care about facts, you’re in my prayers. For those who don’t care about them or believe them, you’re in my prayers too, and that’s a fact.

With Love for Newtown, Ct – Children First

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Four times I’ve faced a gun at close range.  In 1984 the trigger was pulled. I was shot in the head. The bullet is lodged in my brain. I do all I can not to remember the terror before the trigger was pulled and before, in the other instances, I escaped.

I’ve tried with all my heart and soul not to think (feel) about what those last moments were like for those innocent  people (20 children!) in Newtown, Connecticut.  I’ve tried and I failed. It dawned on me, as I was writing to a close friend this morning, that this may be a healthy thing. If we as people, people!, don’t really digest this horror, and decide that first and foremost we must do all we can to protect our children, nothing will happen, nothing will change, and we will all be accomplices in maintaining the heartbeat of this gun-soaked addicted-to-violence society we live in.

The lack of responsible gun control in this country plays a lead role in the 30,000 deaths a year by gun. As Nicholas Kristoff of the New York Times recently pointed out, “More Americans die in gun homicides and suicides in six months than have died in the last 25 years in every terrorist attack and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq combined.”

One of the tragedies in all this is the instinct of some to protect guns before protecting children. As some have already pointed out,  if members of congress and community leaders and every citizen displayed a fraction of the courage the teachers and principal and school psychologist in Newtown displayed trying to protect the students of Sandy Hook Elementary School, what a difference we could make.

Connecticut Medical Examiner Dr. Wayne Carver said every one of the seven children he examined was shot from three to 11 times, some were shot while clinging to each other!  We must put children before guns. We must do something,  now. If we don’t, more children will die.

Remembering Frank Pierce

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Frank Pierce died on this day in 2008. The kindness and compassion Frank showed me and the many he loved and cared about was genuine and loving and sincere beyond description. Those who knew him knew a man whose caring and commitment to others, brain injury survivors and their loved ones were what I witnessed the most, was matched by few and outdone by none. He touched the hearts of those who knew him, including mine.
 – Peter

LOVE YOU BROTHER

Remember to say I love you to those you love. I don’t know what it is about those three often maligned and misused words, I love you, that makes them as special as they are, but I do believe that when they are meant, they should be said. Not only to the many who deserve to hear it, but by the many who deserve to say it.

My friend Frank died at 7:35 yesterday morning with the two he loved and who loved him the most by his side. Like many others, I loved Frank. And whenever I’d say, Love you Frank, he’d smile at me and say, Love you brother. And I knew he meant it. I can still hear his voice saying those words to me, Love you brother. He meant them too, all three of them.

The words I love you are remarkably hard for some of us to say. For still others, they are difficult to hear. Still others avoid the phrase because it is has been used as a tool for manipulation and, in some cases, cruel manipulation, in too many scenarios.

However, I think the only necessary guideline for saying it is honesty. Say it if you mean it. Your history, those who betrayed you, used the phrase to manipulate you in one way or another, denied your ever hearing the phrase, none of these people deserve so much control over you today that they stop you from saying it at all.

A woman I love very much said to me recently, “Peter, you love everybody.” Not true. Not by a long shot. Rest assured, there are people I don’t love and there I even people I dislike, some intensely. But what I do believe in is letting those you feel love for know it. While there is certainly such as thing as too much hate in the world, there is no such thing as too much love. However, there is such a thing as not enough love – and not enough expression of the love that is there.

The first game the Yankees played after Yankee captain Thurmon Munson’s tragic death in 1979 was in Yankee Stadium against the Baltimore Orioles. The Orioles catcher was Rick Dempsey, a former Yankee and back-up catcher for Munson. The Yankee manager was Billy Martin. Dempsey sent a note to Martin in the Yankee clubhouse before the game. In it he told Martin that he, like so many others, loved Thurman and he, like so many of us, did not always remember to tell people he loved that he loved them. And so, in this note, he told Martin that he loved him.

And so if you love people in your life, whether you love them as friends or more, tell them. Use the words I love you – all three of them. I would ask the few of you who might feel saying I love you is a wimpy thing to do why saying it is so hard for you to do? Were it an act of weakness, to say them, it ought to be easy, no?

Take care of yourselves in life. Love each other as best you can. And when you do, say so.

I am going to miss you terribly, Frank.

Love you brother.

Michael’s Birthday

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Tomorrow my closest friend celebrates his 59th birthday. In our hearts we’re brothers.

Over the years I’ve thought about how I should write about Michael Sulsona. In addition to be a remarkable man with a capacity to seamlessly accept the realities of life like no one I’ve ever known, he is one of the best playwrights and screenwriters in the country.  But to write about him, to write about this friendship of ours, this brotherhood of ours that has lived for more than 35 years at this point, how to do that?

Trying to accurately tell you how much I love Michael, how much this man’s presence in my life has meant to me all these years is impossible. I’d be more successful describing the Grand Canyon to someone – over the phone. In other words, the task of writing the all of it is clearly impossible.

I can tell you that Michael was an early lesson for me that disability can mean anything but. Michael, a former (and always) Marine lost his legs in Vietnam. It was Michael who taught me you don’t have to stand up to stand tall.

I can tell you that Michael and, as they each entered the world, his sons, Vincent and Philip, have been the the only steady presence in my life. In other words, they are family. Once, not long ago when talking with Phil, I said, “Sometimes I feel like we’re family.” Phil looked at me, smiled, and, gently correcting me, said, “Uncle Peter, you are family.”

Now that I think about it, that is the gift of Michael (and his boys) for me. They have given me family, themselves. No matter what has happened in my life, they’ve been there. And for a man who has been on his own since he was 16 years old, there is no greater gift than family, real family, family of the heart like Michael, Vincent and Philip and now, blessedly, Michael’s wife Frieda.

I know I would have gotten through things like the shooting, my mother’s suicide,a fight with alcoholism and more had Michael not been in my life. But getting through them would’ve been a helluva lot harder and I’m not sure I would have weathered things as well as I have.

Happy Birthday, Michael. I love you very much. You too boys. You too Frieda.

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Photo by Frieda Tucker

And So It Goes

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Having to move to a new home is no joke, no laughing matter, not easy. There are all kinds of reasons for this, not the least of which is having to say goodbye to your home, this being all the more difficult when it is a home you’d much rather not leave.

There are times too, at least for me, when I find myself in a kind of on-fire fury at the circumstances. The old street blood simmers than boils and I find myself in admittedly juvenile fashion wishing someone would start a fight with me so I might be allowed to demolish, if not the reality of current circumstances, something, or someone. Obviously I would not actually do this, though if someone were to start with me they’d be brought to heel so quickly there would be ample time for me to explain,  while we were waiting for law enforcement to arrive and lock the shit up, the depth of gratitude they should be feeling by offering a detailed explanation of the family of bones in their body that remain unbroken because I trade my sobriety in for no one.

Anyway, the beat and the days roll on. And so it goes.

____________________