The Will to Do It

Good Guys

Let’s get one thing straight.   As a teacher, coach, and an administrator; I spent much of my career working with law enforcement.  I found that almost every police officer, sheriff’s deputy, or state trooper I worked with was competent, motivated to protect people, and well aware of the potential risks they faced around every corner.  They were (and are) exactly the kind of men and women I wanted to “have my back” when things went crazy.

We place them in an incredibly difficult position.  They are supposed to protect us from crime; but if they try to act proactively, they are “interfering”.   We want them to make us safer, but resent it when they enforce the law on us.  And we ask, no, demand, that they risk their lives for us.  Sure, “it’s what they signed up for”.  But that doesn’t change their desire to go home to their families after work, like anyone else.  But they’re not anyone else, on duty or off.  They’re cops.

No Excuses

This isn’t an excuse for the excesses we saw in Minneapolis, or this week in Akron.  But the officers, deputies and troopers I knew wouldn’t do that.  The failure of a few shouldn’t indict them all.

And here’s the most impossible thing we ask:  protect us from the mass shooters; our wholly American problem.  We expect that they will run “to the shooting” rather than away from it.  And, honestly, most of them will.  But the United States seems to have a virtually unlimited supply of high powered weapons, available literally “on demand”.  Hundreds of shots fired in the Uvalde school, seventy some fired at the Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, fifty rounds shot in the Tops Market in Buffalo.   The “shooters” can act so quickly, there’s no way for the police to protect us.

Butcher’s Bill

No matter how fast the police get there (less than six minutes in Buffalo), the “butcher’s bill” is already written.  In Buffalo a retired police officer sacrificed his life.  In Uvalde,  conflict in the hallway among the nineteen officers, held back by the incident “commander”, will probably never be known.  If they were like the police officers I knew, I suspect it was more than intense. But many of the kids were already dead before they even arrived.

In Highland Park, Illinois, the target was a Fourth of July parade.  The police were on the scene, directing the procession.  They’re response was immediate and appropriate.  Watch the videos: the crowd, the parade participants, are running away from the gunfire.  The police are guiding, directing, sheltering the onlookers and victims, and searching for the shooter.  They are in the line of fire, doing their duty, their job.

Fall Guys

They are the “good guys with the guns”.  They are the ones willing to lay down their own lives to protect others.  And there’s not much they can do about the young white man with a gun on the rooftop of the building, or who storms into the supermarket, school, church, synagogue or nightclub.  So let’s stop making them the “solution”, for a problem they can’t possibly solve. 

Because, by making them the solution, we are really making them the “fall guys” for our national malady.  We can’t solve the two actual problems:  the ready availability of high powered, high capacity weapons; and the willingness of young, mostly white men to use them to commit atrocities.  Or more accurately, we won’t.

We won’t, because we’ve allowed common sense to be thrown out the window by political rhetoric.  

An American Solution

The United States has been here before.  In the 1920’s, fully automatic weapons flooded the American market.  We all know them, “Tommy Guns”, Thompson sub-machine guns.  If you don’t remember, find an old black and white gangster movie from the late 1940’s with James Cagney or Edward G. Robinson or George Raft. 

Tommy Guns were designed as “trench sweepers” for  World War I type combat, with the rapid fire ability to clear the enemy at close range.   In the post-war world, with the passage of the 18^th Amendment banning alcohol use in the United States; crime became rampant.   The Tommy Gun lead the way as criminals provided society with booze.  

After Bonnie and Clyde’s crime spree in the Central United States, and the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago, the US government regulated automatic weapons by licensing them and requiring a steep tax.  While it didn’t solve the problem right away, ultimately it limited the number and raised the cost of the fully automatic weapons available.  They stopped being the gangster “weapon of choice”. 

So the argument that there is no “legislative” solution that could cure our current assault weapon crisis is simply not true.  It was done in the 1930’s, and it could be done again, if there was a legislative “will” to do it.

The deeper question – why are some Americans, especially young, white, males: drawn to committing such terrible acts?  I don’t pretend to have an answer to that question, or a solution for the problem.  But I do know one thing – we could take the weapon of choice out of their hands.

If we only had the will to do it.