September 20th, 2013: Straw Men
"All is straw."
— St. Thomas Aquinas
I am a sportsman. Let no man doubt my credentials; I have shot doves, pheasant, cougar, grouse, grackle, corncrake, caracal, goose, gamehen, griffin, and lemur. I have tracked a 12-point buck two hundred yards through a pine thicket on Thanksgiving, to riddle its ample frame with hollowpoint bullets. In the best tradition of Theodore Roosevelt and Donald Trump's sons, I have stalked and shot animals all over the globe. I have done so proudly, legally, with pomp bearing and in a regal stride. I am the embodiment of a man upholding the Second Amendment.
So too was Aaron Alexis. He was a Navy man, one of America's heroes, and as such, was taken care of when he went to Veterans Affairs complaining of insomnia. He was kept awake, as he told police in Rhode Island, by three pursuers dispatched “to follow him and keep him awake by talking to him and sending vibrations into his body.” They tortured him with a microwave ray. They threatened him through the walls of a hotel, through a bathroom floor, through ceilings, threats he didn't dare repeat aloud. He wasn't allowed to buy a handgun last Saturday at Sharpshooters Small Arms Range in Lorton, Virginia; the clerks fulfilled their legal obligation that Alexis furnish proof he was a Virginia resident. Alexis could not do so; a young Virginian named Cho Seung Hui was able to do so, twice, in 2007.
Alexis could, however, buy a Remington 870 Express shotgun. He could carve "Better Off This Way" and "My ELF" into the gunstock sometime before he shot down six of Washington Navy Yard employee John Weaver's friends in front of him, killing a security guard and using his handgun to continue the spree, killing twelve people for no reason before a police officer shot Alexis in the head.
Aaron Alexis had just as much right as me, and probably as much right as you, or Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, whose grief seems real - Alexis has just as much of a right as any of us to own a shotgun in Virginia. He never went quail hunting with it, or showed his young son the safe way to clean it, or stood in the cold of a winter hunting blind holding it, dreaming of venison stew. He never did any of the things many sober, well-adjusted, decent people do with a Remington shotgun. He did, however, kill twelve people with it, twelve people John Weaver called co-workers and "the nicest people in the world."
Oh well. My understanding, according to a moral clarion named Jay Carney, is that now is an "inappropriate" time to discuss these things. Better to let the bodies cool before nothing changes.
That's okay. We'll soon have another inopportune opportunity to appropriately not discuss it. I'm dead sure.
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