October 8, 2006

By Harry T. Cook

What if Duane Morrison had been living in his vehicle around your neighborhood, and you suspected from his behavior that he might be dangerous? If you lived in Michigan, you would not be able to learn through exercising your rights under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) whether a handgun was registered in his name.

Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm recently signed a bill into law that exempts such information from public inquiry. The proponents of the new law sold it on the idea that public knowledge of who had registered handguns would make them potential crime victims. – Yes. You read that right. I did not make it up.

Suppose Emily Keyes had been your neighbor’s daughter, dead now by a bullet to the head fired by Morrison from his handgun. Wouldn’t you be consumed with rage – rage against a Legislature that kisses the, ah, feet of the pro-gun lobby, and against a governor who, in an election year, just wanted to keep the gun nuts off her back? I think I’ll write in Gandhi’s name for governor when I vote.

(In case you’ve been on another planet, Duane Morrison is the vagrant who a week ago Wednesday terrorized a Bailey, Colo., high school classroom before he killed himself and fatally wounded 17-year-old Emily Keyes. See P.S. below.)

My fingers did not touch the keyboard to compose this essay until five days after the horrific events in Bailey. I kept waiting for my mentors in the gun-control lobby to erect a memorial to Emily Keyes with a loud outcry for – at long last – real control of handguns. Outcry came there not. Or at least not yet. This is my outcry.

If I hear George W. Bush talk about the “war on terror” one more time, I think I shall finish my private race to madness.

Terror? What the hell does he, what does his gun-worshipping Republican cohort think gripped Bailey, Colo., last week when Morrison rent asunder the psycho-social fabric of that little town – a wound that will take at least a generation or more to heal?

For the women students whom Morrison took as hostages, it was their own real-life version of United Flight 93, only they had no fighting chance against their terrorist.

We still do not know the dread details of what took place in that classroom between the time Morrison entered and the two deaths that resulted. I frankly hope that both the authorities and the media exercise the restraint of basic human decency and suppress what must be a grim and ghastly story. The surviving victims will have a hard enough time of it without the specifics of their debasement becoming lurid tabloid features.

All we really need to know is that Morrison was armed with a handgun that, if civilized laws were in place, he quite possibly would not have had. Or at least not had so easily. With it, he could and he did become a terrorist.

Do we not see that the armed, military option taken almost four years ago in Iraq has inspired terror just as the possession of that hand gun helped inspire the terror Morrison visited upon Bailey, Colo.?

We live and try to say alive in a country that exalts the muscular and condones violence. There was not enough public pressure on a compliant Congress to force an absolute prohibition on torture of so-called enemy combatants, not enough to preserve the 700-year-old right of habeas corpus (“You should have the body,” i.e., unharmed) for persons destined to be tried in George W. Bush’s kangaroo courts of military justice.

Clint Eastwood’s tough-guy line “Make my day” has entered our language as an acceptable invitation to shoot and be shot at. This is the kind of oater stuff that people my age paid their quarters to see at the Saturday afternoon movies. We did not expect it to be recreated 50 years later as a staple of national life.

Meanwhile, handguns that can “make” Dirty Harry’s day flow through society like water through a sieve. In Michigan, the authorities are required by statute to grant your application to own and carry a handgun if you’re not noticeably psychotic and have no discoverable criminal record. And then, as I have observed, the registration of your weapon becomes classified.

That is the kind of environment that allows the Bush Administration to continue to invite terror into the world in Iraq. It’s what made Emily Keyes’ terrible and unnecessary death possible at the hands of a man who should never have had a handgun – even borrowed as his apparently was.

May Emily rest in peace, and the rest of us be haunted night and day by demons unless and until we find and use the means to end the culture of violence in this country. First, make the handgun as scarce as the proverbial teeth of a hen.

We can call that Emily’s Law II.

P.S. I just read the first Associated Press bulletin about the fatal shootings at a one-room Amish schoolhouse in rural Pennsylvania. As I write, bitter and angry tears are falling on my keyboard. As the psalmist asked with such anguish: “How long, O Lord? How long?”

© Copyright 2006, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.

See also
OXYMORON: ‘SPORTING SHOOTERS’ http://jmm.aaa.net.au/articles/2908.htm

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