I have a gun so I don’t NEED to vote…

A great democracy does not make it harder to vote than to buy an assault weapon.
— Bill Clinton, August 28, 2013

Are there any words that can really rationalize this image? When I ask myself how do I show my priorities in my life? My priorities are shown by the ease, dedication and effort I direct toward those issues. If I want my house to be clean, I have to make an effort to do the work necessary to keep it clean and fresh. I throw out my trash regularly. I wash my dishes, after every meal. I sweep or vacuum on a regular schedule. I do a regularly schedule spring and fall clean. So when you come to my house, you recognize I place a value on cleanliness. There are no dishes in the sink, there is no trash stinking up the place, there is no trash sitting on my floor. Seems simple enough?

So by using this logic, it is safe to presume in most states of the nation, it is a higher priority to own a gun than it is to allow for voting. Voting, the right to have say in who runs for office in your nation. The people who will represent your needs to the government and decide how our mutually agreed upon taxes should be spent on things that benefit the nation and the people living within it.

A gun on the other hand seems to be a way of saying I don’t need to vote.

I have a gun.

I can, if I want to, fight against any government that I don’t like, don’t agree with and can along the way, shoot anyone who disagrees with my point of view and isn’t able to shoot me first.

I have a gun.

The gun violence in this nation doesn’t ever seem to go down, either. In the last month, there have been at least five accidental shootings by CHILDREN at other children. There was even an event where two children conspired to stab or shoot a fellow classmate who ANNOYED THEM. Let’s not forget the police shooting an innocent twelve year old who happened to be carrying a toy gun that looked too realistic to them, so their solution was to shoot him dead on the spot. No warning, no information exchanged, the boy’s life and his parents irrevocably changed because some officer decided:

I have a gun.

Is this what we have become? A nation of people whose first solution even at the delicate age of 12 or 13 is to simply assume killing the person who annoys them is AN APPROPRIATE RESPONSE. What happened to getting support from teachers?

No. I have a gun.

What happened to teaching children to negotiate?

No need. I have a gun.

What happened to learning skills that result in resolution and cooperation.

Forget that. I HAVE A GUN.

And I have the right to bear arms or arm bears, into my supermarket, into my Starbucks, into my bar, where other alcoholic gun-toting citizens might, after having a few too many, conceivably decide to shoot someone who disagrees with their perspective because, after all, none of us have ever seen an angry or ugly drunk with poor self-control or anger management issues have we? Nope. Not once.

Let’s not forget the increasing incidence of road rage where the solution to being cut off in traffic is to follow that driver to the supermarket, wait until he gets out of his car and shoot him. Or in a recent incident, the two drivers drew down on each other and summarily killed each other. An appropriate solution to the problem of both road rage, gun possession and inappropriate responses to poor driving etiquette.

But to those two men in that moment, they felt they were obligated to resolve their problem the only way they knew how, the way their concealed weapons permits said they had to.

They had a gun. Problem solved.

But while American Congressmen, in the pocket of the National Rifle Association, don’t seem able to pass any kind of gun legislation that would stop the mad proliferation of guns into a populace already rife with guns, currently it is estimated there are 300 million guns in the United States at any given moment. Yes, nearly one gun for every man, woman and child in this nation.

Is there a reason America has this many guns? Did China indicate they were coming for American farmland and would not be deterred by the world’s most expensive military force? Has the rest of the world had enough of American imperialist behaviors (also know as our foreign policy) and decided they were bringing the fight to our doorstep (might seem appropriate since no foreign force has fought on American soil since the war of 1812)? Are we expecting an alien invasion?

There does not appear to be any effort being made to stem the tide of firearm possession, no matter how many military bases, school yards, office buildings, streets, urban areas, city parks, or government officials get shot. We are a nation of fools assuming having a gun was the same thing as having a vote. Meanwhile corrupt corporations keep gun ownership an issue in the public sphere while they plunder your pensions, cut and privatize what were once government services, making them less effective and more expensive in the same breath.

So I have to ask you citizens, what kind of future are we looking for? Are we looking for one where a real vote in a real democracy has the potential to make the nation we live in a better place? Or are we simply preparing for the day when we decide government isn’t making the nation safer and rushing off to our secret food bunkers where we can proclaim loudly to anyone who dares to approach in the New World Order of anarchy and self determination…

I HAVE A GUN, AND THERE AREN’T ANY LAWS TO PREVENT ME FROM USING IT!

Heaven help us all.

He’s Just A Little Boy

As men, we look at our sons, sometimes without realizing it, and remember all that we want for our sons. We want them to enjoy the feelings of success in sports we, ourselves may never had enjoyed. We want them to enjoy the social success with their peers, we may never been able to fathom when we were their ages.

And so we drive them hard. We drive them to succeed. We push them to catch, to throw, to run, to shoot, to be better at everything at their age, than we were. Like it or not, we admonish them to be better than we were.

But here is the truth. It’s not about you.

It’s not about him being a representation of you. It’s not about your having a second chance to live vicariously through your son. It isn’t.

And that is a hard thing to admit.

Because, if you are lucky, will see yourself again and again in your son. When he goes to bat, when he is on the field somewhere, when he struggles with is homework, when he fails in a spelling bee, when he scrubs out on his brand new bicycle. When he goes to high school, when he stays out late, when he doesn’t get into the college you think he should.

When he defies you and tells you to drop dead.

He is as he should be. When he is a little boy, the man he becomes is directly proportional to the love, support and willingness to let him succeed or fail on his own merits. Teach him to play, teach him to excel, teach him to fail well.

Then step back and let him grow. Be there with him both when he succeeds and more importantly when he fails. Both have lessons he will need to learn and no one will ever teach him better than you.

Except maybe Mom, but we’ll keep that under our hat. He’s not a man yet. And every day you spend with him will make him the man he’s supposed to be. And that’s not you.

And that’s okay. Grow with him.