That Foxy "natural law", it might be noted, has become so ingrained in the collective mindset of a younger generation never exposed to the military draft, and consequent enforced reflection on the actual horrors attendant warfare, that YouTube, for instance, appears to provide no age restrictions at all on a whole host of homemade videos on guns and explosive devices, homemade silencers and the like, how to make them, how to use them, the stuff of "manliness", "independence" and "self-defense" after all, while it does impose age restrictions on such scientifically instructive videos as one we ran across during the past year involving a medical film from the 1950's showing heart surgery, accompanied by a doctor's narration, presumably because, oooooo-oooh-oooooo, that's icky, mommy.

He recognizes that such vicarious liability for crime would receive strenuous objection from the doctrinaire members of society, of whom he counts himself as one, but suggests that the notion ought at least receive some level of serious thought.

The thought immediately comes to mind, however, of Lidice in Czechoslovakia, following the car-bombing by the resistance in late May, 1942 in Prague, which resulted in the death of the Nazi gauleiter for Bohemia, Reinhard Heydrich, leading to the rounding up and killing of every male in Lidice, razing of the village, and imprisoning of the women and children, because the Nazis believed that the village was harboring the group of individuals who were responsible for the killing of the man who had approved earlier in 1942 the "final solution" at the infamous Wannsee Conference.

Obviously, Mr. Steinbeck had no such community punishment for individual crime in mind, but, when taken far enough in an atmosphere of collective madness, such results can occur in any community or society where punishment becomes an obsession based on excessive publicity given to individual crimes, leading to a type of hysterical desperation to end all crime through repressive measures, exchanging individual freedom for excessive preoccupation with security, dispensing with the proverbial baby, as it were, while disposing of the bathwater.

While there is a point at which parents should become responsible for the extreme actions of their juvenile offspring, under circumstances where the parents supply or knowingly permit possession of the dangerous instrumentality, such as guns, utilized in a serious crime, such as murder or attempted murder, and have actual or constructive knowledge that the child is not sufficiently mature to use that supplied instrument in a responsible manner, there is also the necessity for the community to take responsibility as well for such inevitably undue parental tolerance, and take it into account, assuming its presence, when passing local ordinances or state statutes, such that juveniles below a certain age are absolutely forbidden from purchasing, having or using such instrumentalities, with or without parental supervision or permission, prior to an age where there is at least sufficient general maturation within the population to afford the likelihood of responsible behavior, holding the while not only the parents or guardians responsible but also the immediate sellers and suppliers of the instruments to the person below the requisite age, with substantial punishments for violation.

In the case of guns, however, as, say, contrasted with an automobile, no specific minimum age provides more than a modicum of such assurance of reliable use and care, as the gun is an inherently dangerous instrumentality, which, on balance, has such limited social utility under ordinary circumstances, beyond national defense and professional law enforcement, and has become so ensconced in the public mind through time with notions of glamorous exertion of authority and will over others, a symbol of raw power, born of decades of movie and television programming to that effect, the association of the gun with "toughness" and moral suasion, with insufficient counter-association regarding its possessor's inherent weakness, the need for the gun being rather uniquely effeminate in character, when boiled down to actual cases, a quick resort to mama's apron strings rather than wits when the going gets tough on the street or in the home or at the workplace, so much so that there is little if any rationale for allowing its sale to persons of any age, even with complete background checks which meet all rational criteria. (Recently, in May, 2022, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 2 to 1 ruling in Jones v. Bonta, with two Trump appointees, naturally, constituting the majority, held California's law requiring a person to be 21 before being allowed to purchase long guns and semiautomatic centerfire rifles unconstitutional under the Second Amendment. Hopefully, the matter will be heard en banc by the Court and we have not heard the last of this decision, and so we shall await further proceedings before making direct comment on it. Such a decision does point up the problem, however, in resort to formulaic recitative checkbox formations of the law, applied to obtain a preconceived outcome commensurate with the ukases of the Federalist Society, rather than exerting rational thought, without Skinnerian preconditioned constraints, especially in areas of the Constitution, as with the Second Amendment, where there is very little case law available for guidance, to reach decisions salutary for the society, all of the society, in which we daily must live, not in 1791 or even in 1991, but now. If it appears bizarre, even quite insane, to suggest that, despite the Fifteenth and Seventeenth Amendments, the government can place age limitations on the otherwise unfettered right of exercise of the franchise but not on the substantially qualified "right" to bear arms under the Second Amendment, then you need only go so far as consulting the rhetoric attached to guns fomented on the society by the Federalist Society and its adherents to obtain explanation for that insanity. You will not find it deeply ingrained in the legal traditions of the United States, at least prior to about 1980—when the two judges who drafted that absurd decision were still young children.)

The "shooters" we repeatedly see during the previous four decades in news stories have usually undergone and passed routine background checks to obtain their legally purchased guns, have shown little, if any, "signs" of aberrant behavior which might serve as "red flags" in advance of shooting day, with the parents and associates sometimes not even aware that the individual has the gun, "red flags" that is, save in a fascist society where suspicion is drawn to persons by virtue of their status, not actual violent personal behavior. The shooters have, more often than not, lain low for the most part until they decide to act one day after months or even years of careful, secret planning for their day of infamy, whether to get even with a society for its rejection or simply having given up to the point where "suicide by cop" appears to be the only viable option left, or any number of other individual motivating factors which lead to violence aimed generally at a mass of people.

Reducing the availability of guns and ammunition to all, not just to those deemed a "risk", is the only way, ultimately, to end the cycle of gun violence which obviously feeds on itself, especially among the young and immature, through too much media attention paid to these individual crimes through time on a regular basis. Prior to the advent of 24-news via cable, such routine mass violence aimed generally at anyone in the line of fire was not known, except in quite exceptional circumstances. The only variable is the wall-to-wall routine coverage of the crime scene, not just as a two-minute segment on a local newscast as in earlier times, but hours upon hours of incessant, obsessive coverage, coverage of the shooter, the scene, the police involved, the victims, the victims' families, the heroes, the villains, the coping with the grief, the funerals of the victims, until it all dissolves finally into a kind of unkind tale told by an idiot to the point where people cannot any longer feel anything except contempt for a society which continues to allow guns to be sold at all to anyone.

More drills, more lockdowns, more repressive measures, more ways of "detecting in advance" "mental illness", as ill-defined as such terms become in the hands of the lay public, dangerously so, to the point of intolerance toward anyone exhibiting even a slight form of behavior considered aberrant by the community, whether in style of dress, hair, speech, what have you, all born of hysterical fear, are obviously not the answers—curtailing or chilling of necessity fundamental liberties to make way for a "liberty" in use and possession of guns never intended by the Founders lest "well regulated militia" would never have been included as the initial modifying phrase of the Second Amendment "right", at a time when cumbersome, slow-firing, inaccurate, short-range musketry were the only personal weapons in common usage, lucky to hit the broad side of a barn door at twenty paces.

The places hit by gun violence usually are well-drilled, perhaps too well-drilled, to the point of militaristic discipline insanely imposed on a civilian society, typically by ex-military whiz kids feigning possession of all the answers for their home folks, accomplished through overactive police and politicians not paying attention to the real problem in their midst, or, in some cases, deliberately distracting from the obvious so as not to lose their place of respect and authority in the increasingly insane community, the toleration, even the encouragement, of a culture of stress on guns, all at the expense, and in some cases, the deliberate diminution of intellectuality, rational thought and encouragement generally of culture in that same community, as it descends gradually but certainly into collective behavior dissociative from any reality beyond that concocted and instilled by moviemakers, tv producers, radio gabfests, and "news" organizations, all bent, at the end of the day, on competition for the attention of audiences, engorging the perception that the predatory jungle is just a half-step away and intruding steadily and stealthily, with every high tide and lap-lap of the sea, onto their middle class comforts and security measures, the carefully, stone by stone constructed Trumpian walls surrounded by the community moat and drawbridge at the borders to keep out the riffraff from "our community", all "checked" thoroughly and approved or not by the local checkers, slowly become the equivalent of Berlin in 1938—all as contrarietal as it gets to the society envisioned by the Founders when they drafted, passed and sent to the states for ratification the Constitution, some communities even becoming an extension of their third-world heritage, replete with its hell-on-earth fascist aspects, merely transplanted to the United States, all with the happy-happy approval of the Sing Along gang representing them in Congress, when they deign to come home to their "fine, fine, god-fearing" wunderkind to tell them how well they are fulfilling their forebears' intentions, as those communities keep them in power and as stars of the reality tv show broadcast daily on C-Span.

We reiterate that the only way to end the cycle of violence is for everyone to exert responsibility, not increasingly holding parents responsible for the actions of their minor children, only encouraging extreme discipline in the home which can result in making a good child turn to delinquent behavior for the undue suspicion cast on them, in reaction to which spite becomes seemingly justified toward the too strict parent who has sought only to avoid parental liability over imagined danger never in fact obtaining outside the tv-reality in the parents' minds. That ultimate responsibility is to repeal the anachronistic Second Amendment which has no place in modern society and has, in practice, lost its original meaning having to do with the maintenance of a "well regulated militia", to the point of absurdity, macabre absurdity, resulting in routine deaths of citizens every day to gun violence, too often en masse and without any immediate connection to the shooter.

During the Vietnam War, it took, finally, four months in 1971, following decades of talk about lowering the national voting age from 21 to 18, to pass and ratify the 26th Amendment. The people got fed up and it represented a symbolic way of expressing that anger and frustration over sending young people involuntarily into war via the draft when they could not even yet vote for the representatives making those decisions impacting their chances of surviving to age 21.

Until the country really gets enough motivated to end this cycle of death by repealing the Second Amendment, nothing much is going to change. The society will never know whether such repeal will lower the violence until it has been given a chance over the course of a decade or so to work.

Assuming that process of amendment will only be transacted slowly, however, the society, in the meantime, must hold accountable the gun manufacturers and ammunition manufacturers with unlimited potential for actual and punitive damages under strict liability for any unlawful shooting accomplished with their product, legally obtained, manufactured within 25 years of the illegal usage. That accomplished, the means of undertaking such shootings will soon leave the society, just as the old fascination and fantasy surrounding cigarettes for decades following the Civil War has largely left the society over time and in response to serious local, state and Federal regulation; and sustenance of the wild west show on which some members of Congress and members of state legislatures seem to thrive for obtaining votes from naive, gullible constituents, will soon end.

We do not allow private manufacturers to produce atomic bombs. There is no ground for assertion of "free enterprise" when it comes to the manufacture of an inherently dangerous instrumentality with virtually no redeeming social utility, as in the case of guns in the hands of the citizenry in modern times. Motor vehicle manufacture is more closely regulated by the government than are firearms, a patently absurd situation. Require manufacturers of new guns to place microchip tracking devices on every gun sold, removal of which would automatically disable the gun; require sellers of used guns to place such tracking chips on all used guns sold, with felonies and mandatory prison sentences for violation; impose taxes of $250 per gun annually on every gun sold, new or used, not dissimilar to the modern motor vehicle taxes, with the fees collected going to a fund for victims of gun violence, and, voila, the fascination with guns, especially among the young, will quickly dissipate by virtue of the pocketbook and the beneficially paranoid notion that, with a gun, the central character of 1984 is, indeed, peering over one's shoulder at the gun range, tending to eviscerate quickly that imagined wild west scene in which one is with horse, boots, spurs and gun, alone, insular, patrolling the desolate prairie for marauders, the forces of evil and injustice, preying on the weak and fragile things, the little gophers and groundhogs, until one catches a glimpse in the mirror of the actual evil at work on your psyche.

Obviously, people can drive vehicles into crowds and can use knives or poisons or homemade bombs or poisonous snakes and spiders to kill, but the chance of avoiding serious injury or death from such contrivances is much greater than with the use of a gun, simply because of the need for immediate proximity in the use of a vehicle or most other instrumentalities to inflict death or great bodily injury. There is no rubber bathtub available for any society and there will always be exceptions to the rule, but to sit and do nothing in the face of daily or weekly mass gun violence is to participate in the definition of insanity: repeating the same pattern of conduct in the face of known untoward consequences.

Framed Edition

Links-Date — Links-Subj.