State representative John Becker from southwest Ohio is the sponsor of HB 234, the latest in a string of bills illustrating the Ohio legislature’s endless obsession with deregulating guns.
When something occurs as outrageous as the shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice at the Cudell Recreation Center by a police officer, many people try to wrap themselves in cocoon of denial, telling themselves “I wouldn’t have done that so I’m safe,” essentially blaming the victim for his own “behavior.”
The problem is that it’s hard to ferret out what Tamir did wrong other than being black, which was beyond his control. “Always obey the officer,” one person pontificated online. But video shows us that Tamir had no time to process what the police wanted before he was fatally shot.
A more prominent line of victim-blaming is “He shouldn’t have had a toy gun that looks real” or “His parents shouldn’t have let him play with a toy gun that looks real.” Let’s leave aside that the parents apparently weren’t aware he had this gun, and that by the time a child is old enough to go to the rec center on his own, he’s going to have a lot of things parents don’t know about, including the copy of Playboy he found in back of dad’s underwear drawer.
This line of attack proposes that both Tamir and his parents (who, again, were said to be unaware he had this toy) have superhuman powers of resistance to the overwhelming message of American culture. That message is that your identity as a strong, freedom-loving, independent American and a real man (or a tough, self-reliant woman) rests on gun ownership and gun toting.
Want someone to blame? Start with politicians who are lackeys for the out-of-control NRA, which pushes an agenda contrary to what most Americans think is sane. Yet that agenda controls access to guns, distribution of guns and how many people think about guns in the U.S.
Little boys have always played with guns. Given the stamp of not just approval but glorification of guns coming from all sides—government, the media, increasingly crackpot but also increasing prominent organizations touting their dedication to “liberty” — that isn’t likely to change just because it’s not a good idea.
Let’s start the blaming with the Ohio legislature. It has made Ohio an open-carry state, a concealed-carry state, a carry-in-bars state, a carry-in-the statehouse state. It’s pondering making us a “stand your ground” state — a truly terrible idea. It’s also looking at relaxing gun-training requirements — a truly stupid idea.
On the progressive website DailyKos, there’s a column called GunFAIL, a weekly roundup of accidental shootings. It would be funny if it weren’t so sad — a litany of wives mistaking husbands for prowlers, toddlers finding guns under a sofa kitchen and killing mom, playmates discovering dad’s loaded gun in the garage ending in tragedy, and — my favorites — supposedly trained sheriffs and cops cleaning their “unloaded” gun when it goes off and shoots them in the body part a gun is often said to be a substitute for.
Given that the NRA and gun-loving politicians always trump the public’s desire for better background checks and stronger regulation of gun sales, how can any reasonable person expect a child or his parents to fight this cultural tsunami? Young boys grow up playing shoot-’em-up computer games but blaming the gaming companies is pointless too. They are merely delivering what NRA-driven culture has conditioned young boys to crave.
That culture told Tamir Rice that prancing around with a gun meant you were a big, strong, red-blooded American. And what were his parents going to tell him anyway? “You can’t carry this symbol of American manhood because you are black and by definition not a real American man?” Get real.
By the way, did you know that one of the NRA’s agenda items is to fight against laws to make toy guns look more like toys? They want kids to get the feel of carrying a real gun so when they grow up they become customers for the NRA’s actual constituency — not gun owners, but gun manufacturers and sellers.
It may be comforting to tell yourself that “bad parenting” or a bad kid doing something wrong led to this tragedy. But it’s untrue. Tamir was merely acting out the priorities of an Ohio legislature that thinks deregulating guns is more important than fixing school funding. As for his parents, there’s no graceful way to tell your child he’s still just 3/5ths of a person without the same rights to American male identity that our politicians think is the birthright of REAL American men.
One Response to “Tamir Rice & American Gun Culture”
Cicero
Oh rubbish! His parents had no need to tell Tamir he was 3/5 human. If they cared about him, they would have told him that, when approached by a police cruiser, he should not get up from a picnic table, run around toward the cops, and reach in his waistband for a gun, toy or otherwise. I don’t know if the officer was justified or not, but I saw the video and that’s what happened.
I think you should be aware that last year the police in the USA shot 123 black males. That includes black officers doing the shooting and criminals shot who clearly were beyond dispute. If anyone cares, they shot about 360 white suspects. Why don’t you worry instead about the thousands of black males murdered by other black males?
As for your badmouthing the NRA, there are currently something like 400,000 concealed carry licensees in Ohio. Homicides have GONE DOWN consistently since the CCW laws were passed.