One Billion

Last week the jackpot in the Mega-Millions lotto topped one billion dollars.

One billion.

That’s a thousand times a million.

To give you some perspective (and I think we all need to gain some perspective on occasion), at the rate of pay I was earning as a high school teacher, I made a million dollars every twelve years. Roughly, in twenty-seven years of teaching, I made (and spent—trust me) two and a quarter million dollars.

But in order to make a billion dollars, I would have had to work a thousand times that long. Yep. If I’d kept working, I would have made a cool billion dollars after twelve thousand years (give or take a few hundred years).

Makes me tired just thinking about it, though I’m sure I would have enjoyed spending that much time with my students—kids who were kind, smart, funny, compassionate, and always entertaining. Sweet kids. Innocent kids.

It also makes me think, now that I’m living on my pension (and not earning much from my writing—I mean, you’re currently reading my words for freeee!) that perhaps I might have chosen a more lucrative line of employment.

Take gun sales, for example. Know how long it took gun manufacturers in the U.S. to earn a billion dollars? Ten years. Oh wait—they made much, much more than a billion in ten years. That’s just what they made on assault-style weapons. You know, AR-15s and such. Those sales alone earned them a cool billion dollars. In ten years.

Don’t you wonder what they do with all that money? I do. I’d like to think they put a few million aside to pay medical bills and PTSD counseling and grief therapy and renovations of the crime scene whenever there’s a mass shooting. I’d like to think that, all right. But I can’t. Because they don’t.

Ever wonder who pays the medical bills for victims of mass shootings? They do. The victims, I mean. Well, their insurance companies, but as we know, insurance companies only pay for certain things these days. “Out of pocket” expenses can be astronomical. Especially when you’ve been hit by multiple rounds that basically explode inside your body. (CNN has a non-graphic simulation video posted on YouTube of how the round from an AR-15 affects human tissue. You can view that by clicking here.)

Curious, I did a search of “mass shooting” on the Gofundme.com page. There are hundreds and hundreds of accounts set up to help victims. Because, as I said, if you’re hit but don’t die, you’re going to need really good insurance coverage.

Because gun manufacturers are using their billion dollars for other things.

Look, I know I’ve been harping on this issue for months. Is it too much?

Could it ever be “too much” as long as mass shootings are still happening?

Am I “one of those Dems” who want to “take all the guns away”? No. No, I am most decidedly not. I believe the founding fathers had good reason to say everyone who wants to have a gun at home should have the right to do so. I have no issue with the handgun my nearly-ninety-year-old neighbor is ready to bring out should civil unrest rear its ugly head here in our senior community. I have no issue with a single friend who keeps a gun in her nightstand in case her abusive ex-husband decides to come at her again. I certainly have no issue with my brother’s hunting rifles because he hunts deer humanely, and he eats what he kills (and anyway, most of the time he just has fun camping out with his friends and doesn’t bag anything).

But if we have any chance of stopping the type of carnage we have seen in recent months and years, we have to do something.

How about we reinstitute the ban on assault-style weapons? Because you know, they were banned for years. And the percentage of these types of mass shootings dropped dramatically. And in those years that they were banned, my brother continued hunting and neither my friend or my neighbor felt unsafe without their handguns.

I do have one friend who owns an AR-15 and feels threatened by any conversation involving gun control reform. He uses his AR-15 to hunt coyotes. So he can kill an entire pack at one time.

So yeah, I wouldn’t mind if we passed a law saying he can’t do that.

Mostly, though, I’m more focused on no more children dying deaths so violent, their parents have to give samples of their DNA in order to identify their bodies.

Give it some thought. Maybe call or write a senator. Or vote for only those individuals who sincerely support gun control reform. Please.

Because this:

And because this is a reminder of how quickly we forget:

 

Oh, by the way, we know now that someone in Illinois won that billion-plus Mega Millions jackpot. Wouldn’t it be cool if it were someone in Highland Park? Yeah, I think so, too.

Dick's et al

At some point in the next week, I will buy something from Dick's Sporting Goods. I'm not sure what I'll get... a new yoga mat, perhaps, or some new sneakers. I would hope anyone who feels passionately about the need for gun control reform will do the same.

If you missed it, in my previous post I suggested that making changes to the gun culture in the United States will be a long and arduous process, but we can bring about those changes, just as we changed the societal norm of smoking a few decades ago. Instead of sweeping legislation (that I would love to see but seems improbable since so many politicians are more concerned with saving their seats instead of saving lives), we can turn the ship around by means of small, incremental steps with the goal in mind of not overturning The Sacred Second Amendment but rather limiting accessibility to mass-kill weapons and accessories and doing more thorough background checks (just for starters).

Last weekend, MetLife, a company that offers life insurance and other financial products, was the first to come forward and say, "We will no longer offer discounts to NRA members." Company executives stated that this policy change was made because "We value all our customers" (emphasis mine). Aaaaand BOOM, just like that, within 24 hours, a long list of companies followed, including major airlines, car rental companies, software companies, and so on. When I travel to Missouri in June, I will be reviewing that list of companies to find the airline and car rental agency I will patronize as a way of supporting their courage to do something, however small.

This morning, the CEO of Dick's Sporting Goods made an appearance on Good Morning America to announce that the company will no longer sell assault style rifles or high capacity magazines, nor will they sell a firearm to persons under the age of 21. Bravo. And so to support the company's brave step (because, yep, they know it will--at least temporarily while some folks throw temper tantrums at not being able to purchase all the pretty shiny destructive toys they want--reduce sales and result in a decrease in stock value), I will be buying something—anything—from the Dick's in Upland, California when I head out that way later this week.

Small steps... these are small steps. But they are similar to decisions made by owners of chain and independent restaurants a few decades ago that banned smoking inside the restaurant. Everyone said those businesses would lose business. In fact, studies have shown that restaurants and bars that have banned smoking (in some states, you can still light up inside your local pub) have not seen any decrease in revenue.

I imagine Dick's will see a small blip in sales... maybe... but maybe good-hearted folks around the country will do as I am doing, decide the kids need new sneakers this month or some cleats for Little League coming up in the spring or a really nice hoodie from The North Face or Field and Stream. Spread the word. Maybe we can make that happen, and maybe Dick's will see, in its next quarter financial report, that sales actually increased after this critically important, potentially life-saving decision.

Wouldn't that be cool? 

Smokescreen

When I was a kid, everybody smoked. If you're my age, you remember. Mom, Dad, Grandma all sat on the couch puffing away. When my sister and I were charged with cleaning the living room, we had to empty the ash trays. Remember that? Every home had ash trays. Every business had ash trays, too—tall, industrial size metal cans. At the bank. At the post office. At the library. At church....

People smoked in restaurants, too. It never bothered my mom at all—until she stopped smoking. "I can't believe they're smoking in here. It smells terrible," she would grumble, sotto voce, to make sure the person heard her. Of course, that was much later. After she'd smoked for 35 years.

In junior high and high school, I learned "the dangers of smoking," as every student did. But for most kids, those lessons fell on deaf ears. Because everyone smoked. It was part of the culture. If I suggested to my mother that she quit, she would smirk and say, "My mother has smoked all her life, and she's still alive."

See, there were studies that indicated smoking contributed to all kinds of evil in our bodies. But the idea of everyone quitting smoking was met with derision. Cries of, "It's my constitutional right to do what I want with my body!" were heard, and "The government's not gonna take my cigarettes away!" and "This is America; we're free to do as we choose here!"

If this rhetoric sounds familiar, it may be because we began to hear similar outcries in the wake of the recent shooting in Parkland, Florida.

This week, as some of us were pleading for tighter controls on the dissemination of guns across the country, others were clenching their fingers tighter around their assault weapons and parroting Charlton Heston: "...from my cold dead hands."

The difficulty here is multi-layered. Clearly, it won't be enough to simply tighten up some of the pre-existing gun laws. We can raise the age of majority to 21, but that wouldn't have stopped the Las Vegas shooter who killed 58 and wounded 851. We can make it illegal to own certain types of weapons such as the AR-15 (the semi-automatic rifle Nikolaus Cruz used to kill 17 people in the Parkland mass shooting), but opponents argue that "criminals will find a way to get them anyway." We can arm teachers—okay, no, not really, not realistically, oh my lord the thought of some teachers I've worked with having a gun in the closet—just NO.

But something has to be done. Something has to be done NOW.

Here is what my friend Doug Brooks had to say on his Facebook page about this issue:

The fact that anyone is surprised at the violence constantly being played out across our country is in itself a surprise to me. For several decades, we have been programming our youth for just this outcome. This programming has been achieved through what we call "entertainment." There has been a complete lack of any kind of moral compass in television, movies, and video games. Graphic violence in entertainment has become a "normal" part of our children's lives. Have you seen the first person shooter video games that children play every day? Our society is reaping exactly what we have sowed. This is not a gun control issue. It is a mind control issue. The United States of America was established to ensure and protect an individual's right to be "free." However, this freedom, without a strong ethical and moral base, ends up as chaos. And that, my fellow Americans, is where we seem to be heading....

He has a point.

I walked past my granddaughter's room one day to find her sprawled on the floor in the position of a military sniper, holding her game controller. On the monitor before her, the point of view was down the barrel of an assault rifle. My first--but non-verbal--response was 'holy shit.' My first verbal response was to ask about the "game." She explained that yes, she was killing people, but that "we're the good guys." So that made it okay.

That is not okay, at least not with me.

But she's 18. She can choose for herself--in the same way that she could choose to take up smoking if she so desired. "But," she told me (later, after the Parkland shooting) when we discussed whether playing violent video games contributed to the likelihood of someone shooting up a school, "I would never go crazy and start shooting anyone." No. She wouldn't. But... I have also seen my nephew, when he was 15, playing a far more violent video game. This is a young man with profound anxiety and mental health issues. He also has a severely violent temper and has threatened his own mother with bodily harm while enraged. (Before you panic, there are no guns in their home. He has never been around guns. Of course, that doesn't mean he couldn't easily get one, the way things are right now. Because now he's over 18. He's actually over 21, so even if the age of majority is raised, he can still get a gun if he wants one.

If you believe that it's okay for that young man to own an assault rifle because "it's his right as an American under the Second Amendment," I would have to question whether you are capable of thinking rationally. If you agree with me that no, he should not have access to any kind of weapon, nor should others like him, then we're taking a small step in the right direction.

And that's what it's going to take to turn this ship around--many, many small adjustments in the way we do things, the way we think about things, including the culture of gun ownership and availability in the United States. The process will be slow and arduous and, for some, painful (as was quitting smoking for so many people). Is it worth it, though? Oh, hell yes it is.

We need to bring about change that is substantial and far-reaching, just as we ultimately accomplished with smoking. Back then, some said it would be impossible to shake ourselves free of the spell the tobacco industry had cast upon us. Remember the Marlboro Man? He was so handsome, so cool. Until he was diagnosed with cancer....

Our culture is suffering from its own form of cancer currently. But we can beat it. One step at a time.