First off, the lack of posts is due to a lack of flying. I spent all of September on reserve and didn't get called once. I finally had my first scheduled trip and it consisted primarily of running the Vegas shuttle between various cities on the west coast. The first overnight of the trip was in San Francisco. I logged on to my tablet later in the evening and noticed I had received a notification that a couple of my facebook friends had checked in safe in Las Vegas due to an active "shooter" situation. They had been at a concert and were now barricaded in an office building near the airport.
My first source of information on this was not the news, but rather Facebook. Interesting. The next morning, there wasn't much more information available other than that hundreds were injured and 58 people were dead, the largest count in modern US history. None of it made any sense to me. I was on a deadhead to Salt Lake the following day and I caught my right-leaning seat mate (in more ways than one) reading an article that said "evidence" was found that the shooter had participated in Anti-Trump rallies. Before I even went to Snopes, I knew that was false. Though in their defense, people with beards do all look the same to me too.
About 8 years ago, I went to Kentucky to a machine gun shoot/festival/gun show. Prior to this event, I had never even held a firearm. After my visit, I had fired something like 400 rounds from fully automatic weapons including a Bren machine gun, M-16, Thompson, Galil ARM, and an M249. No, it did not change my life. It did not make me feel more powerful or tougher. I did, however, meet a lot of nice folks there who were safely and responsibly using firearms. And while I certainly think very differently from them, they're not bad people.
I was there for my graduate school thesis project - a documentary about a young lady named Samantha, who I had learned was a very prolific shooter. She had participated in target-shooting competitions with her sub-machine gun and was destroying any semblance of competition. As I spent the weekend there, I learned that she and her father were very competitive with each other and I made that the central theme of my documentary - a sort of father-daughter bond over a shared hobby. When I showed one of my advisors the rough cut, he said it needed to make more of a statement and went as far as to suggest it should be more anti-gun. I refused to change my edit, believing that this would be disingenuous. People would read into it what they wanted is how I felt. Oh, if you want to watch it, it's here.
Anyway, I liked Samantha and her dad. They were nice to me. They had the courage and heart to welcome a film school kid from Los Angeles, California into their world. What is the point of all this? Well it's this. If we go back-and-forth between "Ban all the guns!" and "Everyone should have guns!," we aren't going to get anywhere. If some kind of gun control is to succeed, it needs to have the backing of a completely divided country, and that's not easy. We need to figure out something that passes the "Samantha test" (ie does something about the gun problem in our country while allowing people like Samantha to continue their hobbies).
Jokes aside, the political climate in our country is pretty much toxic to any form of sweeping gun control. Up to this point, the focus has been mostly on specific types of weapons or modifications. Examples would include large capacity magazines, silencers, anything semi-automatic, and the biggest target has been assault rifles themselves. Basically, all of those efforts have failed. For one, the NRA has a lot of politicians (and not just republicans) by the goolies. But the NRA alone is not to blame. The people who own guns themselves are very impassioned. Somewhat ironically, political efforts to limit certain guns or attachments have the undesired effect of gun enthusiasts swarming to buy up these particular items before they are removed from the market. When I was in Kentucky, there were murmurs of Obama wanting to take everyone's guns away. Sales of guns and ammo were marked up to higher prices as demand surged.
So let's just go out and say it. There is no amount of dead bodies or children massacred that will ever bring this country to ban all guns. The far right will always argue that guns don't kill people. People do. And look at all the killings in Chicago! They voted for Hillary! And finally my personal favorite . . .that such a tragedy could have been prevented if "good" people at the scene had guns too. But how do we decide who the "good" people are?
And therein lies a big component in how we can move forward. Background checks. "But Brian!, they exist already! It's sooooooo hard to buy a gun!" Is it? I researched this and I could order a factory-issue Galil semi-automatic rifle, the weapon of choice in the Israeli Defense Force, have it shipped to a licensed firearm dealer in Santa Monica (yes you read that right), and pick it up with some minor paperwork. I am then, supposed to register such a weapon with the state of California within 60 days, but as for the background check? It's instantaneous. There's a computer program called NICS that just verifies if I have any convictions, dishonorable discharges, etc. If no? Voila! I have quite the paperweight for my office. If for some reason, the state of California decided to actually enforce an assault rifle ban, I could use my Florida ID to get one in Florida where gun laws, as you might imagine are pretty lax. If that didn't work out, I could just go back to the Kentucky gun show, and buy that Galil, a silencer, a grenade launcher, and get stopped only when I run out of money. The howitzer will have to wait. Dealers are instructed to not sell to anyone they have reasonable cause to believe might be prohibited from owning such a weapon. So, what does that mean? A potential buyer approaches the dealer wearing a ski mask or proclaims, "I'm going to kill so many people with this!" as they examine it?
As you might have already deduced, an instant yes/no verification of criminal history is not a terribly effective way of doing a background check, nor is putting the vetting responsibility on the dealer who just met someone.
Just to work at an audioguide station at the National Archives in D.C., I had to undergo a pretty thorough background check, which took weeks. People I hadn't talked to in some time would text me and be like, "Ummm, someone called me and introduced themselves as Special Agent Harrison. They wanted to know if you were living on F Street in 2003 and asked the names of your roommates." As it turns out, I successfully passed the background check and was able to serve my country by telling 8th grade school trips how to use an audioguide throughout the exhibit hall. Conclusion? It's harder to handle acoustiguides than firearms. I underwent an even more extensive background check when working at National Airport and again when becoming an airline pilot.They may have discovered that I received a congressional nomination to attend a military academy, yet participated in an anti-war march the following year. I've changed my address a lot. I have a speeding ticket and 5 parking violations. I got a Florida ID so I can get cheap tickets to DisneyWorld, and participated in a high-heels drag race in D.C. dressed as a Persian bellydancer (no photo available).
Now that we've gotten to know each other better, do you trust me with a firearm? It's not as black-and-white as a simple NICS check on convictions, and it would require lots of man/woman power and good training to vet potential buyers. Our country doesn't have the resources for that right now, but it could. The ATF, much like the VA is a well-intentioned, but basically flaccid agency, ill-equipped to handle a large volume of requests, which is why the instant background checks exist. It's really just a bad solution to a bad problem. Some would see thorough vetting as an invasion of privacy. But a lot of those same people are fine with the Patriot Act, which allows the government to spy on its own citizens. When the GermanWings pilot crashed the plane into the Alps, killing all passengers and crew, it came up after the incident that he was dealing with depression and other mental issues. This should be part of pilot medical exams and should exempt someone from flying a plane. It's the same principle. It could have saved lives. I think people would want to know if their pilot is sane. Likewise, I would like to know if the tough guy I saw in Fairbanks, Alaska, proudly carrying his sidearm into an antique car museum is stable. That Model T can be a real dick sometimes, but a gun seems highly unnecessary in that setting.An effective background check wouldn't solve everything, but it's a start. And the problem with our country is that we never start. Tragedy happens, the president makes a speech to comfort the nation, other politicians say that they're sending thoughts and prayers, democrats call for expanded gun control, republicans/the NRA squash such calls in the name of second amendment rights, and the cycle repeats itself. We have a lot of guns in this country, but the agency tasked with overseeing them is not capable of even enforcing existing gun laws. It isn't even focused strictly on guns. Its name includes Alcohol and Tobacco as well. If we could beef up this agency and give it greater powers to vet, enforce, and even recover, maybe we'd have a start. Just a start. "But where would all the money to do this come from?" I've heard talks of a magnificent wall that's to be built on our southern border. It is estimated to cost about $70 billion just to construct. That's 4x the annual budget for NASA. Or to put in another way, $70 billion is about 70x the ATF's current budget. You could hire and train a lot of people for $69 billion. Just food for thought.
Footnote: I apologize that this blog has morphed into "Flyin' Brian and how he's coping with one national tragedy after another", but I'm tired of treating America like it can do no wrong. It does wrong a lot. But I like my country too. It just needs some fixing.
