I grew up in a room full of guns. The bedroom I shared with my brother in the Reeves/Cody homeplace in Walnut, North Carolina, had in it a ceramic pistol ashtray–for change and such pocket stuff:

The color scheme was somewhat different, but it looked like this.

One of the drawers in brother’s dresser held a BB pistol along the same design as the one on the ashtray. And above the twin bed in his corner, two racks held six rifles and shotguns. Often over the years when a situation called for describing the differences between him and me, I would use this description of his side of the room, contrasting it with my side, which was dominated–and characterized–by a blacklight environmental peace poster.

These days, I don’t know what my brother’s feelings are in regards to gun control, but I trusted him with his guns then and I trust him with them now. I would hope that he supports sensible measures to restrict access to guns — particularly assault rifles, which are essentially weapons of individual mass destruction — to those who are qualified to use them correctly and wisely.

And I don’t know what his feelings are about the National Rifle Association (NRA). For all I know, he’s a card-carrying member since whenever–if ever–the organization focused on what it believed to be sensible support of the 2nd Amendment. Back in the time of Charlton Heston maybe. But it’s clear to me that such support is no longer anything more than the public mask for the NRA. What it has become, I believe, beneath its mask, is little more than the puppet lobbying organization for gun manufacturers, who want no restrictions on access, not according to supposed support of 2nd Amendment rights, I believe, but according to their profits.

While I agree with those who argue that background checks and licensing and buy-back programs will not prevent weapons from getting into hands that ought not wield them, I have a simple counterargument: every little bit helps. If our elected representatives want to label this a mental health issue, that’s fine. It is. The NRA and its paid and elected mouthpieces want to claim that if guns are criminalized then only criminals will have guns. Okay, that seems simple-mindedly obvious. I don’t believe, however, that restricting gun access will generate more criminals than we already have. Most individuals whose mental health isn’t stable enough to allow them to purchase weapons legally–given that sensible restrictions were in place–also don’t have the nefarious connections to get around the law to obtain guns illegally. Limiting access to guns might stop only one in ten of the USA’s many thousands of incidents of gun violence, I know. But if we had almost 40,000 shootings last year (2018) in our country, then wouldn’t stopping about 4,000 of those be worth it?

And now for some music.

Here’s a little video I shot for my song “Complaints.” It’s about the anxiety of modern life and of growing older. And it’s about where solace–if not answers–can be found. I put FOX News on in the background, because I personally hold the network responsible for much of our backward and wrong thinking and the fear that is in power these days. (I think it’s the president’s main source of his own thinking, which is just as well, given the low level thinking and thinkers he surrounds himself with and rightly ignores.) The second verse includes these lines:

I fuss and fret about the Great Unknown.
I spend these dangerous days afraid and alone,
And I’m worried – O Lord, I’m worried.
Where is the next monster with a gun?
Where will I hide? Where will I run?
Where will I land if I’m blown to kingdom come?

Just at the moment when I’m singing these words, look at the television, which is showing images from a California shooting. I didn’t plan it or time it. The coincidence between the lyric and the image was random . . . and haunting . . . and fortuitous.