I spent Thursday afternoon in lockdown in the office building where I work because a man with two semi-automatic handguns woke up that day and decided to go on a killing spree at the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic here in Pittsburgh. As the result of his actions, two died (one of them being the shooter himself) and seven others were injured.
I was never in any danger during this event. My office is at least three or four miles from the hospital, although it is a branch of my employer's operations, and, thus, when they went on lockdown in Oakland, so did we. I think everyone in my office felt a little nervous at first, dis-eased by the unknown, the drama, and the repeated and rapid-fire (if you'll pardon the expression) calls and texts received from our employer's post-Virginia Tech warning system. A few of us were inconvenienced because we had appointments at other offices near the hospital, but I think everyone was pretty clear on not needing to venture near the neighborhood after this incident.
So impact on us? Minimal. After a couple of hours of being stuck inside our offices, we relaxed and propped open the card swipe-protected door, so that we could go to the bathroom and the water fountain.
We even resorted to some black humor. One of my colleagues, upon hearing that a police officer had been grazed by a bullet in the shootout, joked, "I can hear it now, 'I shot the sheriff, but I did not kill no deputy.'"
Ha.
"Just make sure you're singing it like Bob Marley and not Eric Clapton," I quipped. "I can't stand the Clapton version of that song."
Double ha. We slay us, don't we?
Except that two people did get slayed, the shooter and a 25-year-old psychiatric nurse named Michael Schaab, who worked with geriatric patients and had just gotten engaged to his girlfriend in February. Apparently, too, this was the second (and last) child of Mr. Schaab's parents, Mary and Harry Schaab, to be murdered. Less than two years ago, their daughter Nancy, 26, was killed during a domestic dispute by her boyfriend.
If you were ever trying to find a pure example of the meaning of the word "tragedy," here's where you would start.
Of course, we didn't know any of this at the time. Nevertheless, that joke's not so funny anymore, is it? If it ever was.
Given the details that we now know, I do feel especially reprehensible for my part in trivializing the afternoon's events. No family should ever have to endure what the Schaabs are going through. My heart goes out to them. The whole city's, the entire nation's should as well.
I'm not some moral puritan who thinks you can't have a laugh, even a bitter pill of one, at someone or something else's expense. Gallows humor is a coping mechanism, pure and simple, something we do as a way to scare away the distress and alleviate the upset from horrific events. For good or for ill, I think we Americans have excelled at this over the last decade or more. Lordy, we've had to, given an up-and-down economy, lingering social ills, threats of domestic terrorism, and the bizarre, incendiary actions of some to impose their visions of law and order upon us. It's laugh or cry most days. The gods bless The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and the Colbert Report. Many of us would have caved ages ago without them.
Moreover, humor, black or otherwise, is just a part of our national character.
As I state to others elsewhere who decry some of the events that take place in our country, these now-almost common workplace shootings a case in point, we're Americans, not Europeans. We're not even Canadians. We made a conscious decision more than 200 years ago to separate ourselves from European rule and to embrace a New World culture.
While our cultural stock is made up of Europeans, it is only partly so. Besides, Europe's a big, diverse place. Our heritage hails from all parts of Europe, not just Britain or Northern or Western Europe. We are Southern European and Eastern European as well, as much Italian and Jewish as we are German, English, and Irish, I would argue. And we are also African, Latino, Asian, and indigenous as well. Heavily so and increasingly so and hooray for that.
I'd argue that we're actually spiritually more akin to Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and the rest of the Americas. After all, we all fought for independence from a "foreign" power. Even English-speaking Canada, our long-lost cousins, whom, on the surface, we resemble in language and custom more than just about anyone else on the planet, seems different from us in its view toward Europe and our approach to "civilization."
Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce, special orders don't upset us: We have it our way. We're Americans. We're not exceptional, just different.
Maybe we're too rambunctious, too hard-headed, too conservative, too hot-blooded, too quick to react, too non-contemplative, too everything. I try to look at these as less "too muches" and more neutrals: It's who we are, for good, for ill, for better, for worse.
Nonetheless, I must admit that the "toos" still drive me crazy from time to time. Or even often.
* * *
Maybe we're more violent, too--I just don't know. I tend to think we're maybe less different than we might imagine ourselves to be. Europe and Canada have had mass shootings as well. It's just that we also have easier access to firearms and a cultural norm that says they're OK--corral or no corral--to use.
Having said all that--and, more or less, unapologetically so, or at least nonjudgmentally so--at times like these, when yet another shooting occurs in a public space, I have to agree that the Canadians and the Europeans are onto something: Limit access to guns, and you'll have fewer shootings and killings, in public or in private.
It seems incredibly simple, and yet it is an idea that stands no chance of gaining traction at this time. For when a mass shooting happens in Europe or Canada, there always seems to be an examining of the national conscience and an attempt to mend the social fabric. In the U.S., the opposite seems to happen now: The more shootings there are, the less contemplation occurs.
When a mass shooting happens in Europe or Canada, there seems to be a concerted effort to further limit access to firearms. In the U.S., again, we do the opposite: Another shooting just seems to prompt more calls for even fewer restrictions on access to firearms.
After Columbine and then eight years later, Virginia Tech, you'd think we would have gotten the message loud and clear and taken immediate action to curb access, limit gun ownership, or at least the types of guns people are allowed to own. But no. Instead our fearless leaders and class-action lawyers recommended we put in more metal detectors and pursued less restrictive gun laws. Funny, huh?
Even after Thursday's shooting here in Pittsburgh, all the focus seems to be on what the hospital and the university had done or not done to prevent this sort of episode from happening. The very afternoon of the shooting, I heard a colleague say, "See, if we had laws in place that would allow us to carry guns on campus, this problem would have been taken care of in a second." Given the general level of punch-drunkeness that occurred that afternoon, I don't know for sure whether he was joking or not.
Nevertheless, even our state's governor, Tom Corbett, weighed in on whether the institution had done enough to prevent this horrendous event from happening. "Obviously it's very disturbing, and I think we need to review exactly what happened and what happened to the lack of security at that facility," the governor was quoted as saying.
Coincidence that the university and the governor are locked in a heated battle over state funding of higher education with plans to cut several million dollars more of the state's appropriation? Cynical me thinks not so much.
So lots of treating symptoms, but not much dealing with the problem, which to me is essentially this: Why should your right to bear arms supersede my right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Why do I need to worry that I will be killed at work or at the gym or at the mall or sitting in my living room watching TV so that you can have unbridled access to all kinds of weaponry, the vast majority of of it out of proportion to your actual need?
You want to hunt? I don't really get it, but I know it's a cultural thing in Pennsylvania and other places. So fine, go hunt. A simple rifle should do the trick. Level the playing field a bit and keep it moderately powered and low-tech. Give the deer or the elk a chance to kick your ass if you can't shoot straight. Seems fair.
You feel you need protection at home? Hmmm, I'm not sure I get your reasoning, that having a loaded pistol will do the trick, especially when so much can go so wrong in such a scenario. As far as I can tell, nobody uses a pistol to hunt; they use it to threaten or kill. I don't understand why you would want to do this, and I certainly don't support it. Here's a case where some additional paraphernalia, like door and window locks, might just take care of your worries without the need to go all Dirty Harry on someone's personhood.
As you feel so strongly about this point, I can be a little flexible on this point--as long as you keep the firepower low and your actions are aimed at stunning and scaring off, rather than killing anything that moves. Oh, and limit one per customer. And consider yourself forewarned: If you mess this up, the privilege (not the right) goes away. Blam!
Everything else? No. Banned. Completely. No exceptions. You may hate it. (In fact, I'm sure you will.) You may fight it. (In fact, I know you will.) You may offer up your curious interpretations of what the "Founding Fathers" intended in the Second Amendment. And who really knows since none of us was around much in the 1780s, not even our most decrepit citizens--our senior members of Congress and the Supreme Court. My layperson's interpretation of the Second Amendment reads it as though we were simply being allowed to form state militias, National Guards, as needed. I see nothing in there about the right to bear arms in the form of AK-47s or armor-piercing bullets. If you're going to be a "strict constitutionalist," as you so enjoy repeating at loud volume, then you have to always be one, not just when it suits you. Them's the rules.
So bitch all you want, rant, wail, berate, and threaten. I will, nonetheless, prevail. It's over. No more. Stop the shooting and killing. Stop pretending it's about your freedom when it's really about your unchecked irresponsibility and about gunmaker profits. Stop it all now. NOW. I deserve to live in peace, and so do you. If you follow my lead on this, we'll get what I want but we'll also get what you and I both need.
Still not convinced? For added incentive, look at this way: Just think how much we'll piss off the Europeans and Canadians by tuning them out, taking action, getting this right, and then stating that this was our intention all along. We just had to do it in our own way, our time, when we were ready and thought it was the best for us, best for the world at large--but not because we were paying any attention to them.
American exceptionalism, American difference, America our way. Call it what you will. Let's stop shooting one another and get back to living well through our unique ability to annoy the world around us. Just imagine being able to shout, "We're number 1! we're number 1! USA! USA" due to a dramatic drop in gun-related violence and homicides.
It'll kill 'em!
I was never in any danger during this event. My office is at least three or four miles from the hospital, although it is a branch of my employer's operations, and, thus, when they went on lockdown in Oakland, so did we. I think everyone in my office felt a little nervous at first, dis-eased by the unknown, the drama, and the repeated and rapid-fire (if you'll pardon the expression) calls and texts received from our employer's post-Virginia Tech warning system. A few of us were inconvenienced because we had appointments at other offices near the hospital, but I think everyone was pretty clear on not needing to venture near the neighborhood after this incident.
So impact on us? Minimal. After a couple of hours of being stuck inside our offices, we relaxed and propped open the card swipe-protected door, so that we could go to the bathroom and the water fountain.
We even resorted to some black humor. One of my colleagues, upon hearing that a police officer had been grazed by a bullet in the shootout, joked, "I can hear it now, 'I shot the sheriff, but I did not kill no deputy.'"
Ha.
"Just make sure you're singing it like Bob Marley and not Eric Clapton," I quipped. "I can't stand the Clapton version of that song."
Double ha. We slay us, don't we?
Except that two people did get slayed, the shooter and a 25-year-old psychiatric nurse named Michael Schaab, who worked with geriatric patients and had just gotten engaged to his girlfriend in February. Apparently, too, this was the second (and last) child of Mr. Schaab's parents, Mary and Harry Schaab, to be murdered. Less than two years ago, their daughter Nancy, 26, was killed during a domestic dispute by her boyfriend.
If you were ever trying to find a pure example of the meaning of the word "tragedy," here's where you would start.
Of course, we didn't know any of this at the time. Nevertheless, that joke's not so funny anymore, is it? If it ever was.
Given the details that we now know, I do feel especially reprehensible for my part in trivializing the afternoon's events. No family should ever have to endure what the Schaabs are going through. My heart goes out to them. The whole city's, the entire nation's should as well.
I'm not some moral puritan who thinks you can't have a laugh, even a bitter pill of one, at someone or something else's expense. Gallows humor is a coping mechanism, pure and simple, something we do as a way to scare away the distress and alleviate the upset from horrific events. For good or for ill, I think we Americans have excelled at this over the last decade or more. Lordy, we've had to, given an up-and-down economy, lingering social ills, threats of domestic terrorism, and the bizarre, incendiary actions of some to impose their visions of law and order upon us. It's laugh or cry most days. The gods bless The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and the Colbert Report. Many of us would have caved ages ago without them.
Moreover, humor, black or otherwise, is just a part of our national character.
As I state to others elsewhere who decry some of the events that take place in our country, these now-almost common workplace shootings a case in point, we're Americans, not Europeans. We're not even Canadians. We made a conscious decision more than 200 years ago to separate ourselves from European rule and to embrace a New World culture.
While our cultural stock is made up of Europeans, it is only partly so. Besides, Europe's a big, diverse place. Our heritage hails from all parts of Europe, not just Britain or Northern or Western Europe. We are Southern European and Eastern European as well, as much Italian and Jewish as we are German, English, and Irish, I would argue. And we are also African, Latino, Asian, and indigenous as well. Heavily so and increasingly so and hooray for that.
I'd argue that we're actually spiritually more akin to Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and the rest of the Americas. After all, we all fought for independence from a "foreign" power. Even English-speaking Canada, our long-lost cousins, whom, on the surface, we resemble in language and custom more than just about anyone else on the planet, seems different from us in its view toward Europe and our approach to "civilization."
Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce, special orders don't upset us: We have it our way. We're Americans. We're not exceptional, just different.
Maybe we're too rambunctious, too hard-headed, too conservative, too hot-blooded, too quick to react, too non-contemplative, too everything. I try to look at these as less "too muches" and more neutrals: It's who we are, for good, for ill, for better, for worse.
Nonetheless, I must admit that the "toos" still drive me crazy from time to time. Or even often.
* * *
Maybe we're more violent, too--I just don't know. I tend to think we're maybe less different than we might imagine ourselves to be. Europe and Canada have had mass shootings as well. It's just that we also have easier access to firearms and a cultural norm that says they're OK--corral or no corral--to use.
Having said all that--and, more or less, unapologetically so, or at least nonjudgmentally so--at times like these, when yet another shooting occurs in a public space, I have to agree that the Canadians and the Europeans are onto something: Limit access to guns, and you'll have fewer shootings and killings, in public or in private.
It seems incredibly simple, and yet it is an idea that stands no chance of gaining traction at this time. For when a mass shooting happens in Europe or Canada, there always seems to be an examining of the national conscience and an attempt to mend the social fabric. In the U.S., the opposite seems to happen now: The more shootings there are, the less contemplation occurs.
When a mass shooting happens in Europe or Canada, there seems to be a concerted effort to further limit access to firearms. In the U.S., again, we do the opposite: Another shooting just seems to prompt more calls for even fewer restrictions on access to firearms.
After Columbine and then eight years later, Virginia Tech, you'd think we would have gotten the message loud and clear and taken immediate action to curb access, limit gun ownership, or at least the types of guns people are allowed to own. But no. Instead our fearless leaders and class-action lawyers recommended we put in more metal detectors and pursued less restrictive gun laws. Funny, huh?
Even after Thursday's shooting here in Pittsburgh, all the focus seems to be on what the hospital and the university had done or not done to prevent this sort of episode from happening. The very afternoon of the shooting, I heard a colleague say, "See, if we had laws in place that would allow us to carry guns on campus, this problem would have been taken care of in a second." Given the general level of punch-drunkeness that occurred that afternoon, I don't know for sure whether he was joking or not.
Nevertheless, even our state's governor, Tom Corbett, weighed in on whether the institution had done enough to prevent this horrendous event from happening. "Obviously it's very disturbing, and I think we need to review exactly what happened and what happened to the lack of security at that facility," the governor was quoted as saying.
Coincidence that the university and the governor are locked in a heated battle over state funding of higher education with plans to cut several million dollars more of the state's appropriation? Cynical me thinks not so much.
So lots of treating symptoms, but not much dealing with the problem, which to me is essentially this: Why should your right to bear arms supersede my right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Why do I need to worry that I will be killed at work or at the gym or at the mall or sitting in my living room watching TV so that you can have unbridled access to all kinds of weaponry, the vast majority of of it out of proportion to your actual need?
You want to hunt? I don't really get it, but I know it's a cultural thing in Pennsylvania and other places. So fine, go hunt. A simple rifle should do the trick. Level the playing field a bit and keep it moderately powered and low-tech. Give the deer or the elk a chance to kick your ass if you can't shoot straight. Seems fair.
You feel you need protection at home? Hmmm, I'm not sure I get your reasoning, that having a loaded pistol will do the trick, especially when so much can go so wrong in such a scenario. As far as I can tell, nobody uses a pistol to hunt; they use it to threaten or kill. I don't understand why you would want to do this, and I certainly don't support it. Here's a case where some additional paraphernalia, like door and window locks, might just take care of your worries without the need to go all Dirty Harry on someone's personhood.
As you feel so strongly about this point, I can be a little flexible on this point--as long as you keep the firepower low and your actions are aimed at stunning and scaring off, rather than killing anything that moves. Oh, and limit one per customer. And consider yourself forewarned: If you mess this up, the privilege (not the right) goes away. Blam!
Everything else? No. Banned. Completely. No exceptions. You may hate it. (In fact, I'm sure you will.) You may fight it. (In fact, I know you will.) You may offer up your curious interpretations of what the "Founding Fathers" intended in the Second Amendment. And who really knows since none of us was around much in the 1780s, not even our most decrepit citizens--our senior members of Congress and the Supreme Court. My layperson's interpretation of the Second Amendment reads it as though we were simply being allowed to form state militias, National Guards, as needed. I see nothing in there about the right to bear arms in the form of AK-47s or armor-piercing bullets. If you're going to be a "strict constitutionalist," as you so enjoy repeating at loud volume, then you have to always be one, not just when it suits you. Them's the rules.
So bitch all you want, rant, wail, berate, and threaten. I will, nonetheless, prevail. It's over. No more. Stop the shooting and killing. Stop pretending it's about your freedom when it's really about your unchecked irresponsibility and about gunmaker profits. Stop it all now. NOW. I deserve to live in peace, and so do you. If you follow my lead on this, we'll get what I want but we'll also get what you and I both need.
Still not convinced? For added incentive, look at this way: Just think how much we'll piss off the Europeans and Canadians by tuning them out, taking action, getting this right, and then stating that this was our intention all along. We just had to do it in our own way, our time, when we were ready and thought it was the best for us, best for the world at large--but not because we were paying any attention to them.
American exceptionalism, American difference, America our way. Call it what you will. Let's stop shooting one another and get back to living well through our unique ability to annoy the world around us. Just imagine being able to shout, "We're number 1! we're number 1! USA! USA" due to a dramatic drop in gun-related violence and homicides.
It'll kill 'em!
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