GUEST BLOG—By
Adam Gopnik, Columnist, The New Yorker
blog, www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk--“I
don’t think I’ve ever been as heartbroken by anything as I was, last night, by
the video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wijFaBQnfMI] of Richard Martinez,
whose 20-year-old son, Christopher, a college student at the University of
California Santa Barbara, had been murdered the day before. Christopher and six
others were killed in a mass shooting near campus. That I have a 20-year-old
son who is also a college student makes an empathetic response easy, almost
obligatory—but I suspect that many others felt the same way, and that they felt
this way because they were hearing a hard truth spoken clearly. Martinez,
almost overcome with a grief that he knows and we know will never fade, not for
as long as he lives, still struggled to speak sanely in that moment.
“And so there was something
almost heartening amid the heartbreak. Richard Martinez, in the height of his
grief, somehow did the hardest thing there is, and that is to find the courage
to speak a painful truth: ‘Why did Chris die? Chris died because of craven,
irresponsible politicians and the N.R.A.,’ he said. ‘They talk about gun
rights. What about Chris’s right to live? When will this insanity stop? When
will enough people say, ‘Stop this madness; we don’t have to live like this?’
Too many have died. We should say to ourselves: not one more.’
“Christopher died because of
craven, irresponsible politicians and the N.R.A. That’s true. That the killer
in question was in the grip of a mad, woman-hating ideology, or that he was
also capable of stabbing someone to death with a knife, are peripheral issues
to the central one of a gun culture that has struck the Martinez family and
ruined their lives. (The shooter had three semi-automatic handguns that,
according to the Los Angeles Times,
he’d purchased legally.)
“Why did Christopher
Michael-Martinez die? Because the N.R.A. and the politicians they intimidate
enable people to get their hands on weapons and ammunition whose only purpose
is to kill other people as quickly and as lethally as possible. How do we know that
they are the ‘because’ in this? Because every other modern country has suffered
from the same kinds of killings, from the same kinds of sick kids, and every
other country has changed its laws to stop them from happening again, and in
every other country it hasn’t happened again. (Australia is the clearest case—a
horrific gun massacre, new laws, no more gun massacres—but the same is true of
Canada, Great Britain, you name it.)
“Martinez’s brave words put
me in mind of a simple point, which I failed to make in a long essay about
language this week, or didn’t make strongly enough. The war against euphemism
and cliché matters not because we can guarantee that eliminating them will help
us speak nothing but the truth but, rather, because eliminating them from our
language is an act of courage that helps us get just a little closer to the
truth. Clear speech takes courage. Every time we tell the truth about a subject
that attracts a lot of lies, we advance the sanity of the nation. Plain speech
matters because when we speak clearly we are more likely to speak truth than
when we retreat into slogan and euphemism; avoiding euphemism takes courage
because it almost always points plainly to responsibility. To say “torture”
instead of “enhanced interrogation” is hard, because it means that someone we
placed in power was a torturer. That’s a hard truth and a brutal responsibility
to accept. But it’s so.
“Speaking clearly also lets
us examine the elements of a proposition plainly. We know that slogans
masquerading as plain speech are mere rhetoric because, on a moment’s
inspection, they reveal themselves to be absurd. “The best answer to a bad guy
with a gun is a good guy with a gun” reveals itself to be a lie on a single
inspection: the best answer is to not let the bad guy have a gun. “Guns don’t
kill people, people do.” No: obviously, people with guns kill more people than
people without them. Why not ban knives or cars, which can be instruments of
death, too? Because these things were designed to help people do things
other than kill people.
“Gun control” means
controlling those things whose first purpose is to help people kill other
people. (I’ve written at length about farmers and hunting rifles, and of how
they’re properly controlled in Canada. In any case, if guns were controlled
merely as well as cars and alcohol, we’d be a long way along.) And the idea
that you can be pro-life and still be pro-gun: if your primary concern is
actually with the sacredness of life, then you have to stand with Richard
Martinez, in memory of his son.
“There, that isn’t hard, is
it? The war against euphemism matters most because it forces us to look at the
truth we already know. The actual consequences of the N.R.A. and the gun policy
it frightens those craven politicians into sponsoring is the death of kids like
Christopher Michael-Martinez. This truth may not triumph tomorrow, but the
truth remains the truth. It would be nice if the President, who knows all this
perfectly well, put aside his conciliatory manner and his search for consensus
and just said it. Speak up, Mr. President! Speak plainly. Just say, “Last
night, I heard Chris’s dad. He’s right.”
Pillar to Post note:
Thank you Adam Gopkik for writing this essay and the New Yorker for
publishing it. And, I hope we have not
heard the last from Mr. Martinez. Let’s
hope he becomes a politician, who can stand up to change. Let’s encourage him
and support his campaign. For our children’s sake. The main headline is by Pillar to Post.
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