Bullets for Your Electric Car

A six year old boy pulls out a handgun in class. The teacher walks over to get the weapon. The child shoots her through the hand and into the upper chest. Fortunately, the teacher lives. The press makes it to be a gun issue. It is not. The press points out all the shootings in the school district, brings up the issue of guns. If only it were that

simple.

We want a better world. All of us, intuitively, understand there are many flaws in this modern world of ours and want this crazy rock we find ourselves on to be closer to what we imagine to be an ideal world. In these daydreams, all our complex, troubling problems have easy solutions: People shoot other people? Take the guns away. Environmental issues due to the use of fossil fuels? Start driving electric cars. The problem is that complex situations rarely have simple solutions: Electric cars still require roads made out of oil maintained by heavy machinery that requires oil. And, where does the electricity that charges that car come from? You can take away the gun from the six year old child but whatever is in his head that drove him to pull the trigger while face to face with another human being….well, it’s still in his head.

The gun was a Taurus 9mm and legally registered. This is an unimportant detail. The teacher got off lucky surviving a chest shot from a powerful weapon, this is an unimportant observation. The shooter is known to have serious mental issues. This is what we need to focus on. I think of six year olds as being highly dependent; a year into school, still requiring Mom or Dad to pick out their clothes and help them back up their little backpack for school. Not this child, not this child that has a history of mental issues. Alledgedly, this child commented that he wanted to set a teacher “on fire,” the same teacher he would later shoot. This is not a match issue or a Bic lighter issue as it is not a gun issue. Lighters and handguns are inanimate objects. The issue is who loves this child? Who is looking after him? Who is listening when he says these disturbing things?

Look at those smelly people downtown with their tarp hovels, shouting at invisible enemies, haranguing people for spare change—the authorities need to just go through the area with a backhoe and make the problem disappear! The tarps are not the issue. The malodorous dropouts with their twisted faces are not the issue. Unless you’re in a Final Solution frame of mind, you cannot make this complex issue just disappear; you raze one tent city and the homeless create a new one somewhere else. The real issue begins with a question: Why is he or she homeless? A lot of those people have mental issues, they require compassion and understanding. They need institutions, safe places where they can be helped, and medical professionals to help them. Like the six year old child who shot the gun will need the rest of his life. The thing is, the genie has been released to do whatever it wants in the world—the problem was in that six year old boy’s head but the genie was released in that classroom. Can you imagine what that situation did to his classmates? The explosion of the gun. The reaction of the teacher and the sight of her blood, the smell of blood and gun smoke. How many nightmares will that create? And what about the teacher? How can she go back to teaching when any little backpack belonging to any of her little pupils could contain a big gun that could make another big hole in her chest?

This shooting resonated with me. I’ve been fascinated with random shootings since Columbine nearly twenty-five years ago—what leads someone to just point a weapon at strangers and potentially kill them? It has led me to write stories trying to make sense of something not easily made sense of. All that can be known in this moment is these complex issues do not have simple solutions. Full disclosure: I own handguns myself. If I had, children, however, I would make sure they were locked up, inaccesable. Especially if my child had mental challenges. This is the issue to me: Who is looking after that boy? Who is making his lunch and helping him back up his little backpack for the day? Who is hearing his violent fantasies and helping him deal with them?

You see Tesla electric cars everywhere, even in the campground where I work.

Look, I’m being part of the solution. I can still have my own car, not have to ride a bus with smelly people, and still do my bit to help the environment.

But what about all the plastic in that car? What about the oil that comprises the roads and the hot patch to repair them and all the heavy machinery required to lay those roads and keep them in repair? The problem is not whether the motor in your car is internal combustion or electric, it is our need to cling to our cars and not work to improve our mass transportation. Unseen: Riding a train to work would make our lives less stressful. I remember commuting, being stuck in stopped traffic for half an hour to an hour, inching along—I’m gonna be late! Come on you bastards! What’s the hold up? Stress. Most of us “cope" with it, maybe we drink a bit much wine after work, but we cope. Possibly we die of heart disease from the stress but for the time we cope. Most of us. Some people do not. They commit suicide…they take a gun to work and take out whatever the stress has done to them on their co-workers. And the press turns it into a gun issue. It is not; if only things were that simple.

A six year child pulled a large handgun from his little backpack and shot his teacher. Since that shooting there have been other shootings and there will be more and more. Progressives angrily make it a gun issue. Conservatives will throw out empty platitudes about "hope and prayers.” A Progressive will be open to being taxed to deal with mental health issues but still, stubbornly, wants to make shootings a gun issue. A Conservative, when asked to contribute to deal with mental health issues will rail about Socialism, Communism, and Marxism but not blink at all the tax dollars spent on weapons for defense. The most troubling thing is, to me, is that we could have that better world. We could have it, but we would have to see things for how they really are and not as we imagine them to be. We could eliminate school and workplace shootings—for the most part—if we made sure that six year old boy had someone caring for him. If we made it acceptable for Bob---who is stressed out and will shoot up the T Mobile he works at—to go to his boss and say “I am not coping, I need to go to a clinic for a week or just out in a nature to decompress.” And the boss would be understanding. Not in this world we live in. Can you imagine such a luxury? “This world is crushing me, I just feel small and broken and need a few days to get my shit together. I need someone to talk to, to just listen to me and take away this fear that the world is monster designed to eat me up.” Sadly, we do not live in such a merciful world.

You can take all the guns away, you can put all of us in electric cars, but the problems still exist; the troubling mental state of that six year old boy, the stress of our modern world, the fact that even if your car doesn’t run on gasoline it still requires infrastructure that runs on oil. We need each other, and I say that as an introvert. We need to put down our phones, to be in a queue for the train or the bus and interact with other people, see them as other human beings. Those smelly people shouting at their invisible enemies were once children, often neglected, no one to pack up their little backpacks before they left for school. The six year old child will, quite possibly, end up living under a tarp on a sidewalk in some city, unloved, uncared for. Dirty. Scared. Dangerous. His teacher will go on with her job but where she saw innocent children needing her guidance she will now see masks—does that sweet, little boy contain demons? Every little backpack, once benign, now ominous. And this is not a gun issue. It never was, if only it were that simple.