When I was almost shot

I think of this line from one episode of The Simpsons, where Moe rushes into a mob gathering and he says something like "Wow, this is the second most number of guns I've ever had pointed at me." That's funny.

I'm 33 years old now and was just starting my senior year of college in September of 2001. At that time, I had been to Canada a handful of times and never flown commercially. I had never been to either coast, either, and maybe to Chicago, "the big city" to folks in Southwest Michigan, a dozen times. So when July of 2002 rolled around and I moved to the suburbs of Philadelphia, I felt very out of place when I saw, somewhat randomly, National Guard troops, armed with rifles, patrolling the public transit lines. This was a more regular occurrence when I got around to visiting New York City. Maybe a year later, I flew in a commercial airliner for the first time and saw quite a bit more of this militarization qua safety. A lot of people at that time said how terrifying it was, overall. This was, of course, in the long wake of the 9/11 attacks.

After spending the first 26 or so years of my life with exactly zero desire to travel internationally, I got a job that took me to Ireland every month. Ultimately, I moved to a job that took me all over the world, including all over Europe, India, and elsewhere. My first time to India is the place where I was almost shot.

Background for this… A few years back, before I ever went over any ocean, there was a Pakistani bombing in Mumbai. I can't claim to be an expert on any of these things, but from what I heard, this started a whole new world of security measures in India. This includes armed guards (heavily armed guards) in the airport, at the hotel, at the factories I'd visit…

So picture this: I'm standing at the line at the desk where they check your passport (this is after 18 hours of flying, so I look and feel my very best). An armed guard stands on either side of me. They appear to both be right handed as each is pointing his rifle to the left. Picture that? Two guards, each pointing their gun to the left, and I'm in the middle. That means one gun is pointed directly at my hips. The guard on the right keeps turning to talk to the guard on my left, each time poking me with the business end of his gun… high up on my right thigh, toward the front… Though I was absolutely certain this person had no malice in his heart and was also equally sure that he had nothing against me personally, I didn't feel comfortable. A few minutes of me dancing forward and backward in an attempt to clear the line of fire ensued, but ultimately, my passport was stamped and I just kinda gave myself up to the fact that I was in a world different than my own. In this world, security was driven by an obvious military presence. I just thought back to 2001 and figured it must be awful to have that kind of tension every day of your life. And I stayed in my hotel as much as possible.

The part about this that stuck with me is that I am not afraid of guns at all. I own some. I enjoy shooting. I try to hunt but find little time and less skill. And like I said, I was absolutely sure that the people charged with protecting us weren't going to shoot me for any reason. But having those loaded-for-bear assault rifles everywhere still made me feel like a different person than I did normally. This, in the face of the very obvious fact that every police officer, most guards, and lots of private citizens are armed with pistols in the U.S. It was just different when those pistols are replaced by AK-47s or other such assault weapons.

And I guess that's a point to be underlined. Americans are constantly surrounded by small arms and even these small arms can do a heck of a lot of damage. Something doesn't feel quite as militant about a 1911, or even a semi-automatic 9mm…

We have a hard time talking about tragedy. When we as a large nation begin to talk about the reasons for these tragedies, or compare those reasons to the reasons for other events, parts of our nation often feel that we're somehow condoning the actions of the criminal. The argument against trying to understand is often boiled down to a sound bite along the lines of, "he was insane and that's all there is to it." That is not the case. That cannot be the case. We need to contextualize and rationalize in order to prevent these tragedies in the future, but that does not mean we ever condone them.

Regardless, there are a lot of people out there talking about these events, so I my voice here doesn't really add anything. Maybe, though, I can talk about getting stuck in the hip with an assault rifle as being part of a normal life in other parts of the world.

There's this other issue in here, though. Our government (by extension, we the people) are dealing with a lot of big issues right now. We are also having trouble getting along. So add together big challenges, stubborn people, and an absolute timeline and often, you end up with tactical solutions. Just to be clear, I mean "tactical" as opposed to "strategic." Tactical solutions have a tendency to build up, one after the other. To make up an example, imagine your job is to pound one nail into one board. You do that on Monday, and your job is done. You come back Tuesday to do the same thing, but now, because of a new tax on nails or something, you need to fill out a form before you pound in the nail. That new form is in response to that tax and is a tactical solution to meeting that need. Wednesday rolls around and due to an injury suffered by another person using a hammer similar to yours, you need to first fill out the tax form, then fill out a check sheet examining your hammer (in response to a new safety regulation) and then start to pound in that nail. I’m not saying that the tax is wrong or that safety isn't important… far from it. But after a thousand days and a thousand more tasks to complete before you can pound that nail, the tactical solutions to real needs have made the work impossible to accomplish. Here, I'd like to say, is where a systemic change would be the thing needed to remove all of the "red tape" built up over time but would still meet all of the needs that drove the tactical solutions in the first place. But that probably won't ever happen…

I bring this up because we could start that same thing with guns soon. The NRA came out recently calling for a huge increase in a militarized presence in schools. This is a tactical solution to a challenge in the same way that the short-lived National Guard presence everywhere was a tactical solution. And these sorts of actions have a tendency to keep building on each other. I'm talking to you, TSA.

If our mindset is that only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun, then we need really figure out what a good guy is. Police and military personnel are probably good guys in general. We entrust them with our safety in the most extreme of circumstances. However, we pay them to do it. So maybe they're not as "good" as they are just earning a living. This isn't to belittle them at all. It's only to make this next point: what if they volunteered? See, volunteers would be the best way to ensure that we only get the best of the good people out there with guns protecting us, right? This would be like a neighborhood watch system. Right? I'm sure that George Zimmerman thought of himself as a good guy. I'm sure that his neighbors thought that too. Then one day, he shot Trayvon Martin, killing an unarmed kid. Good guys with guns can make mistakes, too.

Living in America is effing awesome. The same is true with Europe and the "Western" world. When we go through customs, we don't get rifles poked into our baby-makers. We don't stop talking and laughing as we pass a security official with an assault rifle on the street corner in Cleveland, Ohio, just to be on the safe side. There are places on Earth where the death of innocent people in large numbers at once is not all that uncommon. This doesn't make it any less horrible there or make our loss in Connecticut any less painful.

So as usual, I have no suggestions and am far from having any answers. All I can be sure of is any answer that makes Americans less American is no answer at all.