Gun Violence Is another Case of the Chickens Coming Home to Roost
Commentary by Walter Hesford
Following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X shocked the country by stating that the chickens are coming home to roost in a 1963 speech.
What Malcolm X meant by evoking this old saying is that the violence America had perpetrated had come around to kill its President. Our violent words and deeds turn back on us.
Currently, the chickens are coming home to roost once again. According to The New York Times Magazine article, “Childhood’s Greatest Danger: The Data on Kids and Gun Violence,” gun violence has been the number one cause of the death of our children since 2020. Because we live in a country founded through gun violence, and because we worship the gun, we have a cult of death through which we sacrifice our children.
Every time our children (and others) are sacrificed to the gun, as they were in the March 27 shooting at Nashville’s Covenant School, we afterward hear that it was a “senseless tragedy.” Far from it. Given our gun worship and their wide availability, deaths through gun violence unfortunately make perfect sense.
The prime scripture supporting our gun worship is the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz argues in “Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment,” a major reason white colonists wanted a “well-regulated” militia was to ward off and slaughter the Indigenous peoples they were displacing.
Another major reason for the insistence on a well-regulated militia, especially by southern states, was to suppress slaves and prevent slave rebellions. As Carol Anderson documents in her essay “Self Defense” in “The 1619 Project,” slaves and free Blacks derived no benefits from the Second Amendment.
Thanks to recent Supreme Court misinterpretations of the Second Amendment, one now does not even have to belong to a well-regulated militia to wield the gun-of-your-choice. All of us can buy what we want, including military weapons. Such are the privileges of individual people in a free country. We can sacrifice our children on the altar of a misinterpreted Second Amendment.
“Guns don’t kill people. People do.” Thus goes the cliché cited against any effort to control the sale and use of guns. There is some truth to the cliché. Certainly the gun shooters and suppliers have blood on their hands, but so do politicians who time after time do nothing to prevent gun violence. They are killing people, however indirectly.
Another common reason given for not doing anything to control guns is that it is too late — that guns are everywhere in great numbers so there is no way we can curb the violence created by their ubiquity.
Again, there is some truth to this. We have doomed ourselves and our children through our gun addiction to a cult of death. We might, however, find some redemption down the road by abiding by the wisdom of Iroquois elders who urge their people to consider the effect of their action on seven generations.
If we start now to control guns, perhaps in seven generations we may at least reduce the numbers of children slaughtered by them.
I am writing this when the news is focused on the indictment of former President Trump; even Spokane FāVS News devoted a column to this event on April 4. Trump naturally loves to have the news centered on him so he can raise money and forward his presidential campaign.
I grudgingly grant the importance of this news story. Still, I think it a dereliction of duty on the part of our media makers and influencers not to keep the focus on the ongoing gun slaughter.
I wish they, and we, would roost like hawks on the shoulders of our chicken-hearted legislators until they do something that actually promotes America’s general welfare by bringing an end to the reign of terror created by our worship of guns.
A Final Word: As I submit this column, two Black Tennessee representatives have been expelled from the legislator (and since reinstated) for daring to side with the people they represent in angrily demanding that Tennessee do something about the gun violence that is plaguing their state. The uproar and backlash created by their expulsion gives me a dash of hope that we are waking up to the need to challenge the status quo.
