American Savage: Insights, Slights, and Fights on Faith, Sex, Love, and Politics

by Dan Savage

  Knowing that you’re covered, not having to worry about health insurance, not having to worry about losing your health insurance, not having to worry about your children or your friends losing their health insurance, not having to worry about being crushed by medical bills even if you do have health insurance—all of that peace of mind, being relieved of all of those worries, that has to be worth something.

  After all, people insure homes that never burn down. They get car insurance and never get into accidents. You get insurance in case something bad happens. My house is one hundred years old; we pay homeowners insurance, as did the previous owners. And the house has—as of this writing—never burned down. Does that mean we wasted our money? No. Because you insure your home in case it burns down. For the peace of mind. You don’t think you’ve been cheated if you pay car and house insurance and never get in an accident nor lose everything in a fire. And here’s the thing: Your home may never burn down, and you may never get in a car accident. But you will one day sicken and die. That’s absolutely, positively going to happen. Why wouldn’t you want to be insured for that?

  6 Focus on the Family founder James Dobson released this statement in regards to God’s apparent denial of the urgent prayers for the defeat of Barack Obama sent forth by the National Day of Prayer Task Force. “Many, many, many Christians were praying and we really need to address that issue first: Where was God? Because there were these ‘40 Days of Prayer,’ there were several of those that took place, where people fasted and prayed for forty days asking the Lord for His intervention on Election Day. We did a program last week where my wife Shirley came in with her vice-chairman John Bornschein and told how three hundred Gideon prayer warriors came to Washington, went to every single office of the House of Representatives and the Senate and prayed for the occupant, prayed for our representatives, went to the White House, went in a vigil to the Supreme Court, which is now at great risk, and went to the Pentagon. People like that were praying all over this country and the Lord said no.”

  16. It’s Happened Again

  Wednesday night, the door to our garage was open. And the last time either one of us remembered checking, it was shut. And padlocked. It wasn’t hanging wide open, either, just cracked open a few inches. “Suspiciously ajar,” you might call it. We couldn’t see in, but the door was open just enough for someone inside the garage, if someone was standing inside the garage, to see us standing on the back porch, about twenty feet away, looking concerned about our open garage door.

  With three news choppers thumping overhead, cop cars tearing up and down the street, and our then-twenty-month-old son pulling newspapers out of the recycling bin, Terry turned to me and said, “Go shut the garage door.”

  Earlier in the day a white guy walked into the office of a shipyard on Seattle’s Lake Union, about eight blocks from our house, pulled out a semiautomatic handgun, and shot four people. Two men died; two men ended up in the hospital. And by dusk, the shooter was still at large, believed to be hiding somewhere in our neighborhood. Streets were blocked off, schools were locked down, and police were everywhere checking cars, houses, trees, basements—and garages. Seattle’s police chief went on television to warn area residents to use caution when returning home from work.

  Guns are everywhere in the United States, and I don’t need to tell you that a week hardly goes by without someone walking into a school or an office building or a church or a day care center and opening fire. When any of the evening news anchors begin their broadcasts with the words “It’s happened again,” they don’t even have to tell us what they mean by “it” anymore. Despite a comparatively piddling body count, the shooting in Seattle managed to knock the previous day’s shooting in Hawaii off the top spot on every network news website. But I suspect that without the subsequent manhunt and school lockdowns, Seattle’s shooting wouldn’t have captured the attention of national evening news anchors. Only four shot? Two dead? That’s local news, “routine” gun violence. Manhunts, school lockdowns? That’s sexy.

  Now, the next time “it” happens, Seattle will be added to the list of cities that have hosted a mass shooting. Seattle is on the map now—literally. After the next big mass shooting, Seattle will have the honor of appearing on one of those four-color “mass shooting” maps on the cover of USA Today.

  There’s no question that shutting the garage door was my job—all the dirty work is my job. When a rat died in the crawl space under the living room, Terry handed me a flashlight and a pair of rubber gloves. This time, Terry handed me a flashlight, picked up D.J., and—using caution—returned to the living room. Dead rats and live murderers are my job, Terry feels.

  As I approached the garage, I thought to myself, “We should really call the cops.” What kind of idiot points a flashlight into a dark garage and says “Hello?” when there’s an armed murderer somewhere in the neighborhood? But I calmed myself and kept walking, telling myself that (A) nothing interesting ever happens to me, so I’m unlikely to be victim No. 5; and (B) since it’s already occurred to me that the shooter could be in our garage, he won’t be in our garage.

  There are only ten steps from the back porch of our house to the garage door, but I took the scenic route, circling around to the side of the garage with a broken window. If the shooter wanted to run away, I didn’t want to be blocking the door.

  Standing to the side, I reached up and pointed the flashlight into the garage.

  “Anybody in there?” I called out, trying to sound tough without sounding cop-tough. There was no sound, though, and no shots. I walked around to the door, slowly opened it with my foot, and stepped inside. Nothing. Only when the garage door was padlocked and I was heading back to the house did I realize how fast my heart was beating.

  Later that night, with the shooter still at large, a local TV anchorwoman clucked her tongue, shook her empty head, and said, “Who would have thought something like this could happen right here, in Seattle?” I wanted to shoot my television set. How could it not happen here?

  With so many guns, so many nuts, and so many spineless politicians taking orders from the National Rifle Association, it’s really only a matter of time before “it” will happen in every city in the United States. So common is gun violence that “routine” shootings don’t even make the news anymore. Terry has been robbed at gunpoint, so has my older brother; a good friend of my sister’s was standing on a street corner in Chicago with his fiancée when he was shot dead by gangbangers; a friend of my family was shot and killed on a subway platform. None of these events made the news.

  Sadly, when the latest mass shooting is pointed to as evidence that we need tough national gun control laws, professional gun huggers and their congressional apologists cry foul, accusing gun control advocates of exploiting a tragedy. There’s a difference, however, between exploiting a tragedy and learning from it.

  When a plane drops out of the sky, we search for the cause and pass laws, if needed, to prevent similar tragedies in the future. Why have we not done the same with guns? To declare the scalding proof that we need tough gun control laws off-limits when discussing gun control—and the evidence builds with each new mass shooting—makes about as much sense as declaring the crash of EgyptAir’s Flight 990 off-limits during a discussion of airline safety.

  So, another day, another mass shooting. It’s happened again. And it’s going to keep happening until we work up the courage to do something about it.

  Here’s the sad truth. I wrote that piece, the one you just read, thirteen years ago, in November of 1999. Our country has experienced a deadly mass shooting every year—scratch that: nearly every fiscal quarter—since then. The most recent, most deadly, and perhaps most tragic (if there’s a contest for things like that) took place late last year, in Newtown, Connecticut, where a twenty-year-old walked into an elementary school and killed twenty first graders and six adults. As a nation, we hadn’t even recovered from the shock of a mass shooting in a mall outside of Portland, Oregon, packed with
Christmas shoppers, when the Newtown shooting occurred. And as I write this the trial of another mass shooter is playing out in a Denver courtroom, that of James Holmes, the Aurora movie-theater killer.

  Shortly after Newtown, Newark mayor Cory Booker called the gun control argument raging in the country (yet again) “a false debate,” arguing that there are provisions we can put in place right now, provisions we can all agree on, to make the nation safer. “Most of us in America, including gun owners, agree on things that would stop the kind of carnage that’s going on in cities all over America,” Booker stated, adding, “I’m tired of the political debates. They’re not necessary. I’m tired of the ideological positions. We don’t even need to visit them. Let’s stick to the pragmatic center where all Americans believe the same thing and let’s pass legislation that would make America safer.”

  Booker’s “pragmatic center” consists of background checks and closing down secondary gun markets, a common means for illegally acquiring firearms. But the guy who killed all those kids in Newtown used his mother’s gun, which his mother acquired legally, and the guy who shot the holiday shoppers in Clackamas Town Center outside of Portland, Oregon, stole the gun from someone he knew who had apparently acquired it legally. The guy on trial now for killing all of those people in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, bought his small arsenal (four guns, thousands of bullets, and explosive chemicals) legally from three different stores in the Denver area.

  Mandating background checks and shutting down secondary gun markets won’t solve the problem.

  So what is the problem? The defunded mental health system in the United States? The culture of violence so prevalent in the digital media targeted at young boys and men? The fact that on any given day you can buy a small arsenal legally in most places in America? A paranoid, gun-crazed country, hell-bent on protecting itself from invisible dangers lurking around every corner or garage door? (What if I owned a gun? What if there was someone in our garage that day—not the killer, but maybe a homeless person who’d ducked in to get out of the rain or a couple of high school students who needed a private place to get high? What if they had come toward the door, in the dark, and I shot them in a moment of panic?)

  Scholars, gun advocates, and gun control advocates have argued for decades about what the founding fathers had in mind when they wrote the Second Amendment. A citizen army—the number of professional soldiers in 1791 was not large—that could come to the aid of the government? Or an armed citizenry empowered to protect itself from a tyrannical government? Or was it simply an American extension of English law at the time, where gun ownership was viewed as a natural right?

  In a New Yorker blog post three months before the Aurora shooting, in April of 2012, Jill Lepore, writing about the history of the Second Amendment, quoted a response to a 2008 Supreme Court case (District of Columbia et al. v. Heller) signed by fifteen eminent university professors of early American history:

  Historians are often asked what the Founders would think about various aspects of contemporary life. Such questions can be tricky to answer. But as historians of the Revolutionary era we are confident at least of this: that the authors of the Second Amendment would be flabbergasted to learn that in endorsing the republican principle of a well-regulated militia, they were also precluding restrictions on such potentially dangerous property as firearms, which governments had always regulated when there was “real danger of public injury from individuals.”

  I’m not a Revolutionary-era historian, but I don’t think what we have today is what the founding fathers had in mind either. I don’t think they believed Americans should have essentially unregulated access to military-grade weaponry. Lepore writes, “The United States has the highest rate of civilian gun ownership in the world, twice that of the country with the second highest rate, which is Yemen. The United States also has the highest homicide rate of any affluent democracy, nearly four times higher than France or the United Kingdom, six times higher than Germany. In the United States in 2008, guns were involved in two-thirds of all murders. Of interest to many people concerned about these matters, then, is when the debate over the Second Amendment will yield to a debate about violence.”

  But every time there’s a shooting—every time the debate begins—the NRA and gun nuts in private and public life tell us that now is not the time to have a debate about guns or the violence guns facilitate.1

  “If roads were collapsing all across the United States, killing dozens of drivers, we would surely see that as a moment to talk about what we could do to keep roads from collapsing,” Ezra Klein wrote for The Washington Post after the Newtown shooting. “If terrorists were detonating bombs in port after port, you can be sure Congress would be working to upgrade the nation’s security measures…. Only with gun violence do we respond to repeated tragedies by saying that mourning is acceptable but discussing how to prevent more tragedies is not. ‘Too soon,’ howl supporters of loose gun laws. But as others have observed, talking about how to stop mass shootings in the aftermath of a string of mass shootings isn’t ‘too soon.’ It’s much too late.”

  So let’s talk about guns.

  But for starters, how about a few precautions from America’s “pragmatic center,” as Mayor Booker calls it. How about an assault weapons ban? How about a ban on high-capacity ammunition magazines? How about a ban on unrestricted and unregulated gun-show purchases? How about some more money for mental health services? How about that for a start?

  And that’s basically what the White House, in the wake of the most recent mass shooting, proposed while they still had the national will on their side. Of course, the House of Representatives is still held hostage by the NRA, so the chances of any of these pragmatic ideas making it through the congressional gauntlet are slim.

  Vice President Biden “is seriously considering measures backed by key law enforcement leaders that would require universal background checks for firearm buyers, track the movement and sale of weapons through a national database, strengthen mental health checks, and stiffen penalties for carrying guns near schools or giving them to minors,” The Washington Post reported in January of 2013.

  Isn’t it ironic that the one group who has control over our nation’s gun laws and refuses to make any provisions to potentially make its citizens safer is the one group that enjoys the benefits of unqualified gun control?

  You can’t carry a gun into the US Capitol—and there are metal detectors and guards at every entrance to make sure you don’t try. Your congressperson enjoys a safe workplace. Yet members of Congress in both parties have worked hard to make sure your workplace is more dangerous. The Second Amendment—the NRA and its elected accomplices insist—gives people a constitutional right to carry guns into your workplace but not their workplace. It seems to me that members of Congress should have to live and work under the same threat of random gun violence that the rest of us do. If our elected officials believe it should be legal for Americans to carry concealed weapons into schools, churches, shopping malls, and offices buildings, it should be legal for Americans to carry concealed weapons into the US Capitol Building.

  Fair is fair.

  Or, on second thought, maybe we should just do what comedian Chris Rock proposes: Let’s raise the price of bullets. If every bullet costs 5,000 dollars, we’d surely eliminate a lot of innocent bystander deaths, and probably the demand for high-capacity magazines and automatic weapons as well.

  Until we do that—until we do something—it will keep happening.

  1 One of the arguments that gun nuts make: There are too many guns out there already—more than three hundred million in private hands in the United States—so there’s no point enacting gun control regulations now. New regulations won’t stop the violence. It’s like an arsonist telling you not to bother calling the fire department. It’s too late—he already set your house on fire, there’s nothing you can do about it now.

  17. Bigot Christmas

  It’s Christmas in August.”
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  Terry was standing in our dining room, glaring at me as he wrapped the cord around the vacuum cleaner. He had just finished vacuuming the intricately carved legs of our massive old dining room table, a chore normally performed once a year, right before Christmas. But from the look on his face I could tell he wasn’t feeling festive. He looked like he’d rather be wrapping that cord around my neck.

  “You owe me for this,” he said. “A week in Hawaii. Two weeks in Hawaii.”

  We were cleaning the house like Christmas was coming. We were cleaning the house like family and friends were about to arrive.1 Every square inch of carpet had been vacuumed; every last tchotchke had been dusted. Mail that had stacked up on the kitchen counter over the summer had been sorted and either recycled or filed; the books and musical instruments and board games that accumulate on and around every piece of furniture in our house had been returned to the shelves and closets they were pulled from days, weeks, or months before. But Santa Claus wasn’t coming to town.

  Brian Brown was coming to dinner.

  Brown is the head of the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), the most prominent, most militant, and most malignant organization fighting marriage equality in the United States. NOM, like the Family Research Council and Americans for Truth About Homosexuality, was designated an anti-gay group by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2010. Cofounded by Maggie Gallagher in 2007, NOM fights against equal marriage rights for same-sex couples. That’s all NOM does. Its sole purpose is to make sure that fewer couples marry. While Gallagher and Brown argue that they oppose same-sex marriage because “every child deserves a mother and a father,” and while they claim to be concerned about fatherlessness, and while they cite studies that demonstrate the vulnerability of children from broken homes to justify their opposition to same-sex marriage, NOM doesn’t work to strengthen existing marriages; it doesn’t fight no-fault divorce laws; it hasn’t proposed a lifetime limit on the numbers of marriages a straight person can have. (Hasn’t Newt Gingrich done enough damage to the institution?)