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Richard S. Beam

44 Halloween 2015

10/22/2015

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It’s getting to be the Halloween season, with lots of “scary” stuff in the stores; “haunted” houses and cornfields all over the place; costumes and masks of all types being sold everywhere; many houses being decorated up for the occasion (not as many as at Christmas, but a lot, at least around here); seasonal movies and “specials” on television and candy being pushed in stores harder than one would think possible.
 
I LOVE Halloween!  I always have, while I’m not heavily into blood and guts (even pretend), I’ve always liked the tradition of dressing up and going “trick or treating.”  As I got older, the costume party always seemed like a lot of fun.  And, as I got older yet, I realized that I got a big kick out of seeing little kids in their costumes or going out with my kids to collect their “loot.”  I just think it’s a lot of fun.
 
The idea of a seasonal festival at the end of the harvest or the beginning of winter is common to most societies and many religious traditions.  It is/was widely accepted in many belief systems that this time of year brought the world of the living in closest contact with that of the deceased, so it is/was also widely used as a time for remembering ones’ ancestors.  I rather like that idea, too.  Just as what has become Thanksgiving is a time to be thankful for the blessings of life, the idea of taking a bit of time to think about those who came before us doesn’t seem like it hurts anything.
 
Of course, in relatively recent times, certain groups of religious fanatics have decided that since the Halloween/Samhain tradition has origins in pagan belief, it’s the “Devil’s Night” and recognition of it is a form of satanic “Devil Worship,” requiring “anti-Halloween” (CHRISTIAN!) festivals, etc., to combat the “satanic” practice of putting on costumes and collecting candy door to door.  In fact, I strongly suspect that very few, if any, of these people are aware that the Roman Catholic Church (back in the days when it was the ONLY Christian church [pre-Reformation]) established All Saint’s (Hallow’s) Day as the first of November, so Halloween is actually “All Hallow’s Eve” (the eve of All Hallow’s Day). 
 
I’m also pretty sure that the church created this celebration on this particular date in an attempt to “christianize” the earlier, pagan, harvest/ancestor celebrations.  On the other hand, the Church did that with a lot of other celebrations, as well.  After all, the Romans were NOT stupid enough to schedule a census of Judea which required everyone to go to their place of birth in the middle of the winter when travel was the most difficult.  No, the Church placed the birth of Jesus near the midwinter solstice much later in an attempt to combat traditional Yule celebrations, as they moved Christianity throughout Europe.  Even Easter has many associations with pagan spring festivals, although most of us only associate it with the Jewish Passover and/or the Passion of Jesus.
 
I suspect that the widespread use of witch costumes and thinking about magic as a part of Halloween are (at least in part) responsible for the notion that Halloween is really all about worshiping the Devil, in spite of the fact that devil worship is not a requirement for “witchcraft” and the “wise old man or woman” was/is a significant part of many traditional cultures as healers and the like.  I suppose that the idea is based on the notion that we “good” people worship the proper sort of deity and have the “correct” sort of beliefs, so there must be “bad” people who worship the wrong sort and this is an easy group to mark as “bad,” since they seem to have knowledge which is not necessarily available through our religious teachings.  There’s nothing very profound about that idea.  It’s been around a long time.  After all, religions (at least every one I can think of) are based on the idea that “we” (the adherents of the “true” faith) are RIGHT and everybody else is wrong, so, if they don’t appear to be strict followers of the “correct” belief system, they must be “bad.” 
 
Certainly my ancestors who came over on the Mayflower and lived in the Massachusetts Bay area in 1692 would NOT have approved of the Halloween celebrations which are now a major tourist feature of modern Salem, MA (“The Witch City”).  It is also true that the New England Puritans didn’t seem to find much of anything worthy of a celebration.  That sort of thing was “frivolous” and not worthy of the Chosen people, so they didn’t celebrate Christmas, or Easter, either.  They were perfectly happy to take steps to try to make sure that the Devil wouldn’t get a foothold in their community, however, so they hanged my ancestor, Martha Carrier, and eighteen others and tortured another person to death, while seven died in jail and about 150 more were accused of practicing “witchcraft.”  Obviously, the colonists were VERY concerned about the devil being so well entrenched against them.  Eventually, the conclusion was reached that the entire “Witch Trial” episode was a mistake: that none of the dead were actually guilty of any crime, official apologies were made, and a pittance was paid to the families of at least some of the victims.  To those of us who had ancestors killed, however, it seems a bit too little and rather late.
 
“Magic” is more complicated in that it clearly must be the devil’s work (since we can’t really explain it), except when it’s a “miracle” in which case it’s okay (?).  So turning water into wine, or unleavened bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ is okay, but turning water into rum, as Seamus Finnigan tries to do in the movie of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone or healing the sick with various folk remedies, is clearly the work of the devil.  Just the fact that many of the Harry Potter characters are described as witches and wizards and engaging in “magic,” justifies to some the censorship of these books, in spite of the rather obvious Christ-like qualities of Harry’s character and sacrifice and the obvious evil of Voldemort’s ideas and followers.  I’m afraid that I just don’t get the logic of this sort of prejudice.  But, I’m not a “born again, true believer,” so I guess I’m clearly not qualified to have an opinion….
 
The facts seem pretty simple to me.  Many celebrations and ideas, which MAY have had a religious basis, or may have acquired one along the way, have become so widespread as to have lost specific, exclusive contact with those religious roots. In fact, those roots were often complicated by historical changes in religious practices so that they have, at least in significant part, become secular, social celebrations. 
 
I’m not going to get into whether this is a good thing, or not, but the “Jesus is the reason for the season” fanatics who show up every year (recently) objecting to “Season’s Greetings” and “Happy Holidays” from merchants seem to be woefully out of touch with the reality that their version of Christianity is not, in fact, the dominant religion of the world, nor is the Nativity, which was moved to this time of year by the Church in an attempt to minimize pagan celebrations the only religiously oriented celebration of this time of year.  It’s often struck me as amusing, for example, that we still speak of having a “Yule log” during the holiday season, but most people don’t seem to know that Yule is an indigenous, Germanic midwinter festival, so it’s a pagan practice.
 
Personally, I’d suggest that if one wishes to emphasize the religious aspects of various celebrations, that’s fine; provided that one accepts that their personal beliefs are not likely to be accepted by the rest of the world as dominant “truths,” so others are going to treat these same occasions differently, and some are going to make them completely secular.
 
So, if it makes you happy, you are welcome to hide under the bed while witches rule and the spirits are abroad.  (Anybody remember Dickens’ A Christmas Carol?  Now there’s a case of scary spirits abroad in the night, but that’s not Halloween, so it doesn’t count, I guess.)  If that doesn’t make you happy: put on a costume; stick a candle in a pumpkin (historically, it should be a large turnip); dress up your home with spiders, witches, monsters, etc.; have a party, celebrate the season with your kids and friends.  Remember, as Orson Welles said at the end of his famous radio broadcast in 1938: “So goodbye everybody, and remember the terrible lesson you learned tonight.  That grinning, glowing, globular invader of your living room is an inhabitant of the pumpkin patch, and if your doorbell rings and nobody's there, that was no Martian. . .it's Halloween.”
 
LLAP

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​#43       Shows I’ve Recently Seen, Part 2

10/15/2015

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​Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been to three productions here in the Omaha area by a wide variety of groups.  One was a community theatre with an established reputation and a pretty complete paid staff; the second was the theatre group at a small (1300 students), private liberal arts college about 25 miles from downtown Omaha; and the third was the Nebraska Shakespeare Festival, a non-profit, professional company   All were enjoyable, although for a variety of reasons, so I though I’d write a bit about what I really liked about them, as well as touch on those aspects which might have been improved a bit, at least in my opinion.
 
The first production I went to was the Omaha Community Playhouse performance of The Man of La Mancha.  As I commented in post #41, this is a show I know pretty well, although it’s been many years since I was involved in the production at Western.  I may have read through the script once, or twice, and I MAY have seen the movie, but I have no recollection of having done so and I think I would have remembered it.  I suspect that a movie version of this script would be a bit too “real” to suit me, as the whole point is that the performance is a theatrical piece conjured up in the prison as part of Cervantes’ “defense” of his possessions from confiscation by the other prisoners.  VERY few movies I have ever seen can capture the same sense of “make believe” that it’s easy to establish on the stage, so I would not have been (I’m still not) enthusiastic about a cinematic version, but that’s beside the point.
 
First, I have to confess (yet again) that I love this show!  It has the kind of romantic appeal that I have always fallen for and if it’s done at all competently, I’m a sucker for the “schmaltz” of the show.  It’s a bit like The Fantasticks, another show that is virtually guaranteed to get me going, if it’s done with even marginal competence.  That being said, obviously I enjoyed the performance a great deal, cried at the appropriate moments, laughed a fair amount and had a thoroughly good time. 
 
The acting was pretty nicely done in almost all cases.  I was quite pleased with the “horses” (quite well done as puppet horse heads).  The set was rather unexciting (how easy is it to make a 16th Century Spanish prison exciting?), but worked quite well for the purposes of the show (in spite of the sound effect for the drawbridge stairs being consistently badly timed).  The lighting didn’t seem to bring as much excitement and change of location to the stage picture as I would have expected (it seemed a bit drab and underdone, lacking the contrasts which would have been helpful, I thought.  The costumes (for the most part) seemed a bit more understated that I thought was necessary.  The show just seemed to lack some visual excitement.  Even the “Knight of the Mirrors” sequence didn’t seem quite “over the top” enough visually to suit me.
 
Vocally, a number of the performers weren’t as effective as they might have been.  They were never what I would call bad, but (to my ear) some of them had some problems hitting all of the notes consistently, while others suffered (in my opinion) from sounding overly trained.  Musical theatre is rarely operatic (it CAN be, but it usually isn’t), so focusing too much on showing off a highly trained voice doesn’t necessarily work with all of this music.  To my ear, Aldonza/Dulcinea seemed to have this problem a bit, while Cervantes/Quixote had trouble with some pitches.  That weakened an otherwise pretty good production a bit, but I still enjoyed it a lot.  I said in post #41 that I was curious how they were going to handle the Aldonza “rape” scene.  In the script, this scene is described: “… with methodical, ritualistic brutality, in choreographic staging the MULETEERS bind, gag, beat and ravage ALDONZA.”  It just didn’t really work for me.  Now Maggi & Bonnie said that they thought the general idea came across pretty well, so perhaps I’m being too critical, but I never really felt the sense of violence and violation which I seem to remember from the Western production, and which I think is important in a piece which contrasts romantic, ideal dreams with ugly, violent “real” life.  I just felt that the contrasts could be stronger and clearer and that this is was one place which could have been a good deal stronger.
 
Still, I had a good time and I’m glad we went.  Of course, it would be rare for me NOT to have a good time in the theatre, but I really did have a good time with this, in spite of my criticisms.
 
In the program for The Man of La Mancha was an ad for the theatre season at Midland University, which is located in Fremont, about 40 minutes from our house in Omaha.  As they were running Simon’s The Good Doctor the second weekend in October and since neither Bonnie nor I have ever seen the show, we figured we’d go.  After all, Fremont is closer than Ashville used to be and we used to go up there with some frequency.  I did a little research and discovered that Midland is a private, Lutheran college of about 1300 students which seems to put considerable emphasis on the arts, although, other than a Music Ed. degree, it only offers an Arts Management degree with emphasis on theatre, dance, music performance and “technical” arts (what I’d call stagecraft).  I confess that I became quite curious as to what a school of this size, and without a major could do.  I also don’t remember ever actually seeing The Good Doctor before, although I think it was done at Western at some point.  Perhaps it was while I was doing my doctoral coursework in the mid 1970’s?  I know I’ve see the piece called “The Audition” somewhere (perhaps in observing an acting class, or as part of somebody’s BFA thesis recital?).  In any event, I have no recollection of seeing even this piece in an actual performance.  I do remember that I enjoyed it, however. My only sense of the show was that of having some, very general background about these being stories by Chekhov, assembled and “framed” by Neil Simon in 1974, which would mean that Western having done in while I was doing my course work is entirely plausible.
 
So, having seen The Man of La Mancha at the OCP on Sunday, Bonnie and I went to the Midland production of The Good Doctor on Friday evening.  I think it’s fair to say that we both enjoyed it a lot.  (Again, this COULD be partially true to the sheer novelty of actually going to the theatre together as civilians; something which was not true for much of our life together.)  Midland has what appears to be a really very nice theatre space.  They also have some sort of “Auditorium” space, although we couldn’t get into it, so I don’t know if it’s bigger, or smaller than the theatre.  I would guess that the theatre seats about 250-300 (?).  It definitely felt bigger than the Niggli, but not as big as Hoey.  It was a VERY nice space, however, well finished, well maintained, with an intimate feel, but big enough to do a great variety of productions and production styles.
One criticism which I had was that there did not seem to be an overly generous inventory of lighting instruments.  As a result, I did not find the lighting more than minimally adequate, most of the time, and the actors did not seem well coached in staying “in their light,” which didn’t help.  Costumes were fairly basic (I confess that I became rather spoiled working with Susan and Tony, so my expectations are high), but Western’s program IS a good deal larger (after all, Western is a good deal larger) so I shouldn’t be overly critical.  The costumes did work, although they could have been stronger.  The sets also worked, actually fairly cleverly, although I do think that even I could teach them something about scene painting.  As I have never considered myself much of a painter, the low caliber of painting was something of a disappointment.
 
The acting was pretty much what one might expect from a small, college production.  Some was actually pretty good, while much was only adequate.  The Girl in “The Audition” was really quite good, I thought, but she did seem to stand out a bit.  Of course, every speaking character was played by a different performer, which I believe is fairly common practice in a community or school situation.  (On Broadway, the cast of three men and two women played everything, which is quite another set of challenges.)  Still, I noticed no major “fluffs” and the show ran pretty smoothly and was reasonably, if not brilliantly, performed.  I think one of the most exciting things about the production was the sense that, in large part, the students were doing it because they wanted to do it, not because it was a “crucial part of their professional preparation.”  It took me back a bit to earlier days at Western when the Little Theatre/University Players actively encouraged truly open auditions and campus wide student participation.  I found it refreshing not to sense an overwhelming sense of “professionalism,” and a considerable sense of “Let’s do a show and have some fun.”  All things considered, not a GREAT theatre experience, but one which was fun, less expensive than many in the area and which we enjoyed a good deal.  If the weather isn’t awful, we may very well go back for their production of Quilters at the end of January.
 
Then, early in the evening of the following Sunday, the Nebraska Shakespeare Festival was performing their touring production of As You Like It at Creighton University, one of Omaha’s several colleges.  As most of the performances are for schools, etc., and so are not open to the public, this was about the only chance I had to seen this 75 minute version, and the first chance I had had to see anything by Neb Shakes.  Yes, we COULD have gone to one of their “Shakespeare on the Green” performances last summer, but that just didn’t work out this year.
 
Anyway, I was generally quite surprised at how well this rather severe adaptation worked having a cast of only four men and four women (which, obviously, required a large amount of doubling, so only Rosalind and Celia didn’t play two roles, and there was a LOT of cutting, etc.  Still, the production hung together pretty well.  The folks seemed to know their words, to understand them, and to communicate them pretty successfully.  While I don’t know as I’d say anyone was “brilliant,” no one was bad and the show was successful as a version of Shakespeare’s story.  I would call it a reasonable success, and I intend to make greater efforts to seem the Nebraska Shakespeare shows next summer.
 
Directorially, I have some concerns about some aspects of the production, which I didn’t find necessary and had to question.  In the “Director’s Note,” the director says that:
 
               This production of As You Like It will focus on Shakespeare’s greatest female
               protagonists, Rosalind and Celia, who, in an attempt to overcome great loss,
               depend on true friendship in a search for love.  Confined within the rigid structure
               of a 1930’s private boarding school, Rosalind and Celia, raised as sisters, depend
               exclusively on one another for counsel and companionship.  When their
               relationship is threatened, the courageous women rebel against all they have
               ever know and strike out into the Forest of Arden, an unpredictable and magical
               place influenced by Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.
 
Now, I didn’t find all of this particularly distracting, but I failed to find it in any way adding anything to the script.  First, I believe that Celia is usually looked upon (perhaps unfortunately) as a definite second fiddle to Rosalind as a major character, so dividing the famous epilogue between the two of them bothered me a bit.  Of course, the epilogue has lost a bit of its humor since we started having women play women’s role, but that’s pretty subtle for most people.  The “boarding school” idea wasn’t awful (it probably simplified costumes a bit and made clear who were supposed to be “school age” and who weren’t), but I think it served more to suppress the idea of the play happening at a “court” and to lead to some possible confusion about what’s going on.  Somehow, the “Forest of Arden” as “Wonderland” does make a certain amount of sense, although the intrusion of 1865 era ideas into a show with 1930’sish costumes, which was written in 1599 (see Shapiro’s 1599) seems to me to just confuse things a good deal more, especially when the only Alice references I got was that Duke Senior was wearing a Nineteenth Century hat with a tag marked “10/6” tucked in the ribbon and that one of the scenes was vaguely reminiscent of the “Mad Tea Party.” 
 
All things considered, the concept just seemed a bit “too cute” for its own good, but not as intrusive as UNOmaha’s production of the same play last spring which set the play in Pre-Revolutionary Russia for no reason I could discern.  In both cases, I kept waiting for what D.V. Caitlin used to call the “and.”  I just never could figure out what this interpretational concept added to an understanding Shakespeare’s play.  Both just ended up as seeming a bit overly clever for the sake of cleverness.  Now, I’ve got nothing against cleverness, but I think there should be some connection to the ideas of the script.  In this case, while I’m still looking forward to seeing more from Nebraska Shakes, I think they were just a bit too caught up in the idea of being “cute,” and not enough with telling Shakespeare’s story, especially since most of the tour is to schools.  I’m glad to have seen this production, and the execution was pretty good, but I was not overly impressed with the approach.
 
Overall, I think its been a pretty good couple of weeks for Omaha area theatre.  Am I “picky” enough to wish for stronger productions?  Yes, but I did have a good time seeing these and I do look forward to more.  When I do, I’ll probably comment on them, as well.
 
LLAP
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42 I Just Don't Understand! (Part 2)

10/7/2015

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With the recent shooting incident at Umpqua Community College, we have entered into yet another round of debate about why such incidents happen with greater frequency in the U.S.A. than in other developed countries and what, if anything, can (or should) be done to change this.  On the one hand, we have some folks suggesting that we need more laws regulating the sale, ownership, and/or access to guns, while on the other one, we have folks suggesting that the problem has more to do with mental illness and little, or nothing to do with the prevalence of guns in our society.  I confess that I am discouraged as to why it is so impossible for people to stop yelling formulaic slogans at each other long enough to actually acknowledge that there does seem to be some sort of a problem and to see if there are reasonable steps which can be taken which would at least reduce the chance of this sort of thing happening quite so frequently.  Let’s review the situation…
 
It does seem to me that, as a nation, we are awash with weaponry of many types.  Apart from cars (which also are involved with people dying) and kitchen knives (which CAN kill, in spite of their other uses), I suspect that guns are, by far, the most common type of weapon.  There was, in fact, enough concern about the necessity of the people to have weaponry available for their defense that the idea was encoded in the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution as: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”  There is historic precedent for this idea dating back to English law before the United States existed, so this idea was, apparently, a source of concern at the founding of our nation.  Of course, there are those who point out that this appears to be referring to the idea of the people having the right to form a “milita” for their common defense, so they question whether this right was truly intended to apply to an individual.  The courts, however, have decided that this right DOES apply to individuals, so that there is an individual right to own guns for personal protection, hunting and other sports, etc.
 
Of course, even such a conservative Justice as Antonin Scalia wrote in the majority opinion in the case of District of Columbia v. Heller in 2008:
 
Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited.  It is not a
right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever
and for whatever purpose: For example, concealed weapons prohibitions
have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues.  The Court’s
opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on
the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding
the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government
buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial
sale of arms.
 
Thus, there seems to be legal precedent that gun ownership and use CAN, and, perhaps, should be, regulated in some cases.
 
When we have another example of what has become known as a “school shooting,” we find a fair number of people suggesting that we have laws against the improper use of firearms, just as we have plenty of laws intended to keep guns from the mentally ill, so all that we really need is better enforcement of the laws we have.  Or, another notion I’ve heard is that we should make it easier for more people to have and carry guns so they can defend the rest of us.  I suppose there might be some merit to the notion that “an armed society is a polite society.”  But, I don’t understand how that contributes to keeping guns out of the hands of those whom everybody agrees shouldn’t have them, or how it prevents an “irresponsible” gun owner from getting high, angry, etc., and deciding to “settle things” with his gun, or from mistakenly shooting the someone who seems to be “behaving suspiciously” in the middle of the night when “I heard a funny sound and looked out the window.”
 
While conceding the idea that there is, and probably should be, a right to self-protection, the statistics I’ve seen suggest that all too many homeowners are killed by their own guns when they drag them out “for self-protection” and have them taken away (and used against them) by the “bad guy.”  I also wonder what it would be like to be a SWAT team member (to say nothing of just being a beat cop) who shows up at a “situation” (be it a private home, a fight at a bar, or a school shooting) to discover a person (or persons) waving gun(s) around when they can have no idea who is who and what is what.  I don’t know how they are trained, but my reaction would probably be to demand instant obedience of anyone I saw with a gun to stop and put the gun down.  And, I would be likely to rather quickly “put down” anyone who didn’t obey immediately or who turned their weapon towards me.  Even SWAT members really don’t wish to be shot because somebody was waving a gun around, regardless of that persons purpose.  At a school shooting, one might be able to tell that the people wearing uniforms are most likely “good” guys, but I don’t know of anyone who wears a jacket with “I am a trained, licensed gun owner with a concealed carry permit, which is why I have a gun” printed on it when they are “carrying” and I don’t really expect to.  What’s a cop to do?
 
I’ve also heard it suggested that teachers should be trained and issued guns, so that they can “defend” their students, but, of course, those weapons should be locked up so that the students can’t use them by mistake.  If they are locked up, they aren’t really very accessible, and I think a lot of people would be concerned about teachers being required to wear sidearms to teach First Grade.  That suggests, at least to me, that “SWAT training for teachers” is NOT going to be a required course in Colleges of Education any time soon.

Another argument I have heard against gun regulation is that we have plenty of laws and regulations intended to prevent people from improper (impaired or just dangerous) driving, but we have not stopped the carnage on our highways, so the idea of regulating our way to a better world is futile. 

I don’t think so….  According to an NIH report last updated in 2010, “In the mid 1970s, alcohol was a factor in over 60% of traffic fatalities.  Traffic crashes were the leading cause of alcohol-related deaths and two-thirds of traffic deaths among persons aged 16 to 20 involved alcohol.”  Later, the report says, “Since the early 1980s, alcohol-related traffic deaths per population have been cut in half with the greatest proportional declines among persons 16-20 years old.” and “Today (2010) alcohol is involved in 37% of all traffic deaths among persons aged 16 to 20.”  Even without exact numbers, that sounds like some improvement, and I would suggest that any improvement is, in fact, improvement.  We are probably never going to solve all of the problems of the world, nor eliminate traffic, or gun, deaths.  But, is that a reason to try to make them fewer?

I find the traffic statistics interesting because when I was growing up back in the 1950s and 60s, cars were much more of a symbol of masculine ego than they appear to be today (which is not to say that that appeal has disappeared).  Back then, of course it was the “hot rod” (talk about your phallic symbol) or the “muscle car” that demonstrated your virility.  It was even widely discussed in advertising (so I have read) that the “hardtop convertible” was invented (about 1950, I think) because men WANTED the sex appeal of a convertible, but a sedan was more practical for a family.  So, the hardtop was created as a compromise (sort of like having a mistress in addition to a wife).  This was also the time when NASCAR was starting to achieve national prominence, as was drag racing.  Sexy, desirable men (it WAS a “guy” thing, primarily, but the use of guns seems to be mostly a “guy” thing, as well.) had fast, powerful cars and used them to “prove” that they were sexy and desirable.  I have heard some say that gun ownership has moved to become a part of the same sort of idea today.  Having fancy, powerful, preferably “military-style” weapons, big magazines (another blatantly phallic image) etc., seems to be viewed as “proof” that one is a confident, powerful, Alpha Male.

Okay, that’s enough armchair psychology, which may, or may not have any real accuracy.  Still, no one (to the best of my knowledge) has launched major protests because in order to drive a car (of any type) one is required to get some, minimal training, to pass a test, to be licensed and to have insurance.  Simple ownership of a car, requires that you have it licensed in the state of residence and pay a tax on it as personal property.  Some local communities also require licensing and some states or communities require frequent tests for safety and/or environmental concerns.  That seems like a lot of regulation to me and it certainly establishes the idea that the state knows that you own a car and that (in order to keep it) you must pay annual fees, taxes, insurance costs, etc.  Why does that not upset gun owners?

What is it about gun ownership that demands that it be largely unrestricted, unregistered, unlicensed, and, at least potentially, untrained?  I find it hard to believe that we all emerged from the womb knowing everything we might need to know about weapon use.  I’m not against gun ownership.  I had a .22 when I was a teenager which I used for target practice on a licensed range and I enjoyed it.  I don’t, personally, sympathize with hunters a lot, but I can grant that some people seem to enjoy that, even if they don’t hunt for purposes of food.  (I’ve never really understood the idea of “trophy” hunting, or fishing, either, but that’s a different story.)

Still, I find it hard to understand why someone needs an AK-47 with a 30 round banana clip to go hunting (which I think it would be illegal in any event, but I’m not that familiar with gun or hunting laws).  The NRA seems very worried that if the government knows that you have a gun (i.e. it’s registered), then the government will want to take it away from you.  I just don’t understand that idea.  I’ve never heard of that happening to anyone who was legally entitled to own a gun, and I don’t see “the government boogy man” taking cars away from people without due process, although they can revoke the “privilege” of driving for a variety of crimes, just as ones right to legally “bear arms” can be revoked for various reasons.  The NRA talks a lot about the idea that “responsible gun owners” would be the only ones to suffer from having background checks, etc. to buy a gun.  How so?  A truly “responsible” person should always be able to pass a background check, although it might delay possession of a new gun for a few days.  On the other hand, shouldn’t (isn’t) being in possession of an improperly obtained, or illegal, weapon be a violation of law?  I hear of “weapons violations” on the news every so often.  Does that suggest that the government should have the ability to identify people who shouldn’t have guns before they can purchase one?  At the moment, those people can avoid having their legal ability to own guns checked by just buying them at gun shows, when they don’t just steal them from some “responsible” person!

I’m really not against gun ownership.  If that’s what turns you on, so be it.  I am concerned about the idea that having a gun for personal protection (at home, work, or in a school) requires having loaded weapons sitting around, easily accessible (where the wrong people [including kids] could get their hands on them) or they can’t really be available for “protection.”  It seems to me that requiring the same sorts of precautions we have for driving (at least minimal training and licensing, as well as insurance and appropriate checks on their legal status) isn’t unreasonable, if one really wants to limit guns to “responsible” people.  I’ll admit that we haven’t really done a super good job with driver training, etc., but ANY improvement would seem better than none). 

I’ve tried to understand the sort of paranoia which says that largely unrestricted gun ownership makes me, my loved ones, and my society safer and better, but I can’t figure it out.  Perhaps someone can explain it to me?  I’d really like to know.  I just don’t understand….
 
LLAP
 
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    Just personal comments about things which interest me (and might interest others).

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