CT Blue

It seems that the folks in Burkesville, Kentucky feel unfairly put upon. Some people don’t understand why they feel perfectly comfortable giving real guns to five year olds, or why they can’t see how a parent that leaves such a loaded gun available for said five year old to shoot his 2 year old sister might have some responsibility for said shooting. Certainly more responsibility, I would argue, than the five year old, who may go to his grave with a load of guilt for an act of which he only dimly understood the consequences.

After all, they say, giving guns to kids is part of their “way of life” and therefore we should give them a free pass. All over the world this excuse is used to defend the inexcusably stupid, barbaric, or unjust. Everything from cannibalism, to slavery to female genital mutilation can be explained away by resort to this argument. Back in the days of American slavery it was the South’s excuse for holding millions in bondage. An alternative phraseology is “part of our culture”. If one uses “culture” as a defense one need not justify the behavior to either god or man; it is because it is.

Here in America we are supposed to back off whenever anyone uses this lame excuse for stupidity or bigotry. The Southland has raised this sort of thing to an art form, not surprising, since they’ve had lots of practice, in that they’ve been been using it for hundreds of years to justify everything from slavery to lynchings to segregated proms.

For some reason, we folks in the North don’t get to make this excuse – nor have we sought to. I’m not sure why that is; certainly we do some stupid things up here, but when we’re criticized we tend to try to justify our position by argument; sometimes reasonable, sometimes not, but the idea that we are privileged to behave stupidly because we’ve always behaved stupidly doesn’t have much traction here. I’m not saying we’re morally superior; we’ve just been trained. The Southern States have played the victim so long that we all sort of concede their right to do so; we here in the North are supposed to soak up criticism and keep our mouths shut even when the criticism is unfair.

On this specific issue, my mind remains boggled. When I was a very young boy, Davy Crockett (who came from Tennessee which is pretty much the same as Kentucky, or was when Davy was born on that mountaintop) was my hero. I knew every word to his theme song, and I was prepared to believe almost any good thing about him, but even then I knew that he didn’t actually kill him a bar when he was only three, and I was only four at the time. I had toy guns (never gave them to my kids) and it never crossed my mind that I had any business having a real one. I don’t know what I’d have done if my father had handed one to me back then. But it wasn’t part of my parents way of life to give me the means to easily kill before I even understood the reality and finality of death. I guess I just had a deprived childhood, but then I got to grow up without the burden of guilt I would have had for killing one of my siblings.