For those of you unaware, I live in Tucson, Arizona, the setting for the massacre on Saturday that befell six innocent civilians, including a child, and critically injured a remarkably beautiful congresswoman, as well as more than a dozen others.
Before the shooting, on Saturday morning my friends and I dispersed from the athletics department after a rather grueling weekend training session, and headed to the variety of local cafeterias that welcome ravished swimmers such as us with veritably open arms and open pockets, especially during a period of relative quiet among Tucsonian social circles. Our weekly journey, typically on bicycle, takes us away from the pool, past the basketball stadium, around one side of the football stadium, perfectly dissects the campus, and spits us out on University Boulevard where one may find the usual array of stores, coffee shops, restaurants and bars that enjoy a constant circulation of students to whom the convenience of the locality seems irresistible. This being America, although the hubbub of a lazy Saturday like this one is hardly a matter worth writing home about, the bars along the stretch proudly mount their HD television screens and display them outwards towards passers-by and diners braving the January chill. The display brought news of an event that had only just occurred, in Tucson, within walking distance of the university. While we all arrived at separate times to our chosen rendez-vous point, the conversation was immediate and patron to a single topic.
The grocery store wherein Gabrielle Giffords elected to host her informal constituency meeting, although not within throwing distance, is not quite out of earshot on a still and crisp day. From University Boulevard the grocery store resides about two and a half miles away, and the noise, say, from the firing of a handgun could well be heard to the attuned ear. What’s more, of an evening on Saturdays it is not unheard of that my friends and I might dash to that very store to replenish our continually depleting alcohol supplies. Indeed, the closeness of the event was striking and, it almost embarrasses me to say, terrifying.
The story was instantly recognizable as a tragedy, but also an attack, a flagrant attack, on a scale of senselessness that had never quite struck me before then. When something like that happens in your immediate vicinity the importance or significance is somehow heightened. Our waitresses, at first unaware of the news, responded by covering their mouths and neglecting their tables in order to make momentary phone calls to friends and loved ones. One asks oneself the question: what is it that colours an incident of this nature with the personal? Were this to occur in the adjoining city, for instance, my fear and sense of heightened curiosity would surely be lower: in the adjoining state, more so; in another country, like Pakistan, the backdrop for the recent and similar shooting of Salman Taseer, even more so. But here we may, and in fact feel entitled to feel personally violated, attacked, undermined in, for want of a less predictable cliché, our own backyard.
Needless to say, the regular ongoings of the community were interrupted. Facebook statuses carried the expected notes of shock and disbelief, alongside dismal feigns of sympathy and outreach, obsequiously and uniformly inclusive of the depressing phrase, “thoughts and prayers”, as though the divine would listen after ignoring the plea from a now dead nine-year old girl, for instance. Friends of mine set about organizing get-togethers that may help “bring together” the community. In the evening, a basketball game against Stanford was postponed, apparently because of limited security forces. I would have taken against such acts of contortion had it played out in the wake of a terrorist attack, but in this case, society almost demanded it be shaken.
The news that the shooter was a young male threw me somewhat. I had expected a middle-aged aggressor, disillusioned by a failed relationship, perhaps by several failed relationships, loneliness, delusion, by mounting political aggression and by militant rhetoric of the dogmatic and absurd kind that merely draws a scoff from all but the most disturbed and volatile minds. Undoubtedly, Jared Loughner, the deranged 22 year-old behind the massacre was in possession of one such disturbed and volatile mind, and yet it still troubles me that someone so young may fall prey to the most heinous and sinister compulsions.
The pistol Loughner used, a Glock 19 is readily available to someone such as myself. Even though I’m a resident alien, I have a social security number, a visa, and all sorts of other paraphernalia that confirms my age (over 21) and identity. If I were I so inclined, I would be faced with few obstacles to securing myself a Glock with an extended mag and several hundred rounds of ammunition. One chap on our team, who shall remain nameless, was scurried by this very urge a week or so ago and, upon walking into our local gun shop (ominously named: ‘Second Amendment’), purchased a Glock over the counter for a few hundred dollars. He quickly became a source of much amusement to my teammates once this information was gathered. A Glock, I am reliably informed by another of my friends who has a gun or two to his name, is such a hackneyed weapon to the point of hilarity. Only a man sailing on the whims of fancy would be so impressionable as to buy a Glock, he claimed.
Arizona gets singled out, and rightly so, for its strangely lackadaisical arms laws. Rather than tightening the grip of the law given the flurry of shootings and senseless massacres, from the Virginia Tech shootings, to the Washington DC sniper, to the Columbine high school massacre, the laws have loosened. Unquestionably, there resides, at least in myth, a huge pro-gun lobby that politicians dare not offend, particularly with regard to, yes, the second amendment of the constitution. Although we live in enlightened times, the untruth that the availability of weapons or the widespread concealment of weapons prevents violent crimes has a firm hold on the cultural psyche of cities like Tucson.
A short aside: The household of a handful of my teammate (including the Glock fancier) recently hosted the fire department, the police force, (somewhat alarmingly) two bomb squads, and, most impressively, the FBI in their four-bedroom home following a supposedly panicked call from a neighbor after having seen plumes of black smoke emanating from their garden. Well, it seemed to irritate me more than others when I learnt that the FBI were more concerned about their experiments with chlorine tablets and brake fluid that they were with the menu of unchecked firearms that litter the floor of their house. Once again, I shan’t mention their names, as I imagine they are under enough scrutiny and surveillance as it is, but I couldn’t help but allude to it as an example of, on this occasion, federal indifference toward young people and guns.
President Obama is due to speak here tomorrow at 6pm following an appeal from the university president, and under the banner, “Together We Thrive: Tucson and America”. Presumably with security measures in mind, the basketball arena has been selected for the occasion, regardless of the fact that it seats a paltry 10,000. And so, what has, for me, become a second home, is currently being worked upon tirelessly by event organizers, presidential aides, and what seems to be the entire local Mexican community in preparation for the address. Earlier today, the presence of something untoward grew ever stronger. The FBI and secret service loitered in groups of two, checking over clipboards or being briefed by the Tucson police. A strikingly large malaise of Washington suit-types busied themselves indoors, similarly checking clipboards and barking orders at Mexicans who, for want of something better to do, were cleaning the scuff-marks from the corridor walls. A solitary helicopter buzzed soundlessly overhead and, for some thirty minutes, hung motionless; were it not for the moving blades, one would be forced to conclude they were hallucinating.
Not only has school been canceled tomorrow, but entry into the building or the immediate area, a corner of my world that maintains a singular familiarity, has been forbidden beginning 6am, twelve hours prior to Obama’s sermon. I carry a peculiar feeling, and one hard to articulate. The political and private have and will again come together in an otherwise everyday and mundane environment. Needless to say, I shall do my best to attend, and overcome hoards of people probably more devoted than I in a queue that will almost certainly extend well back toward the place where I first heard the news. It is, after all, free and open to anyone. I’ve packed my voice recorder, my notepad, and my camera. For you, dear reader, if you bear with me, I shall bring a full report.
It will be Obama’s first public address proper since the incident and, given the degree of the matter and its potential reverberations, both political and ideological, I expect, or rather, hope that he addresses the following:
i. Gun ownership legislation, both in Arizona and nationwide.It would be optimistic to hope for a full-house, I suppose, but these points, I would argue, require special and meticulous attention. The case itself, and the prosecution of Loughner, as Sherlock Holmes would undoubtedly remind Watson, must not be theorized about before the acquisition of all the evidence. I leave that to the judicial system, albeit egregiously lessened by the death of one of its members.
ii. The death-penalty, and its implications for this case.
iii. The current rhetoric of the media and political spheres.
iv. The Tea Party movement and its affiliates.
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