When we left the US, it was partly because we felt that the country was going in a direction that we did not agree with, and that the country was continuing its slide into an uglier and more negative culture.
Little did we know that it would also continue move toward a more violent and deadly culture.
All around the world, Newspaper Editorials, some from countries that have now lost citizens to the killer of 32 students and teachers, have chastised the US for making the purchase of a gun about as easy as a gallon of milk. The State of Virginia in particular has some of the most lax gun laws in America, with no background check at gun shows, no waiting period before getting a gun, no safety training before buying a gun and particularly horrifying: no restrictions on the sale or possession of military-style semi-automatic weapons. In Virginia, you can buy an AK47 or an Uzi with the same ease as a hunting rifle.
Apparently the Columbine High School massacre (which happened 8 years ago this coming Friday) was not enough. Italy’s leading daily newspaper, the Corriere della Sera summed it up well:
The latest attack on a U.S. campus will shake up America, maybe it will provoke more vigorous reactions than in the past, but it won’t change the culture of a country that has the notion of self-defense imprinted on its DNA and which considers the right of having guns inalienable.
I’d like to say that this would never happen in Canada, but we also had a shooting at Dawson College in Montreal last September. However, even though Kimveer Gill, another 20-something, opened fire last September, killing a young woman and wounding 19 others before he turned the gun on himself, police responded far more quickly. Maybe this was just luck; It’s hard to say.
What I do know for certain, is that I don’t know a single person here who owns a handgun. It’s simply not something that normal, law-abiding citizens consider. However, when we lived in the US, I knew several people who had them, and this was in one of the most ‘Liberal’ areas of the whole country.
Common sense has always told me that if you have guns around, the likelihood of someone using them to kill someone else is far greater than if they simply aren’t there. I don’t buy the argument that if you make guns harder to get, ‘then only criminals will have guns’. Here in Canada and throughout the rest of the civilized world, that has not been the result. While we can’t claim a perfect record here, we feel safer, that this is a more peaceful and less violent place. Maybe that’s what we have to settle for these days.
Leaving aside the gun violence topic and the current news story (which I’ve written about at home), it’s interesting to see that your language clearly reflects your “I’m a Canadian now” identity.
The US is “a place where you used to live”, and here in Canada “we don’t have a perfect record”…
I find identity issues interesting. When do you (not you, David Drucker, but the general “you”) start calling a new place “home”? If I were on a vacation, got a hotel room from there went on an excursion with the Mrs., I can see myself referring to several “home“ ‘s:
— Let’s go home to the hotel.
— What day do we get home to Vancouver?
— Let’s go home to Denmark for a visit next year.
Maybe it comes down to this: Home is a “base” that I can picture myself “returning to from somewhere else”.
In the example above, the hotel ceases to be “home” the minute we check out on the last day of the vacation. Vancouver is home as long as that’s where we have our mailing address… or maybe as long as we feel we have a network here. If we moved to, say, Edmonton, Vancouver would continue to be “home” to me as long as it was more of a “base” to me than Edmonton.
Hmm, lots more thoughts are trickling forth as I’m writing this… For example it strikes me that instead of “network” above, it would be more accurate to use the catch-all phrase used in thousands of news stories where someone is described as “having (strong) ties to the community”. Oh well, this will become yet another entry in the series of blog posts I’m planning to write on the topic of “identity” (online and “in real life). 🙂
Cheers,
Jan Karlsbjerg
http://www.jankarlsbjerg.com/blog/
Hi Jan -
Good observations. I guess we started calling this place we live home fairly shortly after we moved here. It may be that we were anxious to settle in, or that we were equally anxious to cut our ties with the US. After all, we did move partly (at least) for emotional and political reasons.
What’s ‘Home’ anyway? Where the heart is? Where the hearth is? Where everybody knows your name? (sorry, spent a lot of time in Boston, although not so much in bars).
I clearly remember that both Pam and I referred to the houses we grew up in as ‘home’ (as in ‘Next week I’m going home to visit Mom and Dad’). My parents are still alive but Pam’s are gone. Therefore, I still have a second ‘home’ where she perhaps does not.
I don’t think either of us has ever said ‘Let’s go home to the hotel’ after we’ve been out to dinner in another city.
It remains to be seen if we ever say ‘Let’s go home to the US for a week next summer’. Without getting overly dramatic, I’d have to say that the US feels less like home every day, not just because I’m away from it more, but because it has changed so much from the US that I grew up in. Because the country really has changed (predominantly for the worse), it leads me to believe that it’s possible not only for you to leave home, but for whatever was ‘home’ to leave you.
BTW,(and back on the gun topic) I learned this morning that there is some confusion between the term ‘Assault Weapons’ and ‘Automatic Weapons’, and that AK47s and Uzis may in fact still be regulated based on some Federal laws. The inaccuracy was based on information from the National Post, and I should know better than refer to that awful rag at any time as a reference.
Congratulations on your move to Canada, David! I recently met two luthiers from Boston who also fled the U.S. after Bush was re-elected; they are now working in and renovating a sixteenth-century farmhouse in Bavaria. Incidents like these remind us how lucky we are to live in such a safe place (Munich is the safest city in Europe and therefore I assume in the world).
The Virginia Tech gunman and two of his victims had attended Westfield High School in Fairfax, Virginia, where my brother teaches science. Since last year another ex-student had killed two police officers near the school, the media have swarmed around Westfield trying to make out that it produces killers. Actually it’s the easy access to weapons that makes it more likely for an angry young man to become a killer.