The 2023 Road Trip has taken us to Boise, Idaho, where we are staying for three nights at the Boise Riverside RV Park which abuts the Boise River.
Lots of trees, grass, fresh air, and birds and squirrels in the trees. There is paved hiking/bike trail along the river that goes for 28 miles. Lots of people use it every day. Very nice. On the other hand, traffic is nasty here in this big city, reminding us why we moved to a small community out in the desert.
Charlie’s sisters Jan and Lynn live in Boise, as does her niece Christie, who is a high school assistant principal. We had a nice dinner at Jan’s house on Wednesday night. I got to talk quite a bit with Bud, Jan’s ahusband, who is a retired bank executive. A great guy; I love talking with him.
The temperature here is nice right now: 80 degrees daytime, 60 degrees nighttime. Yesterday afternoon we experienced a thunderstorm that doused the RV park with an inch of rain in an hour. We’ve only seen rain like that a few times in 5 years at our home in Mesquite, Nevada.
Speaking of home, we got a call this morning from a female neighbor who felt it necessary to inform us about a security “scare” last night. It appears that there was an older, barefoot man, with a beard and a backpack, who was walking down one of Sun City’s many paved trails in the evening and overtook a woman who was out walking. He said “Hi” to the lady and moved on. The “incident” caused excitement in the neighborhood, evidently, as the rumor mill swirled about some vagrant out in the community looking to break into houses, accost women, kidnap them, rape them, etc.
Our paranoid neighbor (who wasn’t present when the walking man was out strolling) called the police to report the menace.
What is this country coming to when a man can’t take a barefoot walk? Or stroll with a backpack? I walk down the street barefoot sometimes to get mail, and I’ve also been known to wear a backpack when I take a hike. Am I a criminal? Should paranoid women call the police on me?
We live in a retirement community where everyone is ages 55 to 100. There is NO crime to speak of, at least in the five years that we’ve been living in Sun City. No burglaries, robberies, assaults, kidnappings, rapes (!), or murders. Nada. The only tine we hear a siren is when EMS rolls in to haul one of our elderly neighbors off to the hospital. Some old guy with problems committed suicide four years ago. That’s it. There is probably no safer place in Nevada than our little Heaven in Mesquite.
I worry about people who are paranoid about people “out to get them”.
It is a disease in this country right now, part of the class warfare that is being promulgated by conservative politicians and whacko podcasters. Minorities are to be feared, liberals are trying to convert children into queers, and atheists are scheming to abolish Christianity. Or so it seems to these conspiracy junkies. People are arming themselves, preparing themselves for battle. It’s the “End of Days”, according to some religious kooks.
Red states are going hog wild on lessening gun controls, so that paranoid macho men have the unfettered right to carry automatic weapons into stores, churches, schools, and such. These individuals need to protect themselves from bad guys with guns, goes the argument.
What actually happens most of the time is a family member gets smokeds in a domestic dispute, a child gets ahold of a gun and accidentally shoots himself or one of his siblings, or a neighborhood dispute turns deadly when some idiot pulls a pistol from his waistband in a rage and kills someone. That’s the statistical reality of gun violence in the U.S. Gang members with guns almost always target other gangs, and minorities usually torment members of their own minority neighborhoods.
Statistically, one is more likely to suffer from gun violence in a rural area than in a large metropolis. It’s a fact that the scare mongers don’t like to acknowledge because they like to demonize urban folk and the “socialist” politicians that run those “hell hole” cities.
Paranoia runs rampant in some areas.
Recently, a young 11-year-old boy went to a house in his community to pick up his younger brother from day care (as I understand it) on his way home from school. He knocked at the door, an elderly man opened it and shot the boy twice, once in the head! It turned out that the boy had gone to the wrong house and the paranoid man evidently felt threatened by an unarmed 11-year-old African-American male who did nothing wrong except knock on a door.
If the door knocker had been an Amazon deliver guy or a Jehovah’s Witness neophyte, would the homeowner still have shot the “intruder”? Realistically, probably not. He saw a Black kid… and that justified pulling the trigger, at least in his warped mind. The 86-year-old homeowner has been charged with attempted murder, but the 11-year-old boy is physically and mentally scarred for life, for the crime of “Knocking While Black”.
Thinking back on the barefoot gentleman with the backpack out for a stroll in the evening: Had the woman he encountered been armed and paranoid, would she have drawn down on him in a panic? I hate to think. That’s the problem with guns out in the community: they escalate the tension and/or paranoia. Let’s face it: only people who are paranoid are “packing” firearms in public, who knows what they are thinking, and who knows what frame of mind they’re in. Some people exist in a perpetual pissed-off mood, just waiting for someone to slight them in some way: they are a stick of dynamite with a short fuse.
A couple of years ago, a jogger in Georgia (as I recall) was attacked by some community residents who trailed him in pickup trucks, blocked his path in the street, and shotgunned him to death. The victim’s crime: he was jogging on a public street in a White neighborhood and was an African-American. The gun-toting, self-appointed Neighborhood Watch commandos were paranoid about non-White folk, pure and simple. The three White men (one an ex-Sheriff’s deputy) were convicted of murder; the African-American was executed for “Jogging While Black”.
Police departments throughout the Nation have been taking flack, some well-deserved, for escalating situations by drawing guns unnecessarily… particularly when the situation involves the minority population. The official department policy seems to be “prepare to shoot” as soon as the officer leaves the patrol car… “just in case”. This is paranoia, plain and simple, and often results in a shooting where some innocent citizen pulls a phone (not a gun) out of his pocket and is summarily executed by panicked cops.
In another recent incident, a security guy at a WalMart (I believe) noticed a shoplifter doing his thing and accosted him. The shoplifter ignored the rent-a-cop and headed for the door. The two exchanged words, there was a physical confrontation, and then the shoplifter walked out the door with his stolen merchandise. At that point, the security officer pulled a gun and shot the unarmed man dead on the sidewalk. Questions: Since when is shoplifting a capital offense, punishable by lethal force? How was the security officer in danger when the shoplifter was walking in the opposite direction away from the store? Why would the security officer think it was okay to shoot an unarmed Black man?
Too many people, often paranoid or poorly trained, are packing deadly weapons in our society. If that isn’t bad enough, we have the folks with mental illnesses who’ve had a bad day or week or life and decide to grab their military-grade firearm and mow down innocent children at school, worshippers at church, shoppers at a mall, revelers at a night club, etc. There have been over 200 of these mass killings in the past year here in the United States. This doesn’t happen in countries where personal ownership of guns is restricted; it is a pandemic here in America where there are more guns than there are people and gun-crazy parents gift assault weapons to their pimply-faced teenage sons. What could possibly go wrong?
“Stand Your Ground” laws (the right of a citizen to defend himself in public with lethal force) only exacerbate the situation, providing an excuse for nutjobs who just want to terrorize minorities.
Back in the Black Lives Matter protest days after the George Floyd murder by police, a teenager crossed state lines with his assault rifle, wandered into a BLM protest, and then shot and killed a protester. He claimed, “self defense”, despite brandishing a rifle in a crowd, and the paranoic excuse of “standing his ground” when a protester called him on his recklessness. The teen was acquitted of wrongdoing by a jury that was influenced by partisan rhetoric, some of which came from the President of the United States.
Paranoia abounds, and we are likely to see more and more of this gun violence in the coming years as partisan politics infects every nook and cranny of the Nation.
I own a gun and I keep it in my home to protect my wife and property if some doofus tries to harm us. I’m not looking for a fight, but I will respond if provoked.
If I had my gun with me in my car, and some asshole cut me off or “brake checked” me, would I be more or less likely to escalate the situation with a lethal weapon at my side? Probably more likely, because I’m human and I don’t like taking shit from anyone. Of course, the other guy might be packing, and then we’d have a shoot-out… over nothing.
The idea of “Constitutional carry” (the ability of every citizen to legally carry guns in public places) scares the crap out of me because there are so many angry idiots running around, itching for a confrontation with the “bad guys” that they fear… whether real or imagined. One thing that I’ve noticed, however: the legislative bodies that approve such laws almost always have rules that prohibit firearms in their meeting places. Why is that?
I am reminded of the line in Buffalo Springfield’s song, “For What It’s Worth”, when Stephen Stills says, “Paranoia strikes deep, into your heart it will creep, it starts when you’re always afraid…”
That’s where we are today in The Greatest Nation on Earth.