Forgive me if my thoughts seem a bit jumbled today; between dealing with a neighbor who insists on sharing his tunes through the open window of his truck parked in his driveway (Why??? And for context, the theme of the day, he’s a white dude probably around 60 and, I believe, unemployed, and insists on blasting bass-boosted rap in a mixed neighborhood, so it feels a bit performative.), lingering pain in my left wrist and arm, and the post-vaccination wallop (lot of bruising on the flu-shot arm, none on the covid arm, but both arms have been very sore, as have my joints), I’ve been a little at sea.

Still, I have thoughts.

🤔 Context, or the lack of it. I often remind that context is very important when judging statements made by political figures, as opposing politicians have the tendency to attempt to strip the surrounding context to provide a “gotcha” moment. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s John Brummett, in examining the context of Mitt Romney’s “gotcha” of Barack Obama’s “you didn’t build that” quote in 2012*, raised the specter of the long-ago gubernatorial campaign pitting Sheffield Nelson against Bill Clinton in which Nelson, late in the campaign, ran an ad** using Clinton saying the words “raise and spend” completely out of context. I’ve used that example myself a few times, as well as the Nancy Pelosi quote*** heading into the vote on the Affordable Care Act (used to imply that none of the representatives had actually read it because it was being rushed through, which wasn’t really the case).

(An aside here: Those asterisks correspond to fuller context notes provided below the full column in smaller type. You can also read my source material by clicking on the links in the above paragraph.)

The point is that opponents can easily take something you’ve said, divorce it from everything else that was said, and make it sound like you’re espousing something completely different. (Trolls, of course, sometimes eschew that step altogether and make something up, and usually ignore any calls for proof.)

But what about when someone complains that something was taken out of context but it’s no better in full context (true for many public figures)? For example, while there are Charlie Kirk quotes that improve upon context being added, some just don’t, such as this from his July 13, 2023, podcast:

“If we would have said three weeks ago … that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative-action picks, we would have been called racist. But now they’re comin’ out and they’re saying it for us! They’re comin’ out and they’re saying, ‘I’m only here because of affirmative action.’

“Yeah, we know. You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.”

While a version of the quote had to be fact-checked as it claimed he said, “Black women do not have the brain processing power,” instead of him referring to the specific four women in the whole quote, it’s hard to say with a straight face that fuller context helps in this instance. It actually makes it worse since he goes on to mock Lee and others. Don’t ask me why he rolled the r on “racist,” either. And stealing “a white person’s slot”? Seriously? (I’ll remind readers that it can be hard to find the unedited videos of even Kirk’s podcasts since so many are put behind a wall, I guess meant to keep out those who might use those words against him, and I have no intention on paying to join a club/podcast/whatever just to find the full tapes of something reprehensible and thus support their cause. I’ll leave that to those more willing and able to ferret it out. And I hate to tell them, but that makes it easier for the unscrupulous to make up quotes; there are fake Kirk quotes circulating out there.)

So, sure, blame lack of context if you want, as sometimes you will be right. Sometimes, though, the words and/or actions are just horrible.

💀 More gun deaths. Will there ever be a day when we’ll actually say, “Enough”? I grew up around guns and have a healthy respect for them, but I also lost a friend when I was a kid because of a family that didn’t take gun safety seriously (her family had moved to Paris, Ark., and a neighbor kid was showing her his dad’s new shotgun). My physical science lab partner my sophomore year of college later became a teacher; she died shielding students from bullets in the Westside Middle School shooting in 1998. The day that happened, the school wasn’t named in the first alerts, and I was terrified that it was the school where a dear friend and mentor’s son was. The relief upon hearing it wasn’t Josh’s school was dashed when I realized who the teacher who died was.

I’ve had friends just out having fun, or in their homes, minding their own business, when they were shot through no fault of their own; one had to have a sizable chunk on one thigh removed because the tissue couldn’t be saved, something I was reminded of most times in our ballroom dance class. There is nowhere anymore where we can be completely safe from guns, not our homes, grocery stores, malls, churches, schools or anywhere else anyone would never have thought to bring a gun, and it’s not because they’re “gun-free” zones. It’s because we’ve seemingly decided that guns (inanimate objects) have more rights than people and should be allowed just about anywhere, even in the hands of people who have no business having them.

Too many guns are out there in too few hands (recent estimates place the number of guns in the U.S. at around 500 million, and they’re in the hands of less than half of the American population; heck, I know of at least two people back home with mini arsenals). There are responsible gun owners out there, but not everyone should have access to a gun, which might be used as a threat, in a robbery, in suicide or murder just as easily as it’s used for self-defense or hunting (and seriously, if you need a military-style weapon to hunt deer, you might try practicing at a shooting range to improve your aim, or just leave the hunting to those who do just fine with Grandpa’s old shotgun).

Too many times nowadays, we hear reports of mass shootings (which are quickly politicized even when there’s no political motive because everything apparently has to be in the context of us versus them), but there are also countless shootings in inner cities, rural communities (yep, they happen out in the country too) and elsewhere that sometimes don’t make the news because we’ve become inured to them. Surely no one wants to argue that all of those gun owners are responsible citizens.

Then there are all the suicides; 2023 CDC data showed that 58 percent of gun deaths that year were suicide (a record 27,300 out of 46,728 total gun deaths); more than half of suicides that year involved a gun. Suicides have accounted for the majority of firearm deaths since 1995, understandable since they’re more reliably deadly than most other methods and fairly easy to obtain.

Saturday night, police say, a Marine veteran reportedly killed three and injured at least five other people, firing from a boat into a waterfront bar in Southport, N.C. The man was arrested Sunday and charged with three counts of first-degree murder, among other charges.

Sunday morning, another Marine veteran rammed a Latter-Day Saints church in Grand Blanc, Mich., with his truck before opening fire on the congregation and starting a fire using gasoline. Five worshipers were killed and at least eight were injured; the gunman died in a shootout with police.

Those are just mass shootings in about an 18-hour span on one weekend. The motive doesn’t really matter in the scheme of things. Because there are so many guns, days without shootings in the news (whether drive-bys, celebratory gunfire, mass shootings, one-on-one murder, etc.) are becoming rarer and rarer.

We’ve been here before, too many times, and the solution is multifaceted, needing not only a commitment to mental health care and other interventions, but also action on the only thing in common in all these events, guns. We can keep repeating talking points and offering thoughts and prayers, but each time we don’t even try to take action results in a next time and a time after that.

Polls have shown that the majority of people (and of NRA members, c’mon!) are in favor of common-sense actions like universal background checks and red-flag laws. I’d also say we need to have a national law regulating guns rather than the patchwork of state laws that makes it far too easy for those who shouldn’t have guns to access them. Mandatory insurance, just like with cars, wouldn’t be a bad idea, either, and that could easily be handled by the states.

But we know the majority of Americans aren’t the people contributing to political campaigns, don’t we?

Between that and the intentional division sowed after each tragedy, the chances of common-sense action on guns look slim.

We live in a world where entirely too many people see others as their enemies rather than people, and as long as that remains the way of the world, I don’t see much hope for change.

Still, I have to believe that sense will eventually rule again. I only hope I’m alive to see it.

* Fuller Barack Obama quote for context: “If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

“The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.

“So we say to ourselves, ever since the founding of this country, you know what, there are some things we do better together.”

** Bill Clinton’s response to Nelson’s ad: “Here’s what I actually said to the legislature. ‘Unlike our friends in Washington, we can’t write a check on an account that is overdrawn. Either we raise and spend or we don’t spend.’ All I was doing was fighting for a balanced budget. But Nelson went to work and cut out the words ‘raise and spend’ from my speech to give you the wrong impression.”

On the Issues noted: “See what Clinton did? He didn’t deny that he’d raised taxes twice before. (He had.) He didn’t say he wasn’t going to raise them if he got reelected. (He did.) What he did was dismantle Nelson’s gimmick, discrediting the attack–and the attacker!”

*** Fuller context of Pelosi quote: “Imagine an economy where people could follow their aspirations, where they could be entrepreneurial, where they could take risks professionally because personally their families [sic] health care needs are being met. Where they could be self-employed or start a business, not be job-locked in a job because they have health care there, and if they went out on their own it would be unaffordable to them, but especially true, if someone has a child with a pre-existing condition. So when we pass our bill, never again will people be denied coverage because they have a pre-existing condition.

“We have to do this in partnership, and I wanted to bring [you] up to date on where we see it from here. The final health care legislation that will soon be passed by Congress will deliver successful reform at the local level. It will offer paid for investments that will improve health care services and coverage for millions more Americans. It will make significant investments in innovation, prevention, wellness and offer robust support for public health infrastructure. It will dramatically expand investments into community health centers. That means a dramatic expansion in the number of patients community health centers can see and ultimately healthier communities. Our bill will significantly reduce uncompensated care for hospitals.”

“You’ve heard about the controversies within the bill, the process about the bill, one or the other. But I don’t know if you have heard that it is legislation for the future, not just about health care for America, but about a healthier America, where preventive care is not something that you have to pay a deductible for or out of pocket. Prevention, prevention, prevention–it’s about diet, not diabetes. It’s going to be very, very exciting.”

“But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy.”