Tag: gun control

The Incalculable Costs of California’s Mass Shootings

Published on by redict239Leave a comment

My closest confrontation with gun gunfire came at the end of what started out a normal workday. Decades back when my seventeen years of teaching middle school left me feeling that the word I said most often was “no” – with my own kids at home and with the middle schoolers at work, — I drove one afternoon from my job at Adams Middle School that was just south of downtown Los Angeles to Jefferson High School in South Central. I had an afterschool interview with a Jefferson administrator about a possible transfer to their campus. The atmosphere on Central Avenue that day included the typical L.A. weather that hinders deep thought – the clear blue skies, the glaring sunlight that bounces off cars’ rear windshields and back bumpers – the weather that inspires you to come outside, get out of the house; but once you are out, you’re greeted by the pay-to-play society that is America.

As I drove near the school parking lot towards the dismissal chaos that happens once a school bell rings at the end of the day, gunshots rang out in front of me from the left side of the street. Students scattered. School staff on supervision ducked down. I noticed a young person on the right side of the street who appeared to have been shot being pulled into a black car. Like other cars nearby, I made a U-turn on the tight residential street and headed in the opposite direction. I drove away from the chaos of that afternoon.

Fast forward to contemporary California – the state with the nation’s strictest gun laws — and the string of mass shootings that have occurred in January 2023.[i] One of the first was in the City of Monterey Park in San Gabriel Valley – not San Fernando, but the other valley; the valley popular media chooses to forget. A working-class region – San Gabriel Valley lacks the media chic of an adjacent Calabasas; and, geographically, instead of leading to the lush vegetation surrounding cities near Santa Barbara, it drifts into the dryness of Palm Springs. At a dance studio he frequented in the Chinatown area of Monterey Park, 72-year-old, Huu Can Tran, murdered eleven people – My My Nhan, Lilian Li, Xiujuan Yu, Muoi Dai Ung, Hongying Jian, Yu Lun Kao, Chia Ling Yau, Valentino Marcos Alvero, Wen Tau Yu, Ming Wei Ma, and Diana Man Ling Tom – ages 57-72. He also injured nine others. It was January 21, the eve of the Chinese Lunar New Year. Following the shooting, Tran shot and killed himself during a standoff with police in the city of Torrance.

Next, on January 23 in the northern California city of Half Moon Bay, sixty-six-year-old Chunli Zhao, a farmworker, shot and killed seven of his co-workers – Marciano Martinez Jimenez, Jose Romero Perez, Aixiang Zhang, Zhishen Liu, Qizhong Cheng, Jingzhi Lu, and Yetao Bing – ages 43-74. He also wounded one other person. It appears the shooter was upset because his supervisor requested he pay one hundred dollars for damage to a forklift.[ii] Zhao later drove to a police station where he was taken into custody.

On that same day in Oakland, 18-year-old Mario Navarro was killed and four people injured while filming a music video. The shooter has not been apprehended.

Then, on January 28 in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Beverly Crest,[iii] adjacent to Beverly Hills, Nenah Davis, Destiny Sims, and Iyana Hutton, ages 26-33, were killed and four others wounded outside a party being held at a home being used as a short-term rental.

In a country where guns outnumber people, the US is averaging six hundred mass shootings per year. That’s more than the human mind and human emotions can keep up with. The pace dehumanizes not just the dead, but the living. The 338 million people who make up the U.S. own more than 400 million guns.[iv] That’s domestic gun ownership – sans cops and military. We are five percent of the world’s population, and we own forty-two percent of the world’s guns.[v] We may not be ready to end world hunger, stop climate change, or spread democracy across the globe. But we are ready to kill. Each other. Unfortunately, at a certain point the mass shootings stop being a shock in a society in which we are adversaries of ourselves. Everyone is a potential threat, a lurking enemy.

I may have tired of saying “no” to middle schoolers and my own kids, but where is the “no” to corporate gun trafficking in the U.S.? How are parents supposed to discipline youth on the topic of gun ownership within the capitalist anarchy of our society? Ours is a society that doesn’t say “no” to indulgence – especially not the indulgence of guns.

Back in time, at the shooting that occurred before my job interview, I circled the blocks adjacent to the high school a few times. Holding the steering wheel with both hands, I took a few deep breaths and drove back to the school to see if the perimeter appeared safe. I passed by. I then made a big loop around the campus by driving a few more blocks before finally entering the school parking lot to go to the interview. Sitting at a desk with the administrator, we discussed the shooting and then our conversation shifted to facts about the school.

When I finally transferred to a high school, it wasn’t Jefferson. I chose another location, but I did teach a Saturday enrichment program on their campus some months after the shooting. I was never afraid to be amongst the students there. We read, wrote, conversed. And like high school youth in many cities across the U.S. who are filled with expectations about their future lives, they eventually applied for college.

[i] Beckett, Lois and Levin, Sam. “Eight Days, and 25 dead: California Shaken by string of mass shootings.” The Guardian. 25 Jan 2023.

[ii] Turner, Austin. “Half Moon Bay: DA confirms report that shooter was triggered by $100 equipment bill.” Santa Cruz Sentinel. 27 Jan 2023.

[iii] Associated Press. “Police say three dead, four hurt in latest California shooting.” The Guardian. 28 Jan 2023.

[iv] Horsey, David. “More than 400 million guns, from sea to shining sea.” The Seattle Times.” 20 May 2022.

[v] Harrison, Pricey. “The U.S. has approximately 5% of the world’s population and 42% of civilian gun ownership.” PolitiFact. 15 February 2018

Our Sleepwalking Towards Death with Gabriel García Márquez

Published on by redict239Leave a comment

At eighteen, with my first year of community college completed, I flew alone from Los Angeles to Mexico City. After several days of scouring bookstores, I brought back a suitcase full of novels, poetry, and history books.

I had begun my college studies as a talented Spanish major whose first published poetry — both bilingual and all-Spanish — had been accepted in Americas Review (University of Houston). As a young African-American writer whose first language was English, I shunned away from English-language literary journals because I lacked confidence they would publish my writing. Even then, decades back, I was aware that the publishing industry was a majority-White profession, and I perceived it as a barrier through which I would not be able cross. Social change, my dedication to craft, and persistence have allowed me to move beyond that barrier and get my work published in numerous English-language journals.

Given my skills in the Spanish language, I didn’t hesitate recently to read the short story, “Amargura Para Tres Sonámbulos” (“Bitterness for Three Sleepwalkers”), by Gabriel García Márquez in Spanish. Reading English translations of Spanish-speaking writers creates a thin linguistic veil between myself and the writer that I try to avoid. In the story, Márquez’s first-person-plural narration allows his two sleepwalking narrators to tell a story about a third who is a woman. The two narrators reveal to us, “Estábamos haciendo lo que habíamos hecho todos los días de nuestras vidas” (“We were doing what we had been doing every day of our lives.”) Their emphasis on the humanity of the woman sleepwalker – who lives in the underground — underscores how sleepwalking is an analogy for the process of life. On one occasion during her walk, she falls to the ground and starts eating dirt; yet, she still isn’t dead. The two narrators inform us that the more she walks around the house at night, the more she begins to look like death.

By using the sleepwalking metaphor for the process of a life approaching death, García Márquez makes the finite quality of material life abundantly clear. His magical realism presents three characters who move through the narration like phantasms of our imagination, so thinly clad that they need no names nor any physical description.

Using García Márquez’s number of three, I offer three pressing topics in the world today that we, as humanity, engage with as if sleepwalking. I will refrain from naming them, allowing the reader to use speculation (of which magical realism is a part) to discern the topics of discussion. I have likewise personified my sleepwalkers as women.

She sits at the outdoor table as clouds form in the dry atmosphere. One raindrop falls to the dark brown table as the wind blows the clouds away, assuring no rainfall. She remembers how months, years have passed with barely a sprinkle. She half gazes towards the parched earth, one eye open and the other closed, confident in the technology of dams and irrigation. Faraway, in the Southern hemisphere, no rain means starvation and death. While further off in the tropical regions, torrential rains flood the land, washing away homes and livelihoods, and later leaving stagnant waters that breed disease. Lucky, she puts on her dark sunglasses and feels the warmth of the sun lulling her to sleep.

Six hundred years of extraction on the Atlantic side. Six hundred years! She enters the house, unties the Ankara fabric from her head, rushing to complete her studies while there is electricity. Recalling the words of the professor in class today, she ponders the extraction first of people and then minerals, natural resources, and land from the continent. She must find that chapter her professor was referring to. She sits in the chair, resisting sleepiness, and begins flipping through pages. There it is. She reads how the West and others have ensured that full industrialization of products cannot happen on the land, that the profits are drained away to far-off corners of the world and not given to them — the rightful owners of the wealth. She then sits back, the hanging light flickering off and on, and starts to doze.

She knows that nothing can resuscitate a life that is gone. There is no incubator for a dead body. She saw the bullet hit, pierce skin, spew blood across the linoleum floor, stop a vital organ. The life was lost. She is not sure whether it was a shopping mall, a church, or a schoolroom. Stretched out on the carpeted floor, she covers her head with the blanket to hide from the reality of twenty to forty percent of the world’s guns in her one country. Something about a law written on paper 240 years ago. End of question. End of discussion. End of life.