Note--There we a spate of shootings at schools, stores, and other public places in the past week or so, all killings differentiated from "ordinary urban street crime," but death tolls were fewer than all of the fingers of your hand. That just enough to get a minute on network news with some shaky cell phone video and after-the-fact crime scene shots, a 15 second sound bite from a local police chief or Sheriff. Then--poof--the incidents sink silently from awareness. So many other critical issues now demand our immediate attention the sane gun policy is practically off the table. Until, that is, the next mass murder with sufficient numbers. Five years ago in 2021, just after a spate of killings, I posted this.
Pundits are already finding the silver lining in the Coronavirus year—the lock down and school closings gave us a respite from the kind of mass gun murders that had become numbingly routine in the previous decade. Of course that didn’t take into account the rise in urban street crime shoot ‘em ups that have drenched many of our cities in Black and Brown blood. That is something somehow entirely different even to many White and Anglo anti-gun violence crusaders. Be that as it may, the pause in those other mass shootings has abruptly ended as vaccinations have spread, infections, and deaths gone down and states and municipalities have rushed to open up and return to something that seems normal. Part of normal includes what is spit out of the barrels of assault weapons.
Easy to obtain from suburban gun shops, private sales, and out-of-state purchases, automatic weapons and combat ammo seized by Chicago police in 2019 fuel the steep rise in deadly street crime in the city.
In one week we have seen the Georgia attacks on women, Asians, and massage parlors that left eight dead and the Boulder, Colorado supermarket attack that has claimed ten. In the first case the assailant was a young white man who was “having a bad day” and targeted those who apparently tempted his sexual purity. Local and even Federal authorities seem to have a hard time charging the shooter with a hate crime although victim communities—Asians and women—clearly understand it to be.
In Colorado the shooter was an apparently Muslim man. One suspects that authorities will have less trouble labeling him a hate crime offender and plainly calling the incident what it clearly is—an act of terrorism.
In both cases the offenders—we won’t bother with the nicety of calling them “alleged”—were captured alive unlike many un-armed Blacks in routine traffic stops or mental health crisis. And in both cases there are very loose restrictions on gun ownership and in the case of Colorado allows open-carry. In fact, just days earlier a state court overturned an assault weapon ban that was enacted in the wake of other Centennial State atrocities.
In the aftermath of both shooting, the same old pattern of responses have rolled out—public outrage and demands for immediate action, moves by Democrats including President Joe Biden and members of the House and Senate vowing to enact legislation this time, and the gun lobby and their bought-and-paid-for Congressional mouth pieces telling us how they mourn the victims but that the rest of us have to calm down and not act in haste. The gun nuts are confident that once again outrage will fade after a few weeks and we can all return to the normal of deadly weapons for all who want them in the name, of course, of freedom.
I'm in my 70s now but this sign that I carried in a march in Woodstock after the Parkland mass murder is sadly relevant again. As a nation we never seem to learn...I'm carrying it again in my heart today for Boulder.
Over the years I have written poetry often, far too often, after explosions of gun violence, mass murder, and domestic terrorism in this country. It feels like there is hardly anything else to say—no new insights, outrage, or grief. The parade of atrocities seems never ending, as does our by-now ritualized and inadequate responses. However familiar they become, we cannot allow ourselves to be numbed by them. We cannot lay aside our outrage and our anger not only against the individual perpetrators, but those who encourage, abet, and arm them. We must resist the culture that fosters violence and hate and take positive action—far more than ever before—to stop it.
Almost two years ago [2019] after yet another outrage—the El Paso Walmart attack—I trotted out just some—not all—of the verse I composed after previous events. Gun violence has all too frequently been my poetic topic over the years. You will be forgiven if you can’t even remember some of the incidents—there have been far too many of them and the blur over time.
The victims at Umpqua Community College--now barely a footnote.
Ritual Bloodletting, Breast Beating, and Blaming
October 1, 2015
In the Wake of Umpqua Community College Killings
Grief stricken families, victims, and survivors
are the bullies
the launchers of vast, dark conspiracies
and the gun worshipers and fantasy world heroes
the mewling, pitiful victims.
Step right over the victims.
Don’t slip on the blood.
Remember what is Holy and Sacred.
…Or we will kill you.
—Patrick Murfin
Not John Brown.
He Who Shall Not Be Named Here
November 27, 2015
After Colorado Springs
No! He is not Old John Brown
come round again
no matter the wild eyes
and wilder beard.
The unborn will not rise up
and arm themselves,
to wreck vengeance on
the women who carry them
and anyone who ever
had a kind word or thought
for them.
God is not on his side
just as He/She/It
is not on the side of
righteous trigger-happy cops
tempted by the backs
of Black young people.
Just as Allah is not on the side
of fanatics in Syria, Iraq, and Paris.
He will never savor martyrdom,
ride to his own hanging
on his casket,
only the long, lonely oblivion
of maximum prison hole.
Despite his yearnings
a nation will not march to war
with his name ringing in song
on hundred thousand lips.
With luck, rivers of blood
and mountains of corpses,
families turned against families,
the land laid waste,
will not be his legacy.
With luck.
—Patrick Murfin
Bodies amid the refuse of the stampede to get out of the line of fire in Las Vegas.
What Doesn’t Stay In Vegas
October 3, 2017
What happens in Vegas doesn’t stay there.
It oozes under the front door
of that little house in Tennessee
leaving a nasty stain in the carpet
that will last generations.
It drips from the empty desk
in the high school office
where the phone rings unattended
next to a famed family photo
and a jar of M & Ms.
It is tangled in the nets
of that Alaska trawler
spilling on the deck
and splattering those rubber boots.
It has to be wiped from the table
of that Disneyland café
by some other harried waitress
before it spoils some child’s
special day
or gets on Snow White’s costume.
It pools by the council’s table
in a San Diego courtroom
the empty chair
unable to represent
the mother of three.
It cannot be washed from
the filthy hands
of every politico
who took gun pushers’ cash
and kissed the ass of every
fetishist wanking himself off
to violence porn and hero fantasies.
—Patrick Murfin
Three Holes in the Valentine Heart
Chicago 1929
Toddlin’ Town rat-a-tat-tat,
just Jazz Age juice and justice,
Tommy guns talkin’
fedoras flying,
mugs massacred,
wanna-be eye doc,
grease monkey
garage gore gone.
“Only Capone kills like that.”
Cool beans!
Gangsters!
Northern Illinois University 2008
Gunman on campus!
Good-guy grad student
gone goofy
lecture hall lesson
in shot gun blasts
and Glock gotchas.
Campus cops closing in,
one last round
under the chin,
oblivion.
Twenty-three down,
sixteen shot,
five dead and,
oh yeah, the perp.
Is that all?
Piker! Ain’t no Virginia Tech!
hardly worth the weeping and wailing
all those vigils and candlelight!
And the NRA says all those pussy students
who didn’t pack their own heat
should have OK corralled it.
Nothing to see here,
move along.
Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School 2018
Crazy Cruz kid had issues,
gas mask, smoke grenades,
and a handy AK-47
extra magazines just in case.
Shoot, pull fire alarm.
spray death, kick in doors,
spray death, repeat.
Efficient.
Thoughts and prayers
out the wazoo today.
Blame tomorrow.
Not me, not us.
Unpreventable.
Look….a squirrel
or Stormy Danniels’ cleavage,
any damn thing…
—Patrick Murfin
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