It probably hasn’t escaped the notice of even the most casual Tomato Nation reader that I have a lot of hostility. I get annoyed easily; in fact, I get really annoyed really easily. But when I talk about putting a foot in someone’s ass or giving someone a mouth full of teeth or punting someone into next week, I speak metaphorically. Oh, I could start a fight with no problem – one time, as the Biscuit and I climbed into a taxi, some guy in an SUV behind us starting honking at us, so naturally I didn’t think twice before flipping him off, and besides, I had mittens on, so I didn’t really give him the finger, I gave him a little tent, but Honking Guy didn’t see it that way, and at the next stoplight he marched up to the taxi and cursed at me and the Biscuit and the driver and then just for good measure he slammed the window on my side a couple of times with his elbow, and on the one hand I couldn’t believe that Honking Guy had gotten so bent out of shape about my giving him a little tent that he had actually gotten out of his navy blue Explorer and swaggered over to show me who wore the pants on Second Avenue and I felt as though perhaps someone in the situation – specifically, someone driving a navy blue Explorer – needed to get a life, and I really had to resist the urge to roll down the window right before the light turned green and yell “tell your girlfriend how sorry I am about your microscopic PENIS” as we drove away, and on the other hand I felt sort of scared and I didn’t want to get killed, and I also really really wished that I hadn’t gotten stuck with a woman’s body so that I could hop out of the cab and go chest-to-chest with that guy instead of cowering in the cab while the Biscuit wondered aloud whether he should laser-point Honking Guy. My point? Well, I can mouth off with unparalleled skill, but if punches start flying you’ll find me under a sturdy table doing the crossword.

My own essential wimpiness aside, though, I don’t believe that violence solves anything. Yeah, I fantasize about body-checking people who won’t get out of my way on the sidewalk, and yeah, I daydream of whirling around when the caveman du jour says “nice rack” and giving him a Jackie Chan-style backflip kick shot right to the face, but I don’t – true, I fear retaliation, but I also know that it won’t do any good. Other people on the sidewalk won’t look at me and say, “Damn, that chick means business – from now on, I’ll walk purposefully and stay over to the right.” They’ll say, “Damn, that chick needs to switch to decaf.” And the caveman du jour won’t learn his lesson about remarking on women’s breasts; he’ll just make sure to cat-call from a safer distance the next time. Obviously, if someone started in with me, I would defend myself, but otherwise I just don’t see the point.

Apparently, terrorists think that violence – not just throwing a couple of roundhouse rights in a bar brawl, but destructive and gory violence on a grand scale – does have a point. Apparently, terrorists think that they can only get the attention of the world by wreaking explosive havoc, that they can somehow achieve justice for the crimes committed against them by committing crimes against humanity. Apparently, terrorists think that murdering innocent people, sometimes hundreds at a time, will give them leverage, will force accession to their demands, will accord them some sort of prestige or esteem. I can only speculate on this twisted logic because I cannot imagine how terrorists convince themselves that slaughtering dozens of people, people who don’t make policy decisions and had nothing to do with the injustices done to the terrorists in the first place, will right any wrongs or garner them any respect. The World Trade Center bombing, the Oklahoma City bombing, the bombings of the US embassies in Nigeria and Tanzania, the repeated bombings in Ireland – hundreds of people killed, many of them children, and the people responsible thought that this had a point? What point? How could blowing a four-year-old to smithereens possibly have a point? Do they really believe that the world will look upon these acts and immediately accede their wishes, rather than vowing an equally bloody vengeance on them? The IRA probably wouldn’t stoop to something as amateurish as a letter-writing campaign, but perhaps they should consider it, because their current strategy hasn’t done much to enhance their reputation as a group of reasonable people worthy of regard.

I suppose terrorist groups believe that they have no recourse. That doesn’t forgive their actions, in my opinion, but then again, I grew up in the United States, where individuals ostensibly have rights and freedoms that they can fall back on. Unfortunately, one of those rights includes the Second Amendment – the right to bear arms. Despite a rash of incidents indicating that this amendment needs re-examination – including kids bringing guns to school and mowing down their classmates; kids accidentally shooting themselves while “playing with” their parents’ firearms; gang members murdering each other, innocent bystanders, and policemen – the NRA’s lobbying and the visceral unwillingness of the government to tamper with the Constitution have allowed this amendment to remain untouched.

Let’s take a closer look at the phrase “the right to bear arms.” We could take a willfully naÔve approach and interpret “arms” as the appendages that most of us have hanging from our upper torsos. (In the case of President Clinton, we might consider revoking even this privilege, but I digress.) But by “arms,” the framers of the Constitution really meant “firearms,” of course – the British had denied them this right, and in an age when people relied on guns not only to defend themselves but also to get themselves some dinner. A lot of time has passed since the Revolution, though, and the nature of guns has changed. Back in the day, a man could throw a bullet farther than the average musket could fire it, but today, people can buy bullets that explode inside their victims and shred their innards – not what the founding fathers had in mind, I suspect. The average citizen has absolutely no right whatsoever to carry such a weapon; even police officers don’t have the right to carry such a weapon. And nobody who has children in the house should have a weapon of any kind, because no matter how well they think they’ve hidden the gun, and no matter how stern the warnings they hand down against touching it, the children WILL find the gun and they WILL play with it and they WILL accidentally shoot themselves or one of their friends. Worse, the kids might take a couple of the guns to school and open fire on a senior breakfast. And yet the gun lobby continues to stand by the Second Amendment, and to print bumper stickers that say “NRA = USA” and “Guns Don’t Kill People, People Kill People,” and to ignore the fact that Middle America now considers Lebanon a safer vacation destination than some parts of Montana and that people use guns to kill people.

Gun owners give various reasons for keeping weapons in their homes – they collect them, or they live in a bad neighborhood, or they got robbed or mugged or something. Well, my family’s house got burglarized while we slept, but my parents didn’t react by getting a gun; they had an alarm installed, trained us to lock doors behind us, and hoped that the burglars wouldn’t come back for any electronics equipment they’d forgotten. (And if they had gotten a gun, you can bet that I would have found it and marched over to Edward Wagner’s house with it and pointed it at him and said, “Yes you do too let girls into your clubhouse, and by the way, tell your mom raisins don’t cut it on Halloween,” and it would have ended badly.) Hey, we all saw the episode of Beverly Hills, 90210 when David’s dorky friend Scott accidentally shot himself; we’ve all seen the commercials with the adorable footage of tiny children who got hold of their parents’ handguns and killed themselves by mistake; it doesn’t seem like a giant leap of reasoning to make guns harder to obtain. A lot of people have to share this planet, and it gets pretty crowded, and people get bent out of shape, and I just think that things would go a lot more smoothly if most people didn’t have guns and bombs. I know this sounds like one of those letters we used to write to the President in fourth grade begging him not to make any more nuclear bombs, but every time I pick up a newspaper I feel so frustrated and I wanted to speak my mind about it, even though I know that nobody who reads this page probably disagrees with me.

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