Ed Madden
Semi
I. accessories
On CNN, NRA spokesmodel Dana Loesch tells Alisyn Camerota that the AR-15—used by the shooter at Stoneman Douglas High School to kill 17 people just days before—is the most popular home defense weapon for women in the United States. An AR-15 is just a rifle, she says. What makes it different is the color of it and what makes it different is the accessories that it has on it.
On the toy assault rifles you can buy for kids, there is a fake safety switch to teach kids how to toggle between safe, semi, and fully automatic. The safety switch is integrated into the mode switch, safety being not a condition or a lock, just another mode of use.
Each gun has a red tip, so that any cop seeing the gun raised—even, presumably, from a great distance—will know that it is a fake.
II. safety
When asked, during her Senate confirmation hearings, whether guns should be allowed in schools, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos referred to a school in rural Wyoming: I would imagine that there’s probably a gun in the school to protect from potential grizzlies.
My friend Tony says when he was a kid his uncle was showing his sister how to hold a gun and it accidentally went off, singeing his ear. Everyone just laughed, he says.
Twitter exploded with laughter about potential grizzlies, but DeVos’s answer was actually quite savvy. She framed the gun as a tool of the American frontier, guns in the hands of hunters and ranchers, saving our kids from critters and Injuns.
When Alisyn Camerota suggested to Dana Loesch that, yes, hunters are legitimate users of guns, but no hunter needs an assault rifle, Loesch smiled, We could have that discussion all day long.
On toy assault rifles on which the safety switch is molded onto the gun rather than being an operative switch, the lever is forever on semi, stuck between auto and safe.
It’s a permanent mode: semi-safe.
III. only
After the 2012 Newton massacre in which 20 children and 6 teachers were killed, Wayne LaPierre spoke up, he said, for the safety of our nation’s children. LaPierre said, The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.
The only thing.
Wayne doesn’t talk about potential grizzlies. After Newtown, he cut off the conversation about reasonable gun control by describing a world filled with genuine monsters—people so deranged, so evil, so possessed by voices and driven by demons, he said. They walk among us every day, he said.
After the student walkouts, a local commentator asked on the newspaper website: “OK, kids, here is one question for you. Actually, it’s the ONLY question. If you are barricaded in your classroom with your teacher and an armed madman is breaking into YOUR classroom, would you want your teacher to be armed? Yes or No.”
The only question?
Do you still beat your wife? Yes or no? There is no good answer.
The toy assault rifle shoots 6mm BB bullets. It comes with the following warnings: Do not shoot at human or animal. Only for use by persons 18 years or older.
Editor’s Note: This poem originally appeared as part of a multimedia window installation at Tapp’s Art Center on Main Street in Columbia, SC, by Madden and his husband Bert Easter. You can learn more about the installation, called In Guns We Trust, in this post from the Jasper Project blog.
Ed Madden is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Ark (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2016), a memoir in verse about caring for his father in his last months of living with cancer; and the chapbook, So they can sing, winner of the 2016 Robin Becker Poetry Prize from Seven Kitchens Press. Madden is the director of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, SC.
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