Packing Heat
10/03/13 05:02
Hyder Akbar is a citizen of the United States and also a citizen of Afghanistan. He is a Yale-educated young man who grew up in the United States, but returned to Afghanistan with his father after the United States overthrew the Taliban government. His father served as governor of the Kunar Province. Akbar assisted US forces in Afghanistan as a translator. He is author, with Susan Burton, of a book about his experiences in Afghanistan, called “Come Back to Afghanistan.” The book has received several honors including the San Francisco Chronicle Book of the Year, New York Times Editor’s Pick, USA Today’s Top 10 Memoirs, and the ALA Top 10 Books for Young Readers.
Hyder returned to Afghanistan to help with the rebuilding of the country. He has strong political aspirations and hopes to one day be involved in the ruling of a new Afghanistan. He is a regular contributor to WBEZ’s “This American Life,” and was the focus of a dramatic story in early December in which he told of a trip to Kunar Province in Eastern Afghanistan to report on activities there. On his way home from the trip, he came under attack and Hyder’s car took a round from a RPG and was destroyed. Hyder and his companion narrowly escaped.
Hyder Akbar does not plan to leave Afghanistan to return to the United States. He wants to be a part of the building of the future of that country. And so, he is engaged in recruiting a personal militia – a group of armed guards who can protect him from the other militias that roam his country while he works for reform and change.
By any standards, Hyder Akbar lives a dangerous life. It is uncertain whether or not he will survive to become a political success in that turbulent country.
But I didn’t intend for this blog to be about Hyder Akbar, only to have Hyder be an illustration of what life is like in a country where everyone is armed to the teeth. It is dangerous, and the only way to survive is to have more armament than the opposition. And when the people who are out to get you have rocket-propelled grenades, you have to have some pretty sophisticated weapons, and a large amount of luck, to survive.
Unlike Hyder, I have no connections to Afghanistan. I won’t be involved in the on the ground rebuilding of that country.
I do, however, live in South Dakota. And South Dakota is a place where some legislators at least believe that everyone should be packing heat. We made world headlines last week as the first state in the nation that allows teachers to be armed in the classroom. There was more coverage of the action of our legislature in the BBC than there was in our local newspaper. Around the world, people are scratching their heads at the thought of armed teachers in the classroom. Here, in a state where a lot of regular citizens carry weapons all of the time, it seems a bit less of an issue.
I know that some of the people behind the legislation had good intentions. They are aware, in the wake of the killings in New Town Connecticut, that schools can be vulnerable and dangerous places when attacked by a highly armed person seeking to create a lot of victims. The experience in Afghanistan demonstrates, however, that there are situations where answering violence with violence, force with force, gunfire with gunfire sometimes simply escalates the danger to the place where there are no more schools.
The risk isn’t what a teacher would do with a gun. The risk is what happens when that gun falls into the wrong hands. It could happen. In a state with nearly double the national average of death by suicide, where some of our rural and isolated counties top three times the national average, we know that depressed people and firearms are a deadly combination. We know that easy access to firearms makes death by suicide much more likely. In the case of most adolescent suicides, delay is sufficient to prevent the death. Emotions run amok and firearms make a deadly combination.
The folks in Whitefish, Montana know that. Last week Gregory Rodriguez, host of “A Rifleman’s Journal” on the Sportsman Channel, was sitting at the kitchen table in a private home having a glass of wine with a woman he met at a trade show. Although police do not believe their relationship was romantic, it aroused the jealousy of the woman’s husband. Wayne Bengston, in a fit of jealous rage, burst into the home, shot and killed Rodriguez, beat his wife, took his two-year-old son to the home of a relative, then went home and shot himself in the head. Rage and firearms is a deadly combination.
And we have plenty of firearms in our country. There are over 300 million firearms owned by civilians in the United States. That’s quite a few for a country with a population of 307 million. When you figure that between 55% and 60% of US households do not have guns, those that do usually have multiple guns.
Once you get to the point where everyone is armed, the arms race accelerates to include multiple weapons, larger weapons, and eventually, as is the case in Afghanistan, the need to surround yourself with a militia in order to be able to sleep at night.
It is clear that the majority of South Dakotans are opposed to arming teachers. The legislature, however, has a pretty well-established record of ignoring the majority. South Dakotans often have to employ recall and initiative in order to get the laws we want. Were we to rely on the legislature alone we’d have a lot of laws of which we don’t approve. It is one of the quirks of politics that while Republicans hold about a 10% advantage in voter registration, they control all but five counties in the state. While it is typical for about 40% of the state to vote for the Democratic candidate for President, Republicans hold 80% of the seats in the state legislature. The result is a state legislature where representatives are more likely to be influenced by out of state funders and lobbyists than they are by their constituents.
They pass laws despite the wishes of their constituents. They’ve done it again. We don’t want our teachers to have to pack heat. We don’t want our schools to be loaded with guns.
In their defense, the lawmakers say their bill doesn’t require teachers to carry weapons. It allows for individual school districts to set their own policies on weapons. I’m sure most school districts will continue to ban weapons from schools except those carried by law enforcement officers.
In the meantime the legislature didn’t seem compelled to increase funding for education enough to support fair salaries for teachers. It didn’t seem to think that student nutrition was a crisis in a state where thousands of children go to school hungry every day. It didn’t see funding for textbooks or teacher aids to be a priority. It didn’t provide sufficient funding for school districts to afford adequate counselors for students.
Let’s hope they don’t pass a bill allowing for weapons in the legislature. There are too many angry people for that to be a good idea.
Hyder returned to Afghanistan to help with the rebuilding of the country. He has strong political aspirations and hopes to one day be involved in the ruling of a new Afghanistan. He is a regular contributor to WBEZ’s “This American Life,” and was the focus of a dramatic story in early December in which he told of a trip to Kunar Province in Eastern Afghanistan to report on activities there. On his way home from the trip, he came under attack and Hyder’s car took a round from a RPG and was destroyed. Hyder and his companion narrowly escaped.
Hyder Akbar does not plan to leave Afghanistan to return to the United States. He wants to be a part of the building of the future of that country. And so, he is engaged in recruiting a personal militia – a group of armed guards who can protect him from the other militias that roam his country while he works for reform and change.
By any standards, Hyder Akbar lives a dangerous life. It is uncertain whether or not he will survive to become a political success in that turbulent country.
But I didn’t intend for this blog to be about Hyder Akbar, only to have Hyder be an illustration of what life is like in a country where everyone is armed to the teeth. It is dangerous, and the only way to survive is to have more armament than the opposition. And when the people who are out to get you have rocket-propelled grenades, you have to have some pretty sophisticated weapons, and a large amount of luck, to survive.
Unlike Hyder, I have no connections to Afghanistan. I won’t be involved in the on the ground rebuilding of that country.
I do, however, live in South Dakota. And South Dakota is a place where some legislators at least believe that everyone should be packing heat. We made world headlines last week as the first state in the nation that allows teachers to be armed in the classroom. There was more coverage of the action of our legislature in the BBC than there was in our local newspaper. Around the world, people are scratching their heads at the thought of armed teachers in the classroom. Here, in a state where a lot of regular citizens carry weapons all of the time, it seems a bit less of an issue.
I know that some of the people behind the legislation had good intentions. They are aware, in the wake of the killings in New Town Connecticut, that schools can be vulnerable and dangerous places when attacked by a highly armed person seeking to create a lot of victims. The experience in Afghanistan demonstrates, however, that there are situations where answering violence with violence, force with force, gunfire with gunfire sometimes simply escalates the danger to the place where there are no more schools.
The risk isn’t what a teacher would do with a gun. The risk is what happens when that gun falls into the wrong hands. It could happen. In a state with nearly double the national average of death by suicide, where some of our rural and isolated counties top three times the national average, we know that depressed people and firearms are a deadly combination. We know that easy access to firearms makes death by suicide much more likely. In the case of most adolescent suicides, delay is sufficient to prevent the death. Emotions run amok and firearms make a deadly combination.
The folks in Whitefish, Montana know that. Last week Gregory Rodriguez, host of “A Rifleman’s Journal” on the Sportsman Channel, was sitting at the kitchen table in a private home having a glass of wine with a woman he met at a trade show. Although police do not believe their relationship was romantic, it aroused the jealousy of the woman’s husband. Wayne Bengston, in a fit of jealous rage, burst into the home, shot and killed Rodriguez, beat his wife, took his two-year-old son to the home of a relative, then went home and shot himself in the head. Rage and firearms is a deadly combination.
And we have plenty of firearms in our country. There are over 300 million firearms owned by civilians in the United States. That’s quite a few for a country with a population of 307 million. When you figure that between 55% and 60% of US households do not have guns, those that do usually have multiple guns.
Once you get to the point where everyone is armed, the arms race accelerates to include multiple weapons, larger weapons, and eventually, as is the case in Afghanistan, the need to surround yourself with a militia in order to be able to sleep at night.
It is clear that the majority of South Dakotans are opposed to arming teachers. The legislature, however, has a pretty well-established record of ignoring the majority. South Dakotans often have to employ recall and initiative in order to get the laws we want. Were we to rely on the legislature alone we’d have a lot of laws of which we don’t approve. It is one of the quirks of politics that while Republicans hold about a 10% advantage in voter registration, they control all but five counties in the state. While it is typical for about 40% of the state to vote for the Democratic candidate for President, Republicans hold 80% of the seats in the state legislature. The result is a state legislature where representatives are more likely to be influenced by out of state funders and lobbyists than they are by their constituents.
They pass laws despite the wishes of their constituents. They’ve done it again. We don’t want our teachers to have to pack heat. We don’t want our schools to be loaded with guns.
In their defense, the lawmakers say their bill doesn’t require teachers to carry weapons. It allows for individual school districts to set their own policies on weapons. I’m sure most school districts will continue to ban weapons from schools except those carried by law enforcement officers.
In the meantime the legislature didn’t seem compelled to increase funding for education enough to support fair salaries for teachers. It didn’t seem to think that student nutrition was a crisis in a state where thousands of children go to school hungry every day. It didn’t see funding for textbooks or teacher aids to be a priority. It didn’t provide sufficient funding for school districts to afford adequate counselors for students.
Let’s hope they don’t pass a bill allowing for weapons in the legislature. There are too many angry people for that to be a good idea.