The Story of a Star Wound

From the Archives

(Before you get into the midweek piece below, I want to beseech you again to subscribe, in one form or another, and share. Only way I can grow this enterprise. Seems to be consistent interest in my work, but growth has slowed down a bit. These Wednesday or Thursday dispatches, for the time being, will have a popular piece from the archives and usually a bit of commentary on contemporary news. Eventually, I’ll start sharing chapters of a new novel, and other material, which might turn this into premium content for the midweek for paid subscribers. But no decisions yet. - JM)

There was a story on CNN’s website this morning that ought to drive all of us to a safe room, if not a rubber one. The piece indicated that there have been 39 mass shootings in the first three weeks of this year. Is there another country on the planet, except for those at war, that has that many in a year; even a tenth of that number? The leading cause of death in the U.S. among people under the age of 24 is now firearms; not motor vehicle accidents or drugs; it’s guns. An even more astonishing number reported is that since 1990 more than a million Americans have died from guns. We probably shouldn’t expect anything different since the Switzerland-based Small Arms Survey indicates that are now 120 guns in our population for every 100 people.

The argument used to justify this is the Second Amendment. I won’t bother going into a deconstruction of that thinking because by now it has become passe’. But it’s worth reminding people that piece of the Bill of Rights was drafted in a time when there was a fear the government, even a foreign one, might try to take control of the young nation. Guns in households at that time might have held off small parties of foot soldiers. Might not have saved the nation, though, to have every man, woman, and child firing from a window at enemy troops. Who would be likely to have the most ammo and guns? That calculus is no different today than it was two and a half centuries plus into our past. Everyone who says their household armories are what’s keeping America free are more entertaining than realistic. Does anyone think that if there were a military takeover or a fascist coup across the land led by spray-tanned despot that their missiles and tanks and grenades and automatic weapons could be stopped by NRA enthusiasts?

Not a chance.

But where does that leave us in the land of the locked and loaded? I wonder what might happen if we adopted laws similar to those in Australia and Germany that require mental health exams, annual training courses, and frequently renewed licenses with in-home checks to prove your guns are in one safe and the ammo is stored separately in another secured lock box of steel. Imagine the outrage and threats to politicians who proposed such gun safety laws. We choose guns over people because we suffer the delusion guns are protecting more people than they kill, a notion which is demonstrably false.

There seems to be no place for this country to veer away from our gun culture. When Australia was stunned by a 1996 massacre at Port Arthur in Tasmania, the deaths of 35 people in the tourist community led almost immediately to national support for a gun registry, a gun buyback program, extensive safety laws, and a waiting period for any type of gun purchase, which enabled background, mental health, and character checks. The logistics of just a buyback program in the U.S. border on the irrational. The government would need to purchase almost 400 million guns from the current population of just over 331 million people, and the resistance to potential laws like those enacted in Australia would send Tucker Carlson into A-fib. 

We arrive, then, at the current picture of our society. America has a culture where guns remain readily accessible and almost anyone can purchase what they need to protect themselves, go hunting, or massacre their neighbors. In Texas, you only need your pulse to be palpable to buy a gun. No training or license or any detailed background checks. Every time there are slaughters like the one at Uvalde, there is a hardly talk of gun safety and always accusations that the killer needed mental help or we need to harden security at our schools. No politician gets behind gun control, or increasing expenditures on mental health programs. Hell, Texas Governor Greg Abbott flew to a fund raiser with anti-gun supporters just hours after he had been to the Uvalde killing site, and not too many hours later he addressed the National Rifle Association’s convention in Houston, his only sensitivity being he did so by video instead of showing up in person.

There’s no denying that guns made the settlement of this country possible, but it’s illogical to think they are as important today as they were when people were protecting their settlements from depredations by indigenous peoples or outlaws determined to take whatever they wanted. Guns are how the West was won. They can also turn into how America is lost.

The Story of a Star Wound

There is a stretch of Highway 385 that runs 58 miles from Fort Stockton, south to Marathon. The chip sealed caliche roadbed unfurls through a beauty way that increases in glory with each southbound mile. Though I have ridden a motorcycle or driven a four-wheeled vehicle down that road uncountable times in more than four decades, I am always enchanted by passing through the Sierra Madera Astrobleme, a crater caused by a meteorite colliding with our little planet.

An “astrobleme” is a compound word from Greek that means, literally, a “star wound.” Geologists from the University of Texas at the Permian Basin have studied the crater extensively and estimate the impact of the foreign object was about 100 million years in the past, which places it 34 million years prior to the Chicxulub impactor, which geological studies indicate was responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs. Our Texas impact crater, located entirely within the private confines of the grand La Escalera Ranch, is less than ten miles across, and shows a spoiler pile of mountains that are about 800 feet above the desert floor. What we don’t know is the effect it had on all creatures, great and small, that were then walking in the world.

I was out that way again this week on the old motorbike, riding with a buddy, and luxuriating in my consistent good fortune that there was not a car to be seen in the rear view or across the long mountainous horizon I was running toward. Unfortunately, the serenity was temporary because I passed two black and white DPS troopers set up in speed trap formation and separated by only a few miles to maintain radio contact. Two more black and whites passed us as they headed northbound, and on the return trip a few days later, we witnessed three other DPS vehicles racing southward.

I mention this because, in all my years of rolling down that road, I have never seen a law enforcement vehicle. People in a hurry to reach the national park, or racing for a cocktail at the Gage Hotel, and who don’t care about a silly ol’ astrobleme, never seem to worry about speeding. There has been no apparent need. There have also rarely been cops, and in my case, none.

Guess what’s different?

Hate to bring him up again, but it’s Greg Abbott. The governor seems to be running a kind of borderland cop cartel. Whenever he wants to play tough guy or trigger the FOX “bimbobs” to call him up for an interview, Abbott flexes on border security. A surge of immigrants during the Trump administration didn’t bother the Texas governor enough for him to offer criticism of kids in cages and billions that were to be wasted on a useless wall. Biden’s election, however, prompted the governor to announce he was beefing up Operation Lone Star, a coordinated effort between the Texas Department of Public Safety and the Texas National Guard to protect the border.

If you happen to drive Highway 83 between Laredo and McAllen, you can see the manifest results of this increased law enforcement: There is a DPS vehicle parked on the road every four or five miles, and there are more as you approach towns. An officer always seems to be eating at every restaurant along the route, too. But are they actually needed? They certainly seem to have reduced speeding on that border road.

Cops and a Robber

Protecting the border is the job of the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (USCBP), not the Texas DPS or its chapter of the National Guard. If a crime is committed on Texas soil, the state’s law officers can arrest a perpetrator. What is less clear is their authority to detain border crossers. They use the benign term “referral” to describe what they are doing when getting illegal trespassers into the custody of USCBP. Abbott has increased numbers of these Texas civil servants to the border several times and has pissed away billions in taxpayer money to nab small time drug runners and mothers and children seeking asylum.

Each iteration of Operation Lone Star includes a news conference with the governor, always attired in khaki, surrounded by serious looking law officers, which is nothing more than a staged campaign event for him to talk about the alleged failure of the Biden administration. Taxpayers are funding his theatrics and Abbott and his enablers are already envisioning the TV ads that will come out of these histrionics and him playing America’s sheriff.

He’s already running for president.