Guns
With this past week’s 15-vote
misadventure of the GOP in the House Speakership drama, maybe you thought I’d
focus on the Republican Party’s (in)ability to govern. But other news has been
the focus of my attention.
Most Latter-day Saints in Utah
(and many outside the Beehive State) are probably aware of the shooting deaths
of eight family members in Enoch, Utah. At first, all we were told was that
police had discovered eight people dead in a home in southern Utah. Details
came out gradually. We learned that a husband and father had murdered his wife,
her mother, and the couple’s five children and then turned the gun on himself.
My initial reaction was sadness that yet another troubled soul had taken out
his anger on his family. Then my sister called.
Jolene and her husband, Jim, had
spent most of their married life in the Columbus, Ohio, area, where Jim had
been a professor at Ohio State until he had to retire with a disability. My
sister then went to work, first as a chemist and then as a manager, for
Battelle. She retired a few years ago, and they moved from Columbus to
Hurricane, Utah, near St. George, to enjoy a better climate for Jim’s
deteriorating health. Interestingly, they moved into a ward where two of our
cousins lived. We have quite a few cousins in the St. George area, since my
dad’s family had settled in Enterprise, about 40 miles north of (and 2,600 feet
higher than) St. George.
When Jolene called me last Thursday,
she asked if I had heard about the Enoch tragedy. I said yes. She then informed
me that the victims were members of our extended family. Specifically, the
perpetrator’s mother-in-law, Gail Earl, was the wife of our first cousin Boyd,
who had died three years ago from cancer. Boyd’s brother is one of the cousins
who live in Jolene’s Hurricane ward. The wife who was murdered would have been
my children’s second cousin. This was, of course, a shock, but not as much as
it would have been had I known the family.
You see, my dad was one of the
younger siblings in a family of ten children. He also moved to Salt Lake City
after serving in World War II, where he earned a degree in accounting at the
University of Utah. He then moved further north, to Ogden, where he had been
hired by his future father-in-law to work in his small CPA firm. Dad didn’t
stay with Grandpa’s little business long, but he did stay in the Ogden area.
Jolene and I grew up in North Ogden, where Grandpa had given our parents a lot
to build a house on. Consequently, we didn’t see our Terry cousins very often,
since most of them lived in southern Utah. We were especially disconnected from
Dad’s older siblings, because their children (our cousins) were quite a bit
older than we were.
Frances was one of Dad’s older
sisters. She married Evan Earl, and they lived in St. George until their
deaths. I’m not sure I ever met their son Boyd or his wife, Gail. Boyd was 14
years older than I was, so by the time I was old enough to remember our
occasional visits to St. George, he may have already left home. And we didn’t
spend much time with Frances’s family anyway when we visited. Dad was closer to
the two sisters who were just older and younger than him, and they had kids who
were near the age of Jolene and me, so we mostly spent time with them.
Needless to say, I never met
Tausha Earl, Boyd and Gail’s daughter, who married Michael Haight, the unhappy
husband and father who killed his family in Enoch early last week. We do know
that Tausha had filed for divorce on December 21. Jolene said she had met Gail.
She got together for lunch a while ago with the “Earl women,” probably the
daughters and daughters-in-law of our aunt Frances.
This is of course a terrible
tragedy, and quite unexpected, according to the Haights’ extended family and
neighbors. We may never know what caused this active LDS husband and father to
take out his anger and frustration on his children, his wife, and his
mother-in-law, who was staying there to support her daughter during what had to
be a difficult time. I believe it was Jolene who told me that Michael had
refused to leave the house, but according to news accounts, Tausha’s attorney said
she had not expressed any fear that Michael would physically harm her.
But he apparently had a gun. And in
a desperate moment, he used it.
And so, my cousin’s wife Gail, her
daughter Tausha, and five of her grandchildren have become statistics in the
ongoing gun slaughter that occurs multiple times every day in America. As I
write, on January 8, there have already been 17 mass shootings in
America this new year that have left 23 people dead and 69 injured. According
to the Gun Violence Archive, whose statistics I am using, a mass shooting is
one in which four or more individuals are shot or killed.
In 2022, 44,260 Americans died
from gun violence, including 20,170 homicides or unintentional shootings and
24,090 suicides. There were 648 mass shootings and 36 mass murders. In 2022,
314 children age 0-11 were killed and 680 were injured; 1,356 teens (age 12-17)
were killed and 3,793 were injured. Guns are the leading cause of death among
children under 18, barely edging out automobile crashes.
Comparing gun deaths and injuries
in America with statistics from other wealthy countries shows that we are an outlier,
by wide margins. There are, on average, 11.9 gun deaths per 100,000 citizens in
the United States, compare with 1.9 in Canada, 1.0 in Germany, and 0.2 in the
United Kingdom. Japan’s average is so low it registers as 0.
The reason for America’s wide
statistical margin is twofold. First, Republican legislators refuse to enact
reasonable gun restrictions even though a majority of Republicans favor some of
them. For instance, according to fivethirtyeight.com, 91 percent of Democrats
and 77 percent of Republicans favor universal background checks. Similarly, 85
percent of Democrats and 70 percent of Republicans favor “red flag” laws. It is
revealing to note, however, that while 83 percent of Democrats favor banning
assault weapons, only 37 percent of Republicans favor such laws. Interestingly,
although there are more guns in America than people, less than half of
Americans have a gun in their house (48 percent of Republicans, 28 percent of
Democrats). But despite Republican voters’ support of certain gun laws, GOP
legislators are seemingly cowed by the gun lobby.
The second reason for America’s
outlier status among wealthy nations is that we love our guns more than we love
life. And Republicans are adamant about this. Even though they claim to be the
pro-life party, when it comes to guns, they would rather preserve the right to
own them almost unrestricted than to save the thousands of lives that
unrestricted gun access snuffs out. This is similar to the attitude toward
masks and vaccinations that prevailed far more among Republicans than Democrats
during the height of the pandemic. Individual freedom outweighs the greater
good.
So, in the end, while this blog
post will likely not move any LDS Republican to forsake the GOP, perhaps it can
serve as one more straw on the camel’s back. If the Republican Party had less
support, we would definitely have more effective gun laws in the United States.
And there is a direct correlation between the prevalence of guns in a society
and the number of gun deaths. But until we love life more than guns, nothing
will change. I keep wondering when the people of this country will grow so sick
of the carnage that they will willingly give up their weapons of death. Perhaps
never. Perhaps some of us are fine with the carnage. It’s just collateral
damage in the culture wars plaguing America, and a misconstrued and anachronistic
line in the Bill of Rights prevents us from considering the obvious solution to
this mess. And so we can expect to have endless repeats of the disaster that
has now affected my extended family until it affects every family in America.
Is that what we want?
According to news reports, all
three adults in the Enoch tragedy were trained in the use of guns, and Michael
had apparently removed guns from the house shortly before the shooting, perhaps
to make sure his wife and mother-in-law could not defend themselves. In the
statement from the Earl family, they caution against using this tragedy for
political purposes, but it is exactly the staggering number of these sorts of
shootings that make this a political issue. We need to talk about it, and we
need political action—or
else nothing will change. The family tries to make the case that if the “protective
arms” had not been removed from the house, Tausha and her mother could have
defended themselves and the children. But that is wishful thinking. Even with guns
in the house, Michael still could have easily attacked when Tausha and Gail
were nowhere near the weapons. Assuming the Haights were responsible gun
owners, those weapons would have been locked away, unloaded, with the bullets
stored separately from the guns, because they had small children in the house. So
I don’t buy the Earl family’s attempt to depoliticize what is a very political tragedy.
I’m sorry, but I have to speak out on this, even though (or especially) because
it strikes so close to home.
As a final thought, a sobering
though perhaps irrelevant fact in this sad calamity is the echo of family history.
Michael Haight was a great-great-great-grandson of Isaac Haight, the stake
president and militia officer in Cedar City who ordered the 1857 attack on the
Baker-Fancher party, more widely known as the Mountain Meadows Massacre.
