After the killings at the Connecticut primary school on December 14th, which followed a couple of mall shootings in America, it’s getting harder to explain the “gun culture” of America and the freedom to bear arms as being a good thing. The Chinese I know here are fascinated by the fact that I have guns, but think the idea is a little nuts. The Chinese of course have knives and on the same day as the Connecticut shootings had their fifth or sixth school stabbing episode in the past year or so by another disgruntled local.

I went to an amusement park with some Chinese friends in Inner Mongolia this past summer and they had a pellet-gun shooting gallery with balloon targets. It was pretty popular with the Chinese who don’t shoot very well. Turns out I hadn’t lost my touch.

I’ve owned guns since I was nineteen. They weren’t allowed when I was growing up and my father’s temper and unpredictable outbursts caused enough damage with being slapped around as it was. Guns probably would have killed off most of us. I got one about a soon as I could. The first one I had was an M1 carbine, a military weapon used in World War II, Korea and in the early years of the Vietnam War. During World War II, my mother worked for a while as an inspector at the Poughkeepsie IBM plant that made carbines. I didn’t learn that until I got my first one.

My second firearm (the NRA and other advocates of the Second Amendment distinguish “firearm” from “weapon” in an attempt to neutralize the onerous intent for which many of these things were designed), was an obsolescent 7.5 mm Swedish straight-bolt rifle, military surplus, that I ordered with ammunition from a Montgomery Wards catalog for less than $100 in 1967. Both gun and about 100 rounds of ammunition were left at my apartment door by the UPS guy, in unmarked cardboard boxes – gun and enough ammo to hurt a lot of people if someone had that in mind – just left outside by the door. That kind of bothered me a little.

The first gun I ever shot was in fact a shotgun owned by a high-school classmate, Dick Keene. We went in the woods behind our houses and fired it off a few times. Dick whacked a bird – all that was left was a puff of feathers. I wasn’t happy with that outcome, but it was a time to be tough and not a wimp. Dick Keene joined the U.S. Navy and was killed in the 1967 Israeli War by Israeli’s – who deliberately attacked his spy ship, the U.S.S. Liberty, over several hours during which President Lyndon Johnson recalled other American help that was on the way. That’s a whole other story…….

I bought another surplus carbine, this one actually manufactured by IBM, from a collector in Raleigh, North Carolina sometime in 1985 or 86. I got it back to New York by wrapping it, a short handled shovel and a couple other things in plastic and cardboard as checked baggage on an American Airlines flight from Raleigh to Laguardia – no questions asked.

My first father-in-law carried a small .32 automatic pistol because his job as boss of the local Trussell Manufacturing (maker of spiral-ring and other stationery), required him to move money around. Occasionally we’d shoot that and a .22 caliber pistol he had in the rural setting of my first house.

I taught my kids about guns – three boys – and they were always careful with the things and followed the rules: always assume it’s loaded, never point it at anything you don’t intend to shoot and don’t ever just “fool around” with them. I went shooting with my youngest son, now quite old, and my granddaughter this past summer and saw that he’d passed on the rules to her as well and practices all the safety and caution I taught. She’s a pretty good shot.

My weapons (let’s not kid ourselves), are all World War II vintage except for a Revolutionary War original flintlock musket and a modern copy. I occasionally shoot the copy, but the original is a little too valuable – and old – to take any chances. Flintlock guns are curious things to shoot because of the slight delay between the time the flint (a piece of stone), hits a piece of steel to make sparks and the sparks find their way to a reservoir of gun powder which then has to get a spark into a small hole in the barrel to ignite the powder there the explosion of which propels a 3/4 inch lead ball out the barrel. You’ve got to hold the gun on the target while all that is going on and before the thing actually fires, your view is obscured by smoke and sparks flying all over the place. Old guns like that, before rifling twisted a bullet in flight and made it more accurate, couldn’t hit much and the lead ball had to have enough clearance in the barrel to account for a quick buildup of residue from rotten-egg smelling black powder, so the first two or three shots rattled around in the barrel on their way out. The only way they were effective was to line up a row of people who all shot in the same direction at the same time which is why the Red Coats lined up like that all the time.

The Second Amendment notion came about as a result of that dust up between the American Colonies and England, which wouldn’t have been possible if the citizens of the Colonies were not well armed. Nearly every farmer and a lot of other colonial citizens had at least one gun back then, not only for hunting, but for protection from animals and pissed off native Americans who resented being pushed around. A war with the French not only brought about some of the taxes and other onerous measures Colonists objected to, but also armed and trained a lot of people who defended British America from the French and their Native American allies in a war which ended only twelve years before Lexington and Concord.

So when it came time to setting up a new way to govern, the folks writing things like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were painfully aware of the kind of government they didn’t want and of the kinds of provisions that might preserve the things they did want. And given their recent experience with the Central Government of King George III, they thought that a central government might think twice before overreaching if the citizens of the separate States retained the same kind of weaponry as the central government’s army. It was, after all, the existence of armed citizens that made Lexington, Concord and the Revolution possible. And it’s armed citizens, not armies, which have made all revolutions against tyranny possible – from France in the 18th Century, to Syria in the 21st. At the time of the Second Amendment, a citizen’s gun was technologically equivalent to the Army’s so the tacit threat was credible. While parity in arms between government armies and citizens no longer exists, hesitation by a government contemplating overreaching, from knowing citizens may not sit idly by as their rights are infringed, may be worth the terrible price we pay from time-to-time. Or maybe it’s just a quaint idea whose time has passed.

I don’t want to give up my guns. I follow the law, I don’t shoot people. I went through all the procedures and checks and processes. I even had guns legally in Boston. And if you ever want to find a place that makes it hard to keep a gun, it’s Boston which is kind of ironic because Boston would still be British if the locals had to go through all the hoops and loops to have a gun there that they have to go through now.

But maybe we’ve got to do something. There are too many nuts out there. The guns citizens have are no match for the guns of the Central Government’s Army anyway – or for their tanks, artillery, airplanes, drones and all the rest. So the idea that an armed citizenry is a counter-balance to overreaching government is obsolete – except of course for the Arab Spring and other stuff like that. I sure wish we weren’t dismantling and co-opting the free-press as the media tries to match declining advertising revenue to expenses. Guns are one thing, but that notion that the pen is mightier than the sword is a good one.

In any event, it’s sure hard to explain all this to a young person from China who’s a little worried about attending an American college or university.

Speaking of China, my time may be winding down. I got brushed back by a guy on a motorbike the other day. I had all I could do to keep from throwing an elbow and knocking him and his kid to the ground. I didn’t see the kid until the bike’s handle bar hit me in the ribs. I shouted a reliable American English epithet as the guy sped off which of course had no effect. I need to learn some in the local Shanghaiese dialect. It is getting old though. In February, I’ll begin my fifth year in Shanghai and my sixth in China. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to the PJ’s in broad daylight, the walking backwards for exercise, the people beating on trees or the old ladies in semi-uniform doing ritualized sword pantomime or aerobics to the beat of portable boom-boxes every morning in Yangpu Park.

I’m tired of teaching. It occurred to me that this teaching thing is about the longest time I’ve done the same thing almost ever. I can’t remember being at the same place, doing the same thing with many of the same people for this long before. Many of the kids are fun and well-intentioned, but too many are just rich kids looking for a free-ride and a trip to Europe of America to shop and see the world.

I do my best to try to understand and appreciate the culture and there are for sure aspects Chinese culture that are admirable. At the same time, however, the lack of what I think of as basic logic just doesn’t exist here. These folks simply aren’t trained to think. It’s almost impossible to logically talk about wide open windows and doors in winter with an electric heater going full blast or the opposite when in oppressive heat and humidity, air conditioners are running at their highest settings – all in a country that uses only florescent light bulbs in a bid to save energy. I’ve been helping a kid prepare for the IELTS comprehensive standardized English competency exam and have been having a hell of a time persuading her she can’t memorize all the possible questions and plausible answers to random followup questions she might be asked in the speaking part of the exam. Or in fact for the topics about which she might be asked to write or speak. Yet, most kids – actually all of them, buy every self-help book they can find with consist of possible questions based on past examinees and answers to recite and memorize. Examiners know this so they try never to use the same predictable questions, but even knowing that doesn’t help. Pointing out that it might be a good idea to memorize the general way to structure an answer would be helpful just doesn’t resonate. “But that won’t be the answer.” they say. So it’s useless and they won’t do it. Pointing out the repeated fact that Chinese mainland students score the poorest on the planet on these exams has no effect whatsoever – even often with parents, private tutoring companies and many teachers and school administrators.

I’ll be visited in a little while by a twenty-one year old sex worker who is a “massage” girl in in a small shop on the first floor of my apartment building – exactly ten floors below. I live in a nice section of town – a high-end apartment complex – not in some sleazy neighborhood filled with prostitutes and drug addicts which would be the case if the same situation were in New York or Chicago. Adjacent shops include a pet store, a foot massage place, a small shipping company, a nursery for little kids and a bogus medical scam where old people get wired up to “medical devices” that have no effect except that they think they do. It’s filled with old people connected by alligator clips to their nose or ear or wrapped with a cheap heating pad-like device all connected to a smart-looking box that does nothing.

The girl is from a small and poor village near touristy Guilin in southern China and is in Shanghai because it’s the easiest place to earn the most money for girls in her “situation” divorced, with a young child – in her case a daughter about two years old. She sees her kid two or three times a year. I pass her place of work at least twice a day so we’ve become friends of a sort – although she speaks almost no English. When she shows up, which has become a little more frequent in the last few months as the weather’s turned colder, she sits at my computer and used Rosetta Stone, the language learning software, to learn English. She’s tough on herself; the program is self-grading, and isn’t happy with a score of less than 100 on any module. Her job, which primarily consists of providing temporary “relief” to any guy in need, is just that – a job and one that literally thousands of girls and women have all over Shanghai – within a block or two of almost any street, all over the city. She isn’t happy with her work, but has to provide for her family and without college or any other practical training – that’s all there is, pretty much that pays. After seeing this kind of thing, virtually everywhere in China over four or five years, it becomes part of the landscape and just “normal” – no sinister or other moral judgement attached.

We “talk” via QQ, the Chinese version of MSN or some other instant messenger and by using “Google Translate” with a smattering of English, but not much. I’ve seen photos of her family and hometown. Her family inhabit an unheated cinder block room or two in a rural part of southwestern China where drugs are easy to come by due to the proximity of Burma and Laos. She’s not unique by a long shot which is a burden on this country not soon to be lifted.

So, despite some of the percs of being in China, almost free ninety minute foot massages and thirty dollar ninety minute full body massages among them, I may be running out my string. If I stop the teaching gig, I lose the long-term visa and getting a Chinese “green card” is really, really difficult, usually involving either marriage, buying a house or investing big money – none of which I’m up for at the moment. I’m good until this coming July or August. After that, it’s probably going to be Plan B. I’m not sure what that is either.