Dead I've been reading often too many stories in the last year or so of police abusing and even murdering unarmed persons, both in conducting justifiable and unjustifiable arrests, usually of African-Americans, and I know one thing: it didn't happen to me and this is the indisputable truth of US police are out of control. In 1981, I was in Ann Arbor, Michigan, a university town and about as peaceful a place you could ever want to be, as well as being about an hour outside of Detroit, even then a place many people didn't want to often be, for its rampant crime and its terrible working class poverty - and yes its racial disparity. A friend and I had gone out to blow a small windfall of money on a nice dinner in an actual restaurant, and were hitch-hiking back to the center of town, at about nine o'clock. We got a ride quickly, we thought, ran up to the car that had pulled over, ebullient from our meal and our luck, only to find ourselves staring into the barrel of a pistol. The person who'd pulled us over was a cop, and he had us at gunpoint. And we didn't die. He didn't shoot us. The story he told us was that he'd had a radio call of two males possibly breaking into vehicles in the parking lot of the shopping plaza we'd been coming from (yes, we'd been to a restaurant in a mall and thinking we'd been somewhere special, but they did serve wine, after all). Not actually breaking into vehicles, just maybe, but you know, maybe. I was 5'10' and about 140 pounds, so tallish, thin, glasses, but yeah, it's dark. My friend was over six feet tall and 300 pounds. Big guy, also white. The suspects? Can't tell you, of course, but just how likely is it that we met any description that cop had? How likely is it that we weren't just two guys leaving the vicinity? And how likely is it that a cop would be within his rights to hold us at gunpoint without backup, without even calling it in - which he did and which he had not? As I pulled upon the front passenger's side door and leaned in to thank the driver, I was inches from being shot, and when my friend and I the next day confronted the officer and his superior, we didn't get an apology, we got an arrogant dismissal. Every encounter with the police in the United States can end up the same way, or worse. I didn't get shot, and I believe it's because I'm white. That if I'd been African-American or Hispanic, that when I pulled open that car door, that cop would have shot me, that I might very well never even touched the door handle and the cop would actually have been out of his car, leaning across the roof and shooting me and my friend both, with no warning and no justification. And I was oblivious enough at the time to have thought myself only aggrieved at having been held at gunpoint, not damn lucky to be alive. I don't believe the police first, not anymore, not since then, not anywhere. They don't deserve the benefit of the doubt. And today they are more heavily armed than ever, and very clearly far more apt to shoot without justification. I'm very sorry for the victims of mass shootings, very sorry that America refuses to do anything about gun control, but also that it refuses to believe it has a problem with its police and that this is part of its problem with being a gun culture, with being over 200 years old and still thinking it's the wild west and that that's o.k.

War We invaded Afghanistan after 9/11 because of a violent act of terrorism that resulted in 3,000 deaths. But we do nothing when, year after year, Americans slaughter one another with hand guns and semi-automatic rifles. The statistics are damning. And it's not just criminals. It's suicides. It's police shooting and killing civilians - even unarmed and even innocent of any wrong-doing. But gun violence still remains a frightening and unsustainable outlier. In the last decade, as shown in the chart accompanying this article, terrorism has killed 3,300 people in the US, but gun homicide accounts for 165,700: 98%! I've written to my Congressional representatives to demand they stand up against the NRA and those constitutionalists who argue spuriously, from whatever motivation, for strict Second Amendment rights. I don't believe the Constitution of the United States should continue to be interpreted as it has been, but I'll settle for sensible and strong Federal gun control measures to stop guns getting into the hands of criminals and the insane. Not another mass shooting should be allowed.