Bump stocks and bombs

After a couple of nice, quiet years, the neighbors have started blowing things up again.

When I moved here, the mountain behind me was entirely covered with mature forest. There was one house across the road. There were other neighbors, but the next nearest occupied house on my side of the road was hundreds of yards away. Except in hunting season, no one seemed to venture into the woods up the mountain, or explore the flood plain toward the river. There was a little cabin right next door, but the owner was elderly and seldom got to come to it anymore.

I had good relations with my neighbors. When hunters cut a trail across the elderly neighbor's land, I contacted him to make sure that they did not have permission and then confronted them when they showed up to use their unauthorized access on opening day of deer season. When a timber thief showed up and started cutting where it was easy instead of where he was being paid to cut, I alerted the neighbor and had a few conversations with the logger until he gave up and moved his operation to where it belonged. But, for the most part, good relations consisted of quiet coexistence, appreciating the natural setting we were fortunate enough to inhabit, and seeing little of each other.

Incrementally, houses pop up. Some rich guy started a "shooting preserve" on what had been a beautiful parcel of undeveloped floodplain. It had been cleared for ill-advised development in the 1980s, and then abandoned when the scam went belly up. It was a beautiful place, thick with blueberries and wildflowers. Now it is closed off to the public and it makes its money letting paying groups shoot at pen-raised exotic birds. Bang b-bang bang bang pop pow b-bang bang. But they're not the bombers.

Guns are a fact of life (and cause of death) everywhere. When the cellist is in Baltimore she hears gunfire, and its intent is usually homicidal. Up here, the projectiles are usually aimed at animals and birds, or at various inanimate targets. The river valley is an amphitheater. Sound carries a long way. You start to get a sense of who shoots what where, as the years go by.

A few years ago, my elderly neighbor with the cabin finally died. He had no children, but apparently left the property to a nephew or something. The new owner subdivided the lot and logged the half farthest from me. He sold that piece to some people who built at the back of it, sticking a house into what had been the lower skirts of the mountain's little wilderness. They have some animals and poultry. Occasionally someone will come charging out of their driveway on a racing ATV and zoom up and down the road in front of my house. It seems like a test run after working on the machine, perhaps. As much as I detest motorized recreation, I have to tighten my gut and let it happen, because they have every right to waste fuel and spew pollution to get their jollies in this free country of ours. Clean air and quiet are the casualties, the lesser rights that are easily trampled by noisy, smoky people's right to whoop it up.

Not long after these new neighbors settled in, we started hearing explosions quite close at hand. Maybe they have a cannon. Maybe they're experimenting with fertilizer bombs. I don't know. There would never be any warning. The blasts could occur at almost any hour, but seldom very late at night. We would just tighten our guts a little more, and try to get our breathing back down, and hope that one day we would hear ambulances arriving for them after one of these explosions.

One evening, several years ago, the blast was so powerful that the shock wave actually made our house bounce. The wave and the bang came out of nowhere. I felt it compress my chest as the floor dropped momentarily. It was the kind of sound you would expect to be followed by screams as a fireball billowed up into the night sky, but instead there was only blackness and silence from over there. That was a bit disappointing.

The size of the blast prompted me to call the state police to ask politely how large an explosion private citizens were allowed to enjoy before they had crossed some legal line. That prompted the staties to swing by and find out a little more from me. They may have talked to the neighbors after that, because it did usher in this long period free of bombs. From time to time I might have to put up with a little small arms fire, but that is one reason people move to the country, to be able to set up a little range and fire away. It was pretty nice.

That ended last night.

Pop pop bang bang. Bangbangbangbangbangbangbangbangbang. ....silence....BOOM 

I went out onto the deck and heard the cackling and yeehawing from next door. Years before, the staties had questioned whether I could be sure where the sound came from because of how noise travels in the river valley, with the mountain as a reflector. There was no doubt last night. It hadn't been as big as the house-shaker, but it did have a punch to it.

Some of the smaller noises could have been fireworks, but others were either firearms, or fireworks carefully created to mimic firearms. And in the bursts the rate of fire was faster than the human finger can twitch; not quite the speed of full-auto, it still marched with a quick, relentless cadence. I did not count how many rounds it was, but it was more than a few. Gunfire has a more directed sound than fireworks. You can sense that the detonation is coming out of a tube rather than simply bursting in air.

Forces gather in our troubled land, celebrating the impending abandonment of civilization. They consider themselves realists, these people who build and promote that reality instead of trying to seek a different, equally possible path. Human nature is incorrigible, they tell us. Face the fact that humans are killers and survival depends on your skills and equipment for defense. Human evolution is best represented by the evolution of our weapons, and our ability to view their effects without horror.

No thanks.

I no longer believe that humans will get their shit together and start treating each other decently. We gave up on that notion almost immediately after it reached peak popularity in the early 1970s. And even at its peak popularity, it had a long way to go to start actually making meaningful inroads on the prejudice and paranoia that shape most human interaction. But I refuse to join the forces I cannot beat. I simply spared any future generation from my loins having to live through the coming times of pain and destruction. Every bang, every boom brings a little thud of pain and sadness. I can't help a feeling of regret that my species loves violence and destruction more than anything else. But that appears to be the case. Bang. Boom. Rev. Zoom. Fire. Smoke. Cut. Dig. Grab. Consume. Discard.

I continue to support the other way, without the faintest hope of success. Just because it's losing doesn't mean it is wrong.