Guns: Part 2 — A Band-Aid Is Not Enough

In my previous post, I pointed out that guns kill or injure over 100,000 Americans annually. In 2013, there were 73,505 nonfatal firearm injuries and 33,636 deaths due to "injury by firearms". This carnage is escalating and we need to stop it now.

I offer suggestions. They are just that: suggestions, ideas, talking points. I throw them on the table for debate. Maybe one of them will stimulate a better idea.

What convictions are behind these suggestions? Where do they come from?

Partly it is about responsibility. All of us, especially political leaders, have some responsibility to help correct this situation in which so many innocent lives are lost every year. Those who refuse to help, who actively resist change, are part of the problem.

Partly it is about fairness. If a segment of the public chooses to make firearms easily available to almost anyone, they should bear the cost and consequences of their choice. Gun advocates demand their “gun rights” but expect others to bear the costs. That needs to change.

Partly it is about the rationale for owning a gun. Guns can be entertaining. Target shooting requires skill and knowledge. Hunting is a sport enjoyed by many. Gun collecting is a hobby. Guns are used for personal defense. But people run into trouble when they talk about needing guns to protect themselves from the government should it become “tyrannical” (as defined by them). That is just not going to happen. Is your AR-15 going to stop a tank?

Gun control is about responsibility, fairness, and the rationale for owning a gun.

From a purely practical standpoint, the simple answer would be to ban guns in private hands. That isn’t going to happen, so the simple answer goes out the window. Preventing gun carnage will require a significant number of small actions, but they can all be done — if we really care about savings tens of thousands of lives.

Excuses To Do Nothing

“Your proposal wouldn’t have prevented this shooting, so it’s no good.” As Voltaire said, “Perfect is the enemy of good.” Many things that are not perfect are still useful and desirable. A regulation that is not perfect can still save lives.

“People are dead. Now’s not the time to talk about gun control.” The survivors of gun assaults say, “Yes it fucking is!” When your car runs out of gas, that is the time to discuss being out of gas — not when you have a full tank.

“I’ll need my assault weapons when the government declares martial law.” That excuse is ludicrous. I hope the people who say it don’t actually believe it. Anyone who thinks they can defeat the U.S. military with their personal gun collection needs mental health treatment — and perhaps a tour of an army base.

Gun advocates say, “Now is not the time to talk about gun control.” Shooting survivors say, “Yes it fucking is!”

The gun enthusiast’s motto: “I'll give you my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands” is a classic straw man argument. No one wants to take guns from law-abiding citizens. The intent of gun control is to ensure that gun owners are qualified and competent, that they’re not violent criminals, not terrorists, not mentally ill, and that they’re old enough to act responsibly. Why should these reasons be controversial?

The Slippery Slope

Gun advocates claim that a new gun law is the beginning of a slippery slope. I like to think they’re right — a slippery slope to SANITY.

Is registering our vehicles with the Department of Motor Vehicles the beginning of a slippery slope to the government seizing our cars? Does requiring a license to drive a car take away our freedom to go places? Or do these regulations serve a useful purpose?

Gun control is the beginning of a slippery slope — to SANITY.

“If we allow the government to tell us what we can and can’t do with our guns then … (fill in the disaster of your choice).” This is paranoia. All proposed gun restrictions will be thoroughly debated before being implemented. The will of the majority will prevail. That is how democracy is supposed to work.

The Cost of Misuse

Misuse of motor vehicles has an associated financial cost: damage to property and injury to people. Should these expenses be borne by everyone or by operators of motor vehicles? If you don’t own a car, you don’t have to subsidize bad driving through costlier car insurance. The costs of misuse fall on those who own cars. If you don’t visit a national park, you don’t have to pay fees to maintain the park’s facilities. Visitors to the park do that. But when people are wounded by firearms, all citizens pay a cost — a half billion dollars a year — through higher medical bills and costlier health insurance.

Let’s have mandatory gun insurance to cover the cost of misusing guns. If you don’t own a car, you don’t subsidize bad drivers; if you don’t own a gun, you shouldn’t have to subsidize reckless gun owners.

If you don’t own a car, you don’t subsidize bad drivers; if you don’t own a gun, you shouldn’t have to subsidize reckless gun owners.

Expectations

You don’t expect to be granted a driver’s license without demonstrating that you know how to operate a motor vehicle. You don’t expect to be granted a pilot’s license without demonstrating that you know how to operate an airplane. Why do you expect to buy a firearm without demonstrating that you know anything about firearm safety and handling?

Universal Background Checks

What is the point of having background checks that only work some of the time? It’s like stepping into a boat that has a hole in the bottom.  Would you feel better if the boat owner said, “Hey, it’s only one hole, and a small one at that.”?

Many states allow private gun sales with no background checks. That’s a big hole in the system. All gun sales should require a background check — no exceptions. If a gun owner sells a gun without running a background check and notifying police of the sale, that seller should be held partly liable for any damages done by the misuse of that gun.

Gun Registration

We need to keep track of guns for several reasons. An obvious reason is to prevent straw buyer purchases. We need to know when that gun is transferred to another person, whose hands it passes through, and what crime scene it ends up at. That kind of information can produce red flags and keep more guns from falling into criminal hands.

Potential Gun Owners Must

• Attend an all-day class on how to handle and operate a gun.
• Take and pass a written test.
• Take and pass a shooting range class.
• Take and pass mental and drug tests.
• Pass a rigorous background check for a criminal record or association with criminal or extremist groups.

Gun Permit

If you qualify to buy and own a gun, you’ll be eligible to purchase a photo-ID gun permit. If you violate gun laws the permit will be revoked and you won’t be able to legally buy or use a gun. Just like going to the DMV to obtain or renew a driver’s license, you have to pay a fee for the permit. Money collected from gun permit fees will be used to pay for administration of firearm rules and to mitigate the expenses caused by the misuse of guns.

Gun Owners Must

• Store the gun and its ammunition in a locked container.
• Have the police inspect the gun once per year to verify it is still in the registered owner’s possession.
• Re-take the class and exam periodically, such as every three to five years.

I’m tired of reading about toddlers shooting other toddlers and adults. There is no excuse for adults to be this careless with loaded guns.

Assault Weapons and Accessories

The argument for assault weapons is two-fold. They're fun to shoot, and gun owners will need them to fight the US military when martial law is declared.

The first justification (they’re fun) is not one that anyone should give their life to preserve. The second justification probably originated with people who watched Red Dawn too many times. Neither excuse warrants the casualties these weapons of war inflict on our society. Assault weapons must be banned from general use. Gun ranges could be exempt.

The argument for bump stocks is they convert a firearm that can shoot with a fair degree of accuracy into a weapon that can fire about 9 shots per second with little accuracy. A gun with a bump stock is a killing machine and nothing more. The upside is fully automatic weapons can be fun to shoot. The downside is some people have to die. Bump stocks should be illegal or should carry a sizeable license fee, just like fully automatic weapons do now.

The purpose for ghost guns is to allow people to violate the spirit of the law with impunity. Ghost guns should be illegal.

Liability

If gun owners don’t want restrictions on guns, then they must be liable, as a group, for the expense of having unregulated guns in our society. Gun-related expenses of funerals, hospital care, rehabilitation, etc. should be borne by the gun-owning population. This expense can be incorporated into a gun permit fee, a new tax on guns, or both.

Gun-related expenses of funerals, hospital care, rehab, etc. should be borne by the gun-owning population.

Postscript

I am a gun owner. I understand the attachment gun owners have for their guns. For some, gun collection is a great hobby. For some, like me, a gun is for personal protection. However, I’ve always said I would give up my gun in a heartbeat if I could bring back just one of those kids that died in their classroom.

To my readers: don’t kid yourselves, karma is real. What goes around comes around. Anyone who has a chance to save lives and chooses not to do so will sooner or later pay, in some unforeseen way, for their indifference. So I advise my readers: do the responsible thing, do the moral thing. The worst that can happen to you is you lose your gun. Right now, gun victims are losing their lives. Is your gun more important than a human life?

Is your gun more important than a human life?

Guns: Part 1 — The Predicament

As I contemplate the struggle facing gun law reformers, I am reminded of the words of John Jay Chapman, a late 19th and early 20th century American author and political activist. He said, “ People who love soft methods and hate iniquity forget this — that reform consists in taking a bone from a dog. Philosophy will not do it.”

People who love soft methods and hate iniquity forget this — that reform consists in taking a bone from a dog. Philosophy will not do it.” — John Jay Chapman

I’m also reminded of the struggle to end slavery. Slave owners didn’t see themselves as a participant in evil. To the contrary, they believed slavery was a part of God’s plan, so much so that they were willing to die to perpetuate it. It cost a lot of blood to take that bone from the dog.

Slavery cast its shadow into the 20th century with a legacy of racism and oppression, which gave rise to a new struggle for civil rights.  Some racists were determined not to relinquish their positions of privilege, and they used lynching, murder, and church-bombing as tools to combat change. We’ve come far but it has been a long struggle.

Now we are faced with the “gun problem”. Guns kill or injure over 100,000 Americans annually. In 2013, there were 73,505 nonfatal firearm injuries and 33,636 deaths due to "injury by firearms". To the extent that they oppose a solution, gun advocates are a part of the problem. They justify an unacceptable status quo because they feel entitled. They are unable or unwilling to see the role they play in America’s gun affliction.

G

uns kill or injure over 100,000 Americans annually. In 2013, there were 73,505 nonfatal firearm injuries and 33,636 deaths due to "injury by firearms". — CDC

The gun advocates’ motto, popularized by the NRA on a series of bumper stickers, is “I'll give you my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.” But gun advocates are not the people with cold, dead hands. Those belong to the innocent thousands that are buried every year in cemeteries across America: school children, teachers, and thousands of other ordinary citizens caught in the crossfire of the nation’s shooting binge. According to a  Wikipedia article:

• Firearms were used to kill 13,286 people in the U.S. in 2015, excluding suicide and accidents.
• Approximately 1.4 million people have been killed using firearms in the U.S. between 1968 and 2011 — enough people to fill a city that, in size, falls between Dallas and San Antonio.
• Compared to 22 other high-income nations, the U.S. gun-related murder rate is 25 times higher. With just half the population of the other 22 nations combined, the U.S. had 82 percent of all gun deaths, 90 percent of all women killed by guns, 91 percent of children under 14 and 92 percent of young people between ages 15 and 24 killed by guns.
• In 2010, gun violence cost U.S. taxpayers approximately $516 million in direct hospital costs.

Approximately 1.4 million people have been killed using firearms in the U.S. between 1968 and 2011.” — BBC News

In the UK, there are 50 to 60 gun deaths per year. After adjusting for population difference, the US has 160 times as many gun homicides as the UK. In Japan, the year 2006 saw 2 firearm deaths, and when that number jumped to 22 in 2007, it became a national scandal.

Deaths in the US from firearms have increased over decades to a point that few would have tolerated in an earlier time. But the increase has been gradual enough to become a “new normal”. Our cities and campuses are the new “Old West”. Only when a particularly egregious crime occurs do we sit up and take notice. But soon after, we shrug our shoulders, mutter a few words about how “something needs to change”, and go back to our daily routine, giving the problem no more thought — until the inevitable next mass shooting happens.

It’s not just mass shootings that are the problem. Those are just the most visible aspect of gun violence. I live in central Virginia, where the morning news reported that a man in rural Sussex County was severely wounded by bullets that came through the wall of his house.  Three hours later in the small community of Waverly, a gunman walked up to the bedroom window of a woman’s house and opened fire, hitting her.

A part of the problem is the violence that permeates our culture. We are entertained by violent movies, violent video games, and violent sports. We have become numb to some degree of violence in our culture. At the same time, civility has declined. Road rage is a fairly recent phenomenon which illustrates that many people seem to exist in a state of anger, waiting for some trigger event to set them off.

Another part of the problem is ignorance of gun safety rules. Pointing a supposedly “unloaded” gun at someone and pulling the trigger has been the cause of many tragic accidents. Several years ago, a bullet hit a 7 year old local boy in the top of his head and killed him. He had been walking to a July 4th fireworks show with his father. Police said the bullet was likely fired into the air from as many as 5 miles away.

What shall we do? What can we do? After every mass shooting, useful ideas are offered and promptly rejected with the excuse that they wouldn’t have prevented this particular shooting or that it is too soon to talk about gun restrictions.

There has been discussion about banning assault weapons, bump stocks, high capacity ammo clips, and ghost guns. I doubt these bans are likely to be very effective at preventing school shootings and other mass shootings, but I think such bans would be wise as part of a bigger solution. No single proposal is likely to be a complete solution.

There has been discussion about mental health resources. Detection and treatment of mental disorders will be an important part of a gun violence solution. But like assault weapon bans or bump stock bans, more mental health resources will be only a part of a bigger solution.

Arming teachers is a big topic now. It’s a sad state of affairs when people who have been trained to teach children must now be trained to kill a shooter who might be a child. There’s also the problem of collateral damage. Facing a life-or-death situation, will a teacher have the calmness to anticipate where her bullets might end up, what walls might the bullets penetrate — or ricochet off? Who will have more firepower — the teacher with a concealed-carry pistol or the shooter armed with an assault weapon and with months to plan and prepare? The shooter might have a fully automatic weapon. The shooter might be wearing body armor. I'm not saying armed teachers are useless — I'm saying that when you only treat the symptom of a problem, the problem evolves in a different direction.

Arming teachers might be helpful if schools were the only soft target. But if you harden the targets of school shooters, they will move on to another soft target. You can’t harden everything. There is a gut-level appeal to arming teachers, but it doesn't address the underlying problem.

How do we define this gun problem? Essentially, we have too many guns in the hands of the wrong people. We have too many weapons of war. We are far too lenient about gun sales. In the days when the Second Amendment was penned, a firearm was a musket — a single-shot firearm that took many seconds to reload. If the framers of the Constitution could have foreseen the evolution of guns and the havoc and mass killings that today’s high-tech guns are capable of, I think they would have been appalled. It is highly questionable if they would have protected the right of civilians to own firearms of the kind available today.

In my next post I will share some ideas that I believe will go a long way to fixing the shooting problem. My proposals may ruffle some feathers, but gun owners get to keep their guns and the rest of us get to live in a safer country.

10,000 Maniacs

The song of the day is Even With My Eyes Closed from the 1997 album Love Among the Ruins by alternative rock band 10,000 Maniacs featuring vocals by singer-songwriter Mary Ramsey. (The Maniac’s lead singer from 1981 to 1993 was Natalie Merchant.) The band still records and performs.

We the People: “Enough!”

In my last blog post I stated I wasn’t going to write about the Parkland, Florida, school shooting, because nothing ever changes. But it turns out that I do have something to say, after all. I want to say that if small changes are not forthcoming, big changes will be inevitable.

That which does not bend will eventually break. When the NRA and similar groups refuse to compromise on gun policy — even a little — that policy will eventually be rejected in its entirety by the remainder of the body politic. A tipping point is reached and a fracture with the past becomes inevitable. The old paradigm will break and a new one will take its place.

People are sick and tired of being shot by the dozens in schools, by the hundreds at concerts, by the thousands across America’s neighborhoods. People are sick of being terrorized, of being ignored, of hearing worn-out platitudes. People are sick of nothing being done to change what is happening. Politicians tweet their “prayers and condolences” at every mass shooting while accepting gun-lobby money at the same time.

My prayers and condolences to the families of the victims of the terrible Florida shooting. No child, teacher or anyone else should ever feel unsafe in an American school.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 14, 2018

You’re right, Donald, no one should feel unsafe in a school, or at a concert, or in a theater, or in a restaurant, or in a shopping mall, or sitting on one’s own front porch. But we do. So, what is your plan to make us safe from guns?  You haven’t told us, leaving most of us to think your plan is to do nothing and hope this fuss goes away quickly.

When people ask politicians what they plan to do about gun deaths, we hear the inevitable clichés: “It’s too soon to talk about gun control” and “We must not politicize this tragedy” and, as Florida Senator Marco Rubio said, “This is not the time to jump to conclusions.”

You’re right, Marco; we shouldn’t jump to conclusions. But we don’t have to. According to Wikipedia, there have been 197 school shootings (elementary, high school, and university) in the U.S. since 2000 with 267 killed and 375 injured. If we don’t have a conclusion by now, we never will. Also according to Wikipedia, the rate at which public mass shootings occur has tripled since 2011. If we still can’t draw a conclusion, we must be the most stupid people on the planet.

The NRA and the GOP want to turn a gun issue into a mental health issue. Every time a mass shooting happens, the problem isn’t guns, they say. The problem is not enough mental health resources. However, I’m pretty sure other countries have mentally ill people, too. What those other countries don’t have is the record number of mass shootings that plague America.

Gun advocates like to say, “Guns don’t kill. People kill.” That’s only half right. People with guns kill.

If pro-gun groups don’t help stop this plague of shootings in America, I foresee a time when the second amendment will be repealed and gun ownership will be a crime. It’s hard to imagine it happening, but so was the overnight fall of the Berlin wall, and so was the sudden breakup of the Soviet Union.

Conditions fester until a tipping point is reached, and then the public rises up and often the result is the baby is thrown out with the bath water. If gun advocates don’t want to lose all their gun rights, they need to be part of the solution — not part of the problem.

Shootings

I’ve been pondering whether to blog about the Florida school shooting. But I’ve decided it would be pointless. Nothing is going to change. There will be another school shooting in America soon, and then another soon after that, and so on. Maybe we’ll get to the point where we have a school shooting every day. People don’t care. If they cared, they would do something to stop it. Yet the opposite is happening. Congress repealed an Obama-era law that made it more difficult for the mentally ill to purchase guns. Trump signed the bill into law. State legislatures are making it easier for mass shootings to happen. In Virginia, where I live, the legislature recently voted against banning bump stocks, which convert a semi-automatic rifle to full automatic. I guess fully automatic firearms are needed by sportsmen when they go deer hunting.

In the absence of stronger gun control laws, I can see only one way to reduce casualties caused by school shootings. Students and teachers must be required to wear hard-plate reinforced personal armor to their classes. Yes, I’m talking about the same body armor that is worn by combat soldiers and police tactical units. It sounds extreme, I know, but would you rather see kids in body armor, or would you rather see dead kids carried out of school buildings?

Maybe I’m being facetious just to make a point. And maybe I’m dead serious.

The Conception Conundrum

When does a person’s life as a person begin? By “as a person” I mean having the usual rights that are considered human rights, plus legal rights such as citizenship. Does personhood begin at birth? Or does it begin at conception? Anti-abortionists (or “pro-lifers”, if you prefer) claim that personhood exists from the moment of conception as opposed to birth. That is why they believe abortion is murder. But this claim creates a new set of questions.

If a woman becomes pregnant, is the fertilized ovum a person? If it isn’t a person, then at what point in its development does the new life become a person? And why at that point and not earlier or later?

If the fertilized ovum is a person, then does that person have citizenship? Suppose a woman is in the U.S. illegally when she becomes pregnant. Is the new person a U.S. citizen? If the new life is recognized as a person who has spent their entire life in the U.S. and has not broken any laws, what is the justification for denying the new person citizenship?

Suppose that before the baby is born, the woman returns to her home country, where she gives birth. Is the baby still a U.S. citizen? Or is the baby a citizen of its birth country? Does the baby have dual citizenship? Why should it matter where birth occurs? At birth, the new person is already nine months old. The new person should be able to return to the U.S. as a citizen.

This conundrum goes away if we consider personhood as beginning at birth. Then the country of conception would be irrelevant. But if personhood begins at conception, then birth is only an event in the person’s life and not the beginning of that person. Should a baby conceived in the U.S. and born outside the U.S. be deported back to the U.S.? It sounds strange, but that is a real question if personhood begins at conception.

I don’t know when personhood begins. God hasn’t let me in on that secret. But from a practical standpoint, I can see that defining personhood as beginning at birth creates fewer problematical questions, some of which may be unanswerable.

Not that logic or reason will change any minds on this subject.

Emotional Support Critters

I read recently of a woman who tried to board a United Airlines plane with her “emotional-support peacock”. The airline wouldn’t allow the peacock on the plane.

Next, I read of a woman who tried to board a Spirit Airlines plane with her “emotional-support hamster”. She wasn’t allowed to bring it onto the plane so she made the decision to flush the hamster down a toilet.

I can empathize with those passengers. Their stories remind me of a similar experience I had with an airline. I tried to board the plane with my emotional-support animal and they would not allow me to bring it onto the plane. I think the gate attendant’s exact words were, “Sir, you can’t bring a diamondback rattlesnake onto the airplane.” I asked, “Why not? It’s my emotional-support rattlesnake. I need it with me.” And the gate attendant said, “Sir, even if we allowed the snake on the plane, it would have to be in a cage — not coiled around your waist like it is now.”

The airline and their stupid rules reminded me of an incident I had with another airline. That time, the gate attendant wouldn’t allow me to board the plane with my emotional-support penguin. First he asked if the penguin was housebroken. So I, being a reasonable person, said to him, “Are you kidding? How do you housebreak a penguin?” But he continued to be unreasonable. So I returned to the exotic-pet store and traded my penguin for a rattlesnake.

And now I can’t bring my rattlesnake onto the plane. I’ll have to trade it for a different critter. I’m pondering what my next critter will be. I’m leaning toward an emotional-support scorpion. But airlines are so fussy, it wouldn’t surprise me if they don’t allow scorpions on planes, either. What’s a jet passenger to do? Do they expect us to fly alone?

Trump’s Parade

President Trump wants a “grand military parade”. He saw one on a recent trip to France and now he wants his own parade. Well, why not? It’s not as though we have a national debt that needs paying down. Let’s spend our “excess tax money”, for which we have no other use, on something that is urgently needed by — you know — the president’s ego. Because being the president of the United States of America is just not enough of an ego boost. A grand military parade is just what is needed to fill that large void in the president’s psyche.

The president seems to be on a quest to prove to America and the world that he is a man of transcendent talents. He said that Senator Orrin Hatch called him the greatest president ever — surpassing Washington and Lincoln. He goes to great lengths to convince the public that everything he does is the biggest and the best. He assures us that he’s the most stable, the smartest, the healthiest, and so on. He recently suggested that Congressmen who didn’t applaud his State of the Union speech were “treasonous”. That takes a lot of chutzpah.

But back to the grand military parade. The problem is that a parade won’t fill the void in the president’s psyche. Nothing will. The void in his psyche is a part of the man. I suspect that somewhere in his inner self lurks a nagging doubt that maybe he really isn’t good enough. Maybe he is just a pretender who must constantly convince the world and himself that he’s the real deal. And maybe he can convince some of his admirers that he’s the greatest and best. But given the amount of braggadocio we’ve witnessed from him, it seems he cannot convince himself.

Falcon Heavy Metal

Elon Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX (actual name: Space Exploration Technologies Corporation) rolled out their biggest rocket to date, which they call the Falcon Heavy, and shot one of Musk’s automobiles, a Tesla Roadster, into space. I know it sounds like a waste of a perfectly good automobile, but the car was built by another of Musk’s companies, so he can do whatever he wants with the car. Besides, it was a 2008 model Roadster, so it was due for the scrapyard anyway. And why put more junk in our Earth scrapyards when we can start a new scrapyard on Mars? But I digress.

The Roadster that was just shot into space is a convertible, and its top is down. A mannequin sits behind the steering wheel. The mannequin is wearing a spacesuit. I bet not one science fiction writer ever guessed that the world’s most powerful privately developed rocket would go into space on its maiden flight carrying a red sports car with a mannequin in a spacesuit as its payload. And if a science fiction writer had predicted it, that writer would have been ridiculed, and no doubt his/her editor would have returned the manuscript with a note advising the writer to “change the payload to something people will believe”.

I’m kidding, of course. Having a sports car in space with a space-suited driver behind the wheel is perfectly credible — at least since 1981. That was the year the animated movie Heavy Metal was released (the first one, not the sequel). The beginning of the movie features a 1959 Corvette popping out of a space shuttle in earth orbit, with a space-suited driver behind the wheel. The car descends through Earth’s atmosphere to a soft landing. The astronaut behind the wheel is shown to be just driving home from his job. You can view a short clip of that scene here.

SpaceX is working on an even bigger rocket which they have dubbed the BFR. They claim the letters stand for Big Falcon Rocket, but I think most of us know that the middle letter doesn’t stand for “Falcon”. There’s a tornado siren on a pole about 50 yards from my house. It’s loud as hell. I call it the BFS, which stands for Big F****** Siren, and I assure you the “F” does not stand for Falcon. The “F” stands for just what you think it stands for.

Anyway, congrats to Musk and his engineering team. I can’t wait to see what they shoot into space next. Maybe a ‘59 Corvette? That would be awesome.

Silje Nergaard

The song of the day is Be Still My Heart from the 2001 album At First Light by Norwegian jazz vocalist and songwriter Silje Nergaard.

The Microwave Oven

My microwave oven quit working about a month or two ago. I’ve been using skillets and pots on my stovetop for cooking and for re-heating. Finally, yesterday, I got off my butt and decided to see if I could repair the oven. I’ve repaired other appliances around the house, including a big-screen TV, a computer monitor, and a juicer. Why not a microwave oven?

The oven is a “Sharp Carousel II”. It’s an old oven (early ‘90s) but still looks good and has more features than I need. The outer cabinet is held in place by 8 sheet metal screws: 2 on each side and 4 in back. I remove the screws and lift the sheet metal cabinet off the oven. There is a schematic on the inside of the cabinet and it shows three fuses. There is a magnetron temperature fuse, a cavity temperature fuse, and a main fuse. The main fuse is a 5 x 25 mm ceramic cartridge fuse of the type commonly found in home appliances. I can reach it, so I lever it out with a screwdriver blade and examine it. It is rated 15 amps, 250 volts. I test it with an ohmmeter and it’s open. I drive to the TV store on the corner and return with a replacement fuse. Cost: one dollar. I plug the replacement fuse into its fuse holder, reassemble the cabinet, and plug in the oven. It works once again. Yay.

Except there is a problem with the way I reassembled the oven. The outer cabinet has small flanges on the inside near the front and sides, and these flanges are supposed to hook inside the front of the oven. I didn’t get the flanges hooked in properly and so the top and sides of the oven cabinet are bowed out slightly. I have to remove the cabinet and reinstall it.

As I’m removing the screws I drop one and of course it disappears. It didn’t even bounce — it hit the hardwood floor and went right through. It must have; I can’t find it on the floor. I get a flashlight and look diligently around the oven and the wooden cabinet the oven sits on but I cannot find the dang screw. Oh well, I still have 7 screws; they’ll hold the oven cabinet in place.

At this point I get a phone call. I’m on the phone for a half hour, and when I get off the phone I return to the oven job. It shouldn’t take long to finish the job. Except, now I can’t find the screwdriver I was just using. I look high and low and I can’t find it. How do things just disappear? Finally I give up and I get another screwdriver.

Then I realize I can’t find my flashlight. Are you kidding me? After another fruitless search I give up looking for it and I get another flashlight. I have three other flashlights. I discover the first two have no batteries and the third doesn’t work. Of course. Why should this job go smoothly?

Eventually I got everything sorted out. I found the missing screw under a piece of furniture. I found the missing screwdriver in the ample-sized pocket of my warm-up pants, where I dropped it when I went to answer the phone. I found the missing flashlight — well actually, I don’t remember where I found the flashlight; it just turned up when I wasn’t looking. And best of all, the microwave oven is still working. Got my fingers crossed.