An undistinguished sort of massacre
‘‘The US simply rattles with a grotesque quantity of weaponry, much of it suited to rapid-fire killing.’’
Newsflash. The second amendment to the US Constitution still sucks.
It’s not much of a newsflash, we grant you, but the best we could do with the details available from the Florida high school shooting.
Sift through the reports and you’d struggle to find a single element upon which to pin any claim for particular distinction.
We hesitate to call it a mundane massacre. But not for long.
This is, after all, the 18th US school shooting so far this fresh new year. And the eighth to result in death or injury — from which we deduce that 10 of those shooters probably haven’t been putting in their time at the rifle range.
Really the reports are a collection of sorry familiarities. A lot of tearful kids, tensed-up officials, emoting politicians and ... let’s see, 17 dead at the time of writing, all at the hands of an exstudent using assault weaponry.
Sorry, that was sloppy phrasing. The teen shooter was misusing self-defence weaponry.
Home defence? Don’t tell that to comedian Jim Jefferies. ‘‘You have guns ’cause you like guns. None of you go to home security conventions. None of you read Padlock Monthly. None of you have a Facebook picture of you behind a secure door going ’F.... yeah!’’
Should we look, then, to Donald Trump for a more temperate view? ‘‘No child, teacher or anyone else should ever feel unsafe in an American school’’" says the man who has assured the National Rifle Association ‘‘You have a true friend in the White House’’. The only decent way to react to those statements combined is to say Amen into a sick bag.
The US simply rattles with a grotesque quantity of weaponry, much of it suited to rapid-fire killing. The owners declare themselves ready to take up Charles Heston’s battle cry that if you want it, you’ll have to take it from their cold dead hands.
Remember the Las Vegas shootings last October? Some 58 dead. But by that stage of the year 11,600 people had died in the US from gun violence. In some of those cases, no doubt, weapons were indeed taken from cold dead hands. In most cases, though, the cold dead hands had been unarmed. Hence the hideous NRA call for even more people to have weaponry at the ready. Because if you’ve got a problem, you’ve got something that needs shooting.