Shoot, it happened again
At what point does the invocation of ‘‘thoughts and prayers’’ become sickening?
Here they are being offered up yet again - a little national self-comforting after another mass shooting in the United States. This time at a small Baptist church in Texas.
Some of the prayers once again rising up are those of the heartbroken and bereft. Others are the political flatulence of those never shy to announce their prayers for safety but who sure-as-shootin’ won’t legislate towards making their society measurably less unsafe.
The thoughts of which they speak are more like easily-evoked empathetic feelings, not to be confused with anything as discomforting as self-critical assessments.
If the killer is a migrant they will talk about policy change; if he’s a US citizen the scold will be not to politicise the tragedy.
The voices from the pulpits of the National Rifle Association, and its bought-and-paid politicians, will once again talk about this being an evil act. They will not acknowledge there’s such a thing as evil inaction - the point, long since passed, where a society must collectively accept it needs to reassess the sanity of laws that nowadays have less to do with human rights than national selfimage.
What lessons, if any, might these intransigents draw from this most recent, temporarily vivid, outrage?
Perhaps that the time has come where you need to arm-up before you go to church, brothers and sisters, because that’s the way we protect ourselves from the evil that’s in the hearts of men.
Some men. Bad hombres. But still men who, right up to the point where they go bat-crap crazy, have had the God-given, forefather-enshrined right to bears arms. And to collect them easily. And to stockpile them good and high. Just solely for the purposes of selfdefence and for use at the sanctified shooting ranges of the nation.
Soon enough, if it hasn’t happened already, we’ll have a final tally of the dead and injured from this tiny Sutherland Springs church. It’s not something that needs to be committed to memory. It’s a month since the Las Vegas shootings and the next isolated incident will be along presently. The list will be updated then.
We need the updates because apart from the likes of Sandy Hook and Columbine, the mass shootings are, ironically, becoming a tad amorphous in our collective memory. The US media reports there have been 307 mass shootings in America this year. A mass shooting is defined by those with four or more victims. The rest are just, you know ... shootings.