Names change, but massacres stay the same
Expressions of shock at yet another mass shooting in America are mostly performative. Columbine was a shock. Sandy Hook was also a shock because of the ages of the victims.
Nothing that came after those massacres was as much a shock. Though no less horrific to the victims and their families, those body counts that came later constituted the dull, repetitious ache of the familiar — a phantom limb of pain seemingly beyond treatment or consolation.
In America, members of a congressional death cult ritualistically genuflect at every bloodspattered scene offering “thoughts and prayers” for victims they truly don’t see.
“Now is not the time to speak ill of guns or the Second Amendment,” they say with pious indignation as they pace nervously around bloody footprints tracked into the halls of Congress by gun industry lobbyists. “Now is never the time — and no point in the future is ever the time, either, so stop talking like any change to the status quo is even possible,” they grouse.
Their enablers in the gun lobby know what strings to pull and what politicians to bribe to keep all tears pooling at the symbolic level. Expressions of sorrow must never supersede the higher calling to protect the gun industry’s bottom line.
Fealty to a faulty interpretation of an 18th-century document with its arcane reference to a “well regulated militia” is a convenient legal cover, but the real reason for the refusal to keep weapons of war out of civilian hands is capitalism — not the common good.
Besides, what’s “good enough” for the gun industry should be good enough for America. The shadow cast by militarystyle assault weapons over the concerns about the degenerating quality of life in this bullet-strafed country is already baked into the cost of “freedom.”
You want “freedom?” Well, my right to kill someone if I can get within shooting range is an expression of that same freedom. You think I’m too “crazy” to own a gun? That’s not for you to say!
I’m an American and my mental state doesn’t negate my Second Amendment right to shoot whomever I want if my aim is true enough and I’m sufficiently scared! I’ll gladly suffer the consequences of a bad shoot, but you have no right to hamper my ambitions in any case.
If I want to become a one-man militia, then that’s my business. This is America — not some socialist gun-free state where the rights of my fellow citizens somehow trump my right to intimidate and kill when necessary.
Every American citizen, no matter how mentally ill, has the God-given, constitutional right to walk into any gun shop in the land, even on “a bad day,” and buy as many guns and as much ammunition as his wallet can accommodate.
The merchant of death who sells the guns has a right to the blood money that flows from that exchange. The gun dealer isn’t responsible for what the customer does with the gun. There is no moral culpability — just supply and demand. This is what America has always been about — blood and treasure, baby.
The online satirical news site The Onion has a recurring feature it trots out whenever there’s a mass shooting in this country. The article maintains the same boilerplate description of the shooting with only the location and number of victims adjusted to fit the new reality.
The headline on the recurring piece captures the absurdity and
dread of being held hostage by our evangelical gun culture perfectly: “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”
The 17th installment of this recurring features reads as follows: “Boulder, CO — In the hours following a violent rampage in Colorado in which a lone attacker killed 10 individuals and injured several others, citizens living in the only country where this kind of mass killing routinely occurs reportedly concluded Monday that there was no way to prevent the massacre from taking place.”
Last week, the same article was published with Atlanta, Ga., as the dateline with only the bodycount changed. The same commentary from someone who lives far away from the mayhem is trotted out:
“This was a terrible tragedy, but sometimes these things just happen and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop them,” said Kansas resident Andrew Thompson, echoing sentiments expressed by tens of millions of individuals who reside in a nation where over half of the world’s deadliest mass shootings have occurred in the past 50 years and whose citizens are 20 times more likely to die of gun violence than those of there developed nations.”
The effectiveness of the gag, if you can call it that, is the recognition of the truth that we’re in a “Groundhog Day” of recurring insanity. Cities as disparate as
Charleston and San Bernardino, Virginia Beach and Pittsburgh, Santa Fe and Milwaukee trade places in the generic slot of the stories’ lead sentence.
We have the added humiliation of regularly electing leaders who fear an industry that is devoted to indiscriminate death more than they fear their constituents.
What’s especially infuriating is that everyone can see the same scenario playing out every few weeks. It’s a recurring nightmare everyone knows will descend on us again the second we close our eyes, yet we claim we can’t do anything about these massacres because our elected officials are too feckless and corrupt to obey the popular will.
Once again, the recurring news story in The Onion states it better than any editorial page in America: “‘It’s a shame, but what can we do? There really wasn’t anything that was going to keep this individual from snapping and killing a lot of people if that’s what they really wanted.’ At press time, residents of the only economically advanced nation in the world where roughly two mass shootings have occurred every month for the past eight years were referring to themselves and their situation as ‘helpless.’”
It really doesn’t have to be this way. We don’t have to submit to being held at gunpoint by Second Amendment absolutists and their lackeys in Congress who consider any constraints on the gun industry an intolerable assault on “freedom.”
We’re at a critical moment. We’re about to emerge from a societal shutdown in which the frequency of mass shootings fell precipitously. We have to decide whether we’re going to allow the “old normal” of two mass shootings a month to reassert itself or insist upon a “new normal” where we’re capable of dealing with an assault on society tied directly to one irresponsible industry’s lust for profit.
Every other western democracy has made that choice and has become better for it. Saving ourselves means asserting our right to live in a society free of regular gun massacres even if it comes at the expense of an entire industry’s bottom line. The time for excuses and magical thinking is over.