“Stuff happens” defines us in America
Last week another fourteen or fifteen or twenty or something were killed up in Oregon by another crazed, gun-fueled killer. It could have been five or ten or fifteen or twenty-two. It could have been in Oregon or Sandy Hook or in a movie theater or in a hairdressing salon in Seal Beach, down the 405, like what happened a few years ago.
“Ugh.” One more time around the predictable news cycle. The helicopter news videos. The clips with the distraught emotional survivors. The first responders and cops looking valiant. And, of course, the prayerful vigils and burial services and importantly – the promises that “we will never forget…”
“Sigh.” And then absolutely nothing happens and absolutely nothing changes. And we forget, even though we promised we would never forget…
Conveniently, the news switches to bombs blowing up a Doctors Without Borders hospital or 100,000 more refugees leftover from very ill advised wars or some new movie about Mars which is especially interesting because NASA discovered water there…
We get distracted and it becomes so easy to forget a so very disturbing event that would actually be shattering if we stopped to take the terror and tragedy of a shooting rampage into our consciousness… waking us from our long-running gun stupor.
And then, sure as shooting, in another week or two we’ll get another mass killing in another public setting. Mass gun violence has become so commonplace in America you can almost set your watch to it, and we experience it nearly as casually.
“Stuff happens,” Jeb Bush commented on the Oregon shootings the other day. Stuff happens.” Jeb adds, “There’s always a crisis. And the impulse is always to do something and it’s not necessarily the right thing to do.”
Jeb’s saying he’ll do, and we’ll do, absolutely nothing, all over again. We’ll again do nothing, as unbelievable gun mayhem becomes part of the American experience and fabric. We’ll do nothing, as gun mayhem defines who we are as a people, and lays bare our decayed morals.
Americans have been sold a bill of goods instead of a Bill of Rights, where the public pays death taxes for the gun lobby’s right to bear ridiculous arsenals of weapons unimagined by our Founding Fathers. Let’s call our unchecked distribution of guns for what it is: Gun nuts and criminals effortlessly get all the guns they want and you and I pay for this corruption of the 2nd Amendment with our blood and our kids lives. Our national obsession with gunplay is paid by the deaths of our loved ones.
Many guns end up killing their owners, which, I suppose is some sort of cosmic justice for the gun enthralled. But another 10,000 guns or so end up killing spouses, girlfriends, boyfriends, the guy at the 7-11, the kid over in Newhall, the guy behind the pizza place in Valencia - and these days, an unending stream of mass murders unique to our very violent United States and defines us as savage in the eyes of the rest of the civilized world.
But along the way to becoming Machine Gun ‘Merica and Gunplay Mecca, the shoot ‘em up crowd seemed to forgot about yours and my rights in the 9th Amendment:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
So here we go in plain language: Our constitutional right to live undisturbed, peacefully, with life, liberty and securely; knowing that our kids can go to school, go to college; that we can visit movie theaters and shopping centers without a very realistic fear of getting shot ---- these very fundamental rights of peace are now infringed by 2nd Amendment gun distribution gone mad. We’ve far surpassed the right to bear arms to maintain state militias, and we’ve winked and nodded our way to putting 300 million guns in the hands of everyone from law abiding hunters to gangsters to kids on psycho drugs gone crazy. And all this gun nonsense is treading on our rights to be safe and sound and is killing our kids.
I want my rights to live in a safe, sane country enforced! I want to live in a secure country, free from this gunplay nonsense! I do not buy into the Bush Doctrine of “Stuff Happens” where we continually pay for our inaction to control guns with the blood of our families. Damn the gun lobby, damn the death distributors that manipulate our lawmakers from taking common sense action. Their rights for gunplay do not supersede my right to peace and safety.
Our continued silent acquiescence to evermore mass gun murders reflects the failure of our country to govern a civilized society. Our modern acceptance of these killings as a “normal part of American life” demonstrates we’re becoming a failed state underpinned with failed and twisted morals.
Our acquiescence of all this mayhem has left us all culpable, cowardly, and collectively… guilty.
America must face reality, come clean, start over, and shed ourselves of this expanding curse of gun culture violence.