Talking points
Sign of a damaged culture
“Another week, another mass shooting,” said in WashingtonExaminer.com. The site of the massacre this time was a bar in Thousand Oaks, Calif., where a Marine veteran murdered 12 people— including an armed police officer responding to the attack— before turning his handgun on himself. Some speculated that the shooter, 28-year-old Ian David Long, suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder after a 4½-year military stint that included a combat tour in Afghanistan. But “his problems clearly predated his service”: In high school, he allegedly assaulted a female track coach. We’re all part of “the American shooting lottery” now, said Adam Gopnik in NewYorker.com. Some survivors in Thousand Oaks had also escaped the Las Vegas shooting last year that killed 58 people and wounded some 850 more; one man, Telemachus Orfanos, survived Las Vegas only to be murdered in the bar. “Americans may soon start congratulating one another on how many near misses they have endured, with ‘Missed Me!’ bumper stickers and ‘I Survived My Third Gun Massacre This Year and All I Got Was This T-Shirt’ T-shirts.”
Just hours before this latest slaughter, said Dr. Judy Melinek in Vox.com, the National Rifle Association had the gall to warn the American College of Physicians, which had voiced alarm at gun carnage, to “stay in your lane.” My lane? As a forensic pathologist, I have performed more than 300 autopsies on firearms victims and have faced dozens of heartbroken kin. Every day, my medical colleagues pull bullets out of men, women, and children. Doctors “didn’t choose this fight,” but we are in a “unique position to understand the scale of human suffering caused by guns.”
More gun control wouldn’t have stopped this tragedy, said David French in NationalReview .com. The NRA has already “been thoroughly routed in California,” and the state’s strict firearms control regime “exceeds even the dreams of most national Democrats.” The real reason we keep seeing mass shooting after mass shooting— in states with strict gun laws, and lax—is because such massacres are a contagion. Each new atrocity lowers the threshold for the next, with “more people considering committing mass murder as a way of addressing their grievances.” We need to figure out why our nation “is generating an excess of broken, damaged people” willing to inflict horrific pain on their neighbors and friends. “Until then, we’ll spend our days yelling at each other about policy proposals” that really won’t help.