On Anger at the Latest Mass Shooting
Right now a burning anger spreads through me. On the morning after, as the news now puts it, “the latest mass shooting in America” I have to say this out loud to the crazies who demonize people for not wanting a discussion about sensible gun regulation and education – Shut up. My anger is really directed at those calculating assholes who mine hate for money or power and don’t care about the cost.
Unfortunately, America’s gun violence crisis goes on throughout the year. Poorer neighborhoods suffer from the effects of gun violence every day. Though when a poor non-white person dies from a gunshot wound not inflicted by police, their death gets a minute or two on the nightly news, maybe a post like mine, and then another needless tragedy is forgotten. TO be fair if the victim is a child, especially a girl, we’re moved to the pity and anger we should always feel. The most telling thing about gun violence inflicted on residents of modest means is that we accept it with a shrug, because our attitude has become “nothing can be done, let’s move on.”
What makes gun violence transcend this new cycle? White, male, anger-filled morons who deliver spikes of evil that we can’t ignore. The response on the left remains hand wringing because we don’t have a coherent answer to gun violence. Please let me know if you have one. From the right we’re served dumbass ideas like arming teachers or rabbis or whoever is the latest victim. They seem to believe we live in a world where the sane thing to do is turn every home, church, school and movie theater into a “hardened” target.
If only everyone packed an Uzi, America would be safe.
Ask an Afghani how that theory is working.
The policies that allow more guns and more gun carriers are the policies that lead to ever more murder of innocents and that leave us vulnerable in our coffee shops, our pizzerias, and our houses of worship, especially black and Jewish houses of worship. From my perspective, we need to amend the second amendment to read – “You can have a gun, but congress or your state or city government can regulate the sale or purchase of said firearm and all weapons related accoutrements.” Guns are American as apple pie, football, and kicking indigenous people off the land we moved them to after we kicked them off the land where they were living before Americans arrived. But there’s no such thing as the unlimited right to own a weapon. I think all but the truly disturbed agree that people don’t have a right to own a grenade launcher, or a tank, or a bazooka. So, by extension, we don’t have the unlimited right to any weapon we chose.
An aside on the meaning of that tricksy second amendment. It was an attempt to ensure that the rich of the seaboard were protected from the settlers and the Native Americans of the interior. The amendment was aimed at protecting those living along the Atlantic seacoast from those they were screwing over, not to allow your weird uncle to fondle the thousand automatic rifles stashed in his living room.
Since second amendment reform is certainly dead on arrival, we need sensible reforms passed by our elected representatives. Sensible measures include clip size reductions, outlawing bump-stocks, waiting periods for gun purchase, and eliminating loopholes like the sale of guns without background checks at “trade shows.” However, the Republicans and their acolytes in the right wing press whip up their crazy fan club to buy guns and spew hate whenever someone speaking like me is elected. It’s so great for their brand and winning elections, they’re willingly turning aside from the truth so they can’t implicate themselves as abettors in the murder of innocents.
The saner elements in society need to start talking together about finding solutions to gun violence. There are solutions. Take Canada. They love guns, ranking third in gun ownership in the world. But they have less than 20 percent of the US gun deaths per capita.
Perhaps we should investigate how other countries approach gun violence and have a true national debate on how America can take what works around the world and adapt it to our society. Australia went full on “we’re taking your gun away” about a decade ago and in their schools there are no active shooter drills because they have so little of that going around.
Could you imagine that?