Good Morning.
We have now had another terrible mass shooting, this time at a school in Florida where virtually anyone can walk into a gun shop and purchase the weapon or weapons of choice and enough ammunition to wipe out a supermarket, a grade school, or a church. Florida, you recall, has a Stand Your Ground law that encourages its citizens to become armed vigilantes. It's what happened when George Zimmerman gunned down Treyvon Martin as he walked home from a convenience store with a can of iced tea and a bag of Skittles. Zimmerman decided Martin was probably up to no good (read, he was black), jumped out of his vehicle, and wrestled the kid to the ground, shooting him in the process. Some people were outraged, some didn't care a bit.
We've had Columbine, Newtown, Virginia Tech, Tuscon, San Bernadino, Fort Hood, Charleston, Orlando, Las Vegas, and Sutherland Springs, to name but a few. All we have to do is say the name of the place and the immediate association is a mass shooting, not a pleasant climate or a vacation destination. We hear the numbers - the people, often students, almost always
strangers, who were killed and those who were wounded. We see parents frantically looking for their kids, the photographs of the dead when they're finally identified and their loved ones notified, and maybe a glimpse of a hearse a couple of days later. We switch the channel.
Congress does nothing. The official excuse is that they're terrified of the NRA and its ability to pour millions into the electoral process and sweep out of office anyone who doesn't agree with their interpretation of the Second Amendment. The truth is that a) plenty of elected officials agree with the gun lobby; b) some don't agree with it but just don't care enough to
flex a little muscle; and most of all c) the American public sits around on its collective tush and says oh well. As one commentator pointed out, these shootings have become so commonplace that they dominate the news cycle for maybe 36 hours and then everyone simply moves on.
We're not talking shotguns here for a little road hunting in the fall. We're talking assault weapons whose only reason for being manufactured is to kill as many human beings in as short a time as possible. We have a lot of messed up people wandering around and they can buy this stuff as easily as a garden hose. The gun lobby and its supporters say that if the disordered types couldn't buy a gun, they'd build a bomb, but that's a cop out. We should be a country that says there are better ways to make a living than selling assault weapons, that recognizes that anyone who wants to buy one of these things has malice on his mind. You don't shoot a couple of pheasant for Sunday dinner or even protect the livestock on your farm with an AK47. As for the bomb theory, the store owner should be on the lookout for someone who is buying tons of fertilizer and bags of nails, and the purveyors of these materials on the Internet should be doing the same, but greed is, of course, more convenient than responsibility for the public good, or God forbid, concern for the soul of humanity.
That's only the beginning of the conversation. The real question is why people go on the rampage to avenge any offense,
real or imagined, and that plenty more think about it. It's not only the folks with a diagnosed mental health issue. Anger
seems to be the official national emotion, the one that causes someone to run a fellow traveler off the road and send hate mail and post foul-mouthed opinions. It's also what drives voters to the polls, a lot of them anyway, and it's not about wanting a different health care program or safer bridges. It's more visceral, more jungle warfare. It's about vengeance, payback time, an eye for an eye, and its acceptability in many quarters should scare the hell out of the rest of us.
Best regards,
Elisabeth
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