Does America Want This?
Is this THE COUNTRY WE WANT? Nine DEAD IN TEXAS MASS SHOOTING
I have this very troubling feeling in my gut that these mass shootings are just not going to stop. You all already know the scenario, although the details change a lot with the circumstances: Someone takes a pistol, a military assault rifle, or maybe both and goes and shoots someplace up.
photo from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, UsS. Treasury Department
Why?
The easy answer is that there are too many guns available to too many of the wrong people. Despite years of debate, attempts at legislation, finger pointing, handwringing about mental health, nothing happens that stops these events. The most recent one at an outlet mall north of Dallas on Saturday is still mysterious, except for the fact that a man who was supposed to be carrying a gun, a nearby cop, shot the perp to death before he had a chance to kill even more people. The toll at this point is nine dead.
Most went to shop at the mall and for reasons we don’t yet know, they were dead, along with a policeman and a security guard, before you knew it.
In an instant, they joined the growing list of victims in a series of senseless crimes, homicides, that cast a dark cloak over the nation’s reputation and the will and fortitude of its legislative bodies. This has been happening for decades now. Kids are murdered in school and all we get is “thoughts and prayers.” Young men in the big city wrap themselves in gang violence and die by the hundreds every year. Do they deserve that? Of course not. These kids, and their older brothers, are supposed to play a big role in the future of the nation. We want them to survive, to learn, to thrive.
But that is not happening.
Our lawmakers are gutless, for the most part, on the subject of gun control. They make themselves convient punching bags for a variety of interests that want them to do something to stop this. Thoughts and prayers, useless talk, that’s what they offer.
I have bad news about talk about tighter gun controls, too.
They could ban the sale of all guns tomorrow and it wouldn’t stop anything. We live in a nation that is armed right up to its eyes, a nation that simply will not abandon its romantic images about wielding firearms. Arguing about which ones are “safe” is ridiculous. A .22 handgun is just as fatal as a 9 MM or an assault rifle at close range.
Firearms are for killing. They allow us to kill people at a distance, or masses of people close up. Pretending they are for target shooting at gun clubs just doesn’t work when there are enough guns around to give a couple to every American adult. Anyone who is not a law officer who leaves the house with a gun is either delusional enouth to think they can protect themselves in some kind of gun fight or headed for some kind of trouble that requires a weapon.
It’s nice to think this is all about too much equipment in the field. It is not. It is about a troubling willingness to take the lives of other people. That sounds completely simplistic, doesn’t it? It’s not, because if that willingness wasn’t there, a lot of those killings wouldn’t be there, either.
And finally, don’t bother about the “mental health” argument. Go to the streets of the biggest city near you and look at the city budgets for mental health services. Solving that problem, are you? I think not. We know how to address mental illnesses. We just don’t have the compassion or willpower to do it.
—Charles Madigan