President Barack Obama addressed the memorial for the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting last Sunday. His remarks, broadcast by television networks into the country’s homes, touched many. Others, upset that the vigil preempted the weekly pugilistic pigskin contest, seized on Twitter to voice their discontent.
“Take that nigger off the tv, we wanna watch football!” stands out as a salient example of the venomous rants.
Invective like this will not help the nation’s efforts to craft “sensible gun legislation” much as advocating for women rights in Saudi Arabia might face an uphill battle. Nevertheless, the country appears willing to revisit its addiction to firearms for the first time in decades.
By now the standard bearers of denial have all chimed in. They postulate that too little God and too few armed guards in the classroom, too much sex (elsewhere, presumably), too much bureaucracy and too much violence on our screens set the stage for a society adrift in desultory gratification in which confused individuals seek degenerate outlets for their irresolute souls.
Our first instinct in these repeated circumstances is to unmask psychosis in the killer’s sordid life, a ready-made villain. Someone ought to have noticed that he was withdrawn, a loner lacking social skills. Maybe the madman skipped his medication or was never on pills but should have been. If only we did a better job of evaluating and treating mental illness, kept guns out of the hands of the deranged, we could exhale our anxieties.
In contrast the widespread availability of weapons, the 300-million-strong apocalypse that suffocates the country, plays no role in the episodic slaughter.
“Guns don’t kill, people do,” affirms the no-restrictions-in-the-right-to-bear-arms crowd with disquieting sincerity. With that preposterously impeccable logic why not acquire grenades, rockets and, for the ultimate deterrent, nuclear weapons?
On the international list of murder rates the United States ranks shamefully below Palestine, Turkmenistan and Yemen, regions seldom described as havens of peace. The rate of firearm homicides - 11,493 deaths in 2009 reports the Center for Disease Control and Prevention - dwarfs that of any other industrialized nation.
Life is cheap in a predatory country that limits regulation on the powerful while at the same time entertaining a mythology about the resilience of the little guy.
Even by our lax standards the debilitating race to arm everyone everywhere nauseates. Studies show conclusively that fewer gun owners per capita - and not a wholesale militarization of the civilian population - produces not only fewer murders by firearms but fewer murders period. We need not resort to allowing weapons, concealed or not, in public schools, day care centers and churches as almost became law in Michigan this week until that state’s Republican governor had a change of heart and refused to sign the bill passed by the Legislature.
This wretched approach reeks of grotesque delusion. We may not congratulate ourselves when we design loophole-ridden background check laws or equally flawed bans. Connecticut prohibits assault weapons but the Bushmaster rifle used in the school rampage was acquired legally by the killer’s mother.
Antsy buyers of the honored law-abiding variety did not ponder these implications too long. In the wake of the Newtown, Conn., killings they rushed to stock up on a bit more killing power. Stores reported impressive spikes in sales of the same assault weapon used at the elementary school. Some ran out of merchandise. The world’s largest supplier of firearms sold three and a half years worth of high-capacity ammunition magazines in three days. The popularity of guns as Christmas presents surged in part because, as a newspaper article quoted, “buying a gun as a gift for someone you love is a smart and responsible investment.”
Each mass shooting delivers profits to the industry. Since 2010, Ruger and Smith & Wesson, our two biggest publicly traded gun makers, have enjoyed a 150 percent rise in stock market value, reports Forbes, a business publication.
Personal safety might be a smokescreen for more sinister motives. As violent criminality continues a decade-old decline each year since the election of our first African-American president has translated into one sales record after another.
The fixation on the trivialization of violence is revolting. In the wake of Sandy Hook there have been four more tragedies. Guns have been fired in crowds with deaths reported at a casino and in a church. They received little publicity, victims of a collective outrage intimately linked to the carnage’s proportions. In obscurity more children have died from intentional or accidental gun violence in the past week than perished at Sandy Hook.
The country’s unfinished drama proceeds without a conclusion, propelled by the warped mind of quiet acquiescence.
If there ever was a time when a well regulated militia was necessary to the security of a free state, we have long since vaulted past these good intentions. We cannot tolerate our status as the world’s most violent democracy.
When a British-born television host challenges this untenable orthodoxy proponents of the Second Amendment promptly trump the provisions of the First and demand that he be deported.
Our pathetic addiction is a deadly and malignant aberration that demands an effective response, not another round of symbolic but empty gestures.
Repeal the repelling mindset.
No comments:
Post a Comment