Perhaps nothing shows the sickness in American culture better than the NRA and school shootings...
I'm not blaming American's the people but the insanity that is modern American gun culture and those Americans that worship at its alter. I'm not even against the concept of gun ownership, there are a LOT of guns up here in Canada, just more sensible ownership. Nowhere else on the planet does a school get shot up and 17,20,30 children and adults die horrible, painful, brutal deaths, and local gun sales go UP! The NRA uses these incidents as advertising campaigns. There is a sickness in American culture, a growing cancer that is spreading. It's not just American culture, I see it here too but not like this. Not month after month, week after week. Major american cities have been a literal war zone for decades and people have just become numb to it, and yes I'm taking into account the reduction in major violent crime since the 90s. Something is wrong in a culture when self defense is something you have to think about as part of your daily routine, when it becomes part of the culture.
We are raising generations of militant people without even realizing it. The NRA and sympathizers love to sell us on how a good man armed with a gun always cancels out a bad man with a gun, and that the bad man with the gun will always get the gun. There is a terrible assumption built into this wild west fantasy though, which is that it assumes de facto that the "good man" with the gun who blows away the "bad man" with the gun is GOOD! There is something deeply troubling about the idea of planning for murder "self defense" etc, as a noble and good act. That's not how human psychology is supposed to work. Blowing the bad guy away is something you do in movies and video games. What happens in real life is you get PTSD. There is no way in which you take the life of another human being without serious psychological consequences. And guess what, if you can blow someone away and walk away with a smile on your face, I've got bad news, you aren't the good hero you think you are.
Bad people are always going to exist, that part the NRA and gun nuts have right. The part they have wrong is that we need to be scared of them. You can't stop evil, the more fearful of it you are, and the harder you try, the farther into its grasp you slip. The right wing nut jobs have it backwards. They like to sell up the idea that guns and military hardware in all forms are part of the price that protects freedom. Into this they will then conflate the death of soldiers that serve. What they are actually selling is the death of "the bad guy" being the price of "our" freedom. But the "bad guy" can be the monster of the week, one week it's terrorists looking to take down high-rises, next it's black drug dealers in our streets. The real price of freedom is actually the opposite, it's the occasional death of innocent lives and the refusal to give into the fear to fight back with fire. Arming every woman, man, and child in the nation isn't some patriotic duty, it's actually cowardice. Anyone can pull a trigger and statistically by FAR the greater majority of those who do on live people are not good people, even if they started out with good intentions.
You don't solve a gun violence problem by adding more guns to the mix. All that does is pour fuel on the fire. It devalues human life even more. Once everyone is armed it's a game of statistics for survival.
We start valuing human life when we start actually putting something up for our lives.
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