I do not mean to sound callous. Any death that comes any earlier than it has to is sad, and is something that society as a whole needs to address, and by address I mean present actual solutions that will allow more people to come home to their families and loved ones. There is no such thing as "1 million deaths is just a statistic", because that one decimal point on some clipboard is someone who mattered to someone else.
That being said, let's not pretend that anything is going to be get done about this. Even when Obama was an office, there is a timidity about any limits to gun ownership and use in this country. Even on this very board, you will hear every so often someone go ahead and say "if we just let up on the gun issue, the red states might not go to Republican so much." Of course that never works, because the same sort of gun owner that is allowed more freedom with one type of weapon will want the next shiny toy, and the next, and the next.
That is because, while there are many people who just want their hunting guns, and maybe a gun for home defense, there is an NRA contingent that will not be happy unless they can walk around armed well enough to kill at least a dozen people. If we were really to go ahead and name the demon, it is the fact that America was founded, first by the Brits, and then our founding fathers, to encourage a lot of people who felt violence was the only solution, and who felt a duty, not just a lust, but a duty, to be able to kill dozens of people in order to feel safe. Go ahead to our "gun group" and you'll see people who just want their hunting rifles and a gun to drive a burglar off, but you also see people who act like they they have a God-given right to use AK-47s to shoot deer, collect multiple magazines of Teflon coated ammo, and yes armed themselves to overthrow the government.
Granted, considering the way that Trump has soured the nation, I can see why a bunch of self identifying "leftist" types want to be armed. After all, don't those Trump owners hope that these liberals are not armed, and if/when the day comes where they get to fight the second Civil War, they plan to use those guns to shoot liberals. Are these not the same folks that gloated when Gabby Giffords got shot? Does not Breitbart print articles praising every white shooter but but speaking as if every Brown shooter was somehow representative of the whole of Islam? Yes they do, and unlike the more idealistic set, I fully believe that if/when they get their second Civil War, many of these types will do carnage that makes Serbia look like a backyard barbecue. I also believe that those same types will be among the first to get blasted into a sauce by either the US Armed Forces, or whatever mercenaries Eric Prince is training in Asia, what solace does that offer us in our graves?
The point is America is used the scenes of carnage and our culture is convinced us that there is no way to keep guns out of the hands of mad men without ruining our liberty. Note that I say mad men, because let's face it, your average criminal syndicate is not done a mass shooting since Miami in the 1980s. If you want dozens of innocent people dead, you are looking for mentally disturbed individual, or just a frustrated soldier angry that he is no longer the default setting for power. Yes I say he, I'm sure that there might be some female shooter wanting to go ahead and join the ranks of those the media will anoint with fame, which are culture is made a synonym for heroism. However, let's face it, the profile of the shooters is usually someone who is either fallen from grace or has some flaw that they wish to drown in a haze of blood, because most cultures, especially but not limited to ours tell the disturbed and the outcast that they can go ahead die in a blaze of glory and become some sort of hero. It does not matter whether it was the white shooter in Québec, the Arab-American shooter in Orlando, or evacuated in Sandy Hook whose mommy taught him how to handle rifles despite him having behavioral problems.
Forgive me if I really am not going to be moved by any candlelight vigils, or the standard rants about how somebody needs to do some thing. Gun violence in America will not stop until Americans see guns as more of a threat. It is not like you cannot target certain types of guns, is there any reason for anybody to be walking around with several dozen rounds of semi automatic weaponry, the sort even cops are not allowed to carry around. However, America is founded on the idea that the only way that you can protect yourself is by being willing to kill other people. There is a point where you also have to admit, if other people have guns and you don't you are putting a target on yourself; I have heard the Trump nuts brag about how they can go ahead and start shooting liberals, and frankly I do want to put a surprise for those sons and daughters of Robert E Lee and Nathan Bedford Forrest that automatically assume liberal means easy kill. However, a society that requires a bunch of people to tolerate five times the amount of gun violence of your average industrial nation and that forces males to feel they have to be armed in a very not "well regulated militia" to defend themselves from everything from scary looking people to grizzly bears is not necessarily a society worth defending. After all, if these guns are meant to make people feel safe from other people, they are doing a very lousy job of it, that Marion Hammer and Wayne LaPierre get paid just the same.
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