The mind of a modern American (this modern American, to be precise):
“Indianapolis, now? Jesus, this is three mass shootings in just a few weeks. First, Boulder, then... No, wait, Boulder was the second one. First there was. . . uh. . . Oh come on! First there was. . .”
Reader, we sincerely COULD NOT REMEMBER.
Yes, eventually we retrieved Atlanta from our mental database of national tragedies, but for several minutes, we drew a complete blank. And it’s not incipient Alzheimer’s: We can still always find the car keys and recite Doc Gooden’s 1985 pitching stats. Rather, it’s the unrelenting accumulation of similarly horrific incidents that just keep happening, with only the details changing—and those not so much. Flags get lowered to half-staff with such depressing regularity that the country should just mandate shorter ropes.
And yet nothing will change. The NRA is literally bankrupt, yet nothing will change.
We’ll see the memes from right-wing idiots claiming that there is no gun problem. That it’s a people-problem. That somehow the breakdown of traditional values embodied by—who knows—gay marriage or kneeling during the National Anthem, maybe, is to blame for the breakdown of society, which manifests itself in senseless acts of violence.
Leaving aside their confusion of cause and effect, let’s take up their argument, though: It’s NOT a gun problem. Guns don’t kill; people kill and all that. We don’t have a gun crisis, we have a mental-health crisis. Well, shouldn’t we still do something? Shouldn’t we do something to keep these avatars of a fallen moral order from getting their hands on weapons of mass destruction? Shouldn’t we pour money into mental health services to keep heavily armed people from going over the edge?
We’re not saying anything new here. The news is repetitive, and so is the response.
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