Although not wanting to deal with the reality of gun violence makes you an asshole and you do NOT get a place at the table.
It's not even about mental health
Although the fact that it's harder to get care for mental illness than it is to buy a gun and The fact that budget cuts by Republicans have gutted what little mental health care states provide leaving millions of very sick people in the streets makes me ashamed to call myself human.
No, it's about a culture that enables the mass killing.
What is it about our culture that would drive someone to do such a thing? Why does a body count matter so much to someone wanting to end it all?
In the next few weeks, we'll hear all about guns, and we'll hopefully hear a little more about mental health, but nothing about the culture that produces them.
And this culture has NOTHING to do with God, Mike Huckabee, so STFU and go back in the corner.
Consider: We have had guns in this country forever. And yet for the longest time, we didn't have the attitude where everything could be solved with a gun. Even in the earliest Westerns, the heroes were always reluctant shooters, shooting only to disarm. When did it start?
Certainly one can point to the glorification of the "gun culture" in the writings of the Eastern press who went to Dodge and Tombstone to create media "heroes" like Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, "Wild Bill" Hickock, and the like. Even the criminals were glorified. The James brothers were murderous thugs who would be on a par with the worst inner city gangbangers today and yet they are still glorified and romanticized. We average 20 mass shootings a year. The rest of the world doesn't even average a tenth of that.
But we can't blame literature, or mass media, or music, or video games. They have these things in other countries and yet they have far fewer mass killings than we do.
Is it indoctrination?
Is it our perpetual war?
Is it our "If it bleeds it leads" media machine?
Is it our lack of serious social welfare?
Is it something else?
I think Jason Whitlock started asking these questions and Bob Costas made them go viral:
I would argue that your rationalizations speak to how numb we are in this society to gun violence and murder. We’ve come to accept our insanity. We’d prefer to avoid seriously reflecting upon the absurdity of the prevailing notion that the second amendment somehow enhances our liberty rather than threatens it.
How many young people have to die senselessly? How many lives have to be ruined before we realize the right to bear arms doesn’t protect us from a government equipped with stealth bombers, predator drones, tanks and nuclear weapons?
Our current gun culture simply ensures that more and more domestic disputes will end in the ultimate tragedy, and that more convenience-store confrontations over loud music coming from a car will leave more teenage boys bloodied and dead.
Andrew O'Hehir takes on the question at Salon:
Media fascination with violence, and the 24/7 news cycle, may have made things worse. “If it bleeds it leads” is a longtime maxim of the news industry, to be sure. By the time Martin Scorsese made “Taxi Driver” in the mid-‘70s, the archetype of the psychotic killer as media hero was well established. But the mass shooting as a collectively created media spectacle, shared by television, the major Internet news portals, the mainstream media’s big names and millions of individuals on social media, has changed the nature of the experience. I do realize the painful and profoundly unfunny irony of raising this issue in a day-after analysis story on the Internet, one of dozens or hundreds you may come across this weekend.
I certainly don't have the answers to these questions. But these are questions we should be asking. Have we become so numb to this that mass shootings are becoming the norm?
Is this becoming the price we pay for the Second Amendment?