Gun violence is the only American epidemic we are legislatively required to accept

Daily Kos Staff

Friday October 02, 2015 · 12:29 PM PDT

2015/10/02 · 12:29

A man carries flowers from the Sandy Hook Fire Department to the Sandy Hook Elementary school sign after a mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut December 15, 2012. Residents of the small Connecticut community of Newtown were reeling on Saturday from one o

I know there's going to be steep competition for the dumbest column about guns in the wake of [insert latest horrific mass murder here], but since The Fix keeps flogging this rather silly effort we're going to at least give it an honorable mention. After noting Obama's repeated point that gun deaths in America dwarf deaths by terrorism and musing that it might be "hard to know what point Obama was hoping to make," and after indeed crunching the numbers and agreeing that all the terrorism America has faced is mosquito spit in a bucket compared to the flood of gun deaths in America every single day:

Gun violence is real and pervasive, of course, but you could make the same point about fatalities that result from car crashes or from heart disease. The number of people who die from those things dwarfs the number of deaths from terrorism, too.

Yes. Yes, that is right. Those things also kill large numbers of Americans. And, for the benefit of the slow among us, we will again repeat that the difference between those things and gun violence is that Congress has not repeatedly passed multiple laws demanding that government be barred from doing anything to prevent car crashes or heart disease. Because, of course, that would be stupid. There is no pro-cancer lobbyist group demanding doctors not screen their patients for cancer because Freedom, and the few voices among us who huff that they should be able to launch their un-seat-belted protocorpses out of their car windshields if they damn well want to are, rightfully, ignored in favor of all the firefighters and police officers and paramedics who got tired of having to carry snow shovels in their trunks in order to laboriously peel those freedom-lovers back off the pavement.

Only gun violence is subjected to federal laws, passed by cheap crooks and supported by the paranoid, requiring government to not even examine why these things are happening. If private planes were crashing into American public classrooms at the rate of one a week. you can damn well bet that the cable news networks would pee their tailored pants in alarm, and presidential contenders would be beside themselves with public fury demanding that something be done, and there would be select committees and all of the usual pomp that important men surround themselves with when they want to be seen as giving a damn. We would shut down the airports. We would demand inspections of each and every plane. We would, in short, do something.

If elementary, middle, high school, or college students in America were constantly being killed on a classroom-by-classroom scale by crashing private planes, or monthly gas explosions, or a steady stream of ricin bombs, or packs of rabid wolves, or toxic pencil shavings, or ordinary crayons, or, yes, car accidents, heart attacks, or cancer, we would do something. We would do a lot of somethings; new laws, new safety requirements, new commissions, new investigations; we would keep doing them until we had made such incidents, at the very least, more rare than they used to be.

The right to simply walk into any classroom in America and start murdering people, however, is specifically and conspicuously Protected. It may not be infringed in the slightest, says the NRA, which has predicated all their recent lobbying and promotional fearmongering on the explicit premise that what with the "knockout game," and immigrants, and ISIS, and the government itself, their members may themselves find themselves in a position where they, too, need to murder large numbers of people at once and government shall not interfere with those preparations. This radical—well, objectively insane—premise is cited even by sitting congressmen as the reason why the rest of America shall be prohibited from doing anything to prevent those mass murders.

Head below the fold for more on this sad story.

And America, its baby boomers dulled into a sleepy apathy toward horrific violence that was possibly instilled by the music those kids listened to back then or—dare we say it—the scourge of pinball games?—is fine with that.

The cable news networks cover each mass murder with requisite gaudy sorrow, but do not pee their tailored pants in alarm. Instead they host tuttering pundits who hypothesize that perhaps the problem here was that there weren't any fine upstanding NRA members there to engage the perpetrator in heroic gun battle. There almost always were such people there, of course; in Las Vegas the would-be hero was executed from behind by an accomplice he never saw, and in Oregon the hero wisely concluded that if he pulled his own gun out and stormed toward the killer the SWAT team, which had already arrived, would fill him with a pound and a half of bullets before he jogged ten steps, but no matter—the myth of the heroic cowboy saving the day, preferably in such a way as to make a really good movie afterward, is still cited as The Only Possible Thing that we might deploy against the mass murderers we ourselves arm and turn loose Every. Single. Day.

So what could we do to stop classrooms of our children from being murdered? We could start, as we have with cancer, and heart disease, and car accidents, with doing Something. That would be very fucking obvious, and yet we are prohibited from doing it by—again, to be terribly uncivil about things—the collective Republican Party, which continues to block every effort. We could fund more studies into how such incidents could be prevented even in a country awash in guns. We could, gasp, require more rigorous screenings of individuals among us who which to purchase weaponry that would allow them to murder one or more classrooms full of children. We could examine whether reduced magazine sizes might slow murderers down, which would result in fewer dead people but would indeed slightly inconvenience avid shooters whose shooting pleasure is measurably reduced if they cannot squeeze off their rounds as fast as their fingers can twitch.

We could revisit whether a constitutional amendment adopted during frontier days, when America was a new nation hemmed in by wild lands and the colonial ambitions of the world's then-greatest military powers, needs adaptations made two centuries later.

Or we could indeed declare that the problem is not guns, but mentally ill people holding those guns, and direct our efforts to solving that problem. If we felt like it. If, say, we were so fed up with classrooms full of other people's children being murdered that we were willing to forgo one one-hundredth of the next proposed tax cut.

But we're not, and the reason is simple. We have, as the sitting president alluded to and who anyone who simply sits themselves down on Twitter after any one of these now-common mass murders, accustomed ourselves to these new levels of violence. We find them acceptable now—and if you dispute that, I invite you to provide any evidence to the contrary. We offer up sad thoughts for the victims, to be sure, but not even ten minutes will go by before various individuals and groups and pundits loudly announce that their own right to imaginary, preventative murder makes these latest deaths simply a necessary part of our national life. That it is not preventable, because those individuals themselves will loudly, and if necessary violently, oppose any and all attempts to do so.

Gun violence is the only thing that can hurl itself at one American classroom a week and have the resulting deaths be declared necessary. We would do that for nothing else, because if we did it for anything else we could not bear to live with ourselves.

And that is why gun violence in America is "different."

Gun violence is the only American epidemic we are legislatively required to accept

Comments are closed on this story.