Another Massacre: Saying It All Again, One....More...Time

OVER THE PAST FEW YEARS, after one of our patented American massacres, I usually wrote an essay about it, replete with cogent comments and pithy profundities, At least, I tried. I now begin to perceive that if I continue this pattern, I will eventually fill the known universe with redundant profundities. We are a sick culture, we are all complicit, and all that. The usual stuff. The time has seemingly come to lengthen the interval between essays to every other mass murder. Or maybe somebody smarter than I might write one final, definitive essay, describing what all these mass murders and murderers have in common, if anything, isolating the central problem, and describing specifically how to prevent future episodes. Then, at long last we could be done with it, and relegate the essays and this repeating nightmare to the history books, with all the other nightmares, where it belongs. How many mass murders have there been in the United States in the past twenty years, say, since columbine? Fifty? A hundred? Technically, there's about one a day, defined as three or more victims per shooting, most unreported in the media, which seeks only to entertain and sell advertising. The first two that I remember were both in 1966, when I was eleven, if memory serves; the Texas tower shooting spree, and the Richard Speck nursing student massacre in Chicago. So, its not entirely a recent phenomenon, but today's frequency is new, with increasing frequency of massacres as the years pass. The wager happy English are doubtless taking bets on when the next such event will transpire in the U.S.. We might all agree on one point: it probably won't be long until another. The fact that this particular killer was challenged by a good guy with a rifle will doubtless evince a torrential downpour of right wing know-it-alls, saying, "see, we told you so!! Just look what a good guy with a gun can do to a bad guy with a gun!". This shrill hysterical assertion will be no more reasonable now than ever before. Where was the good guy the moment the bad guy squeezed his first round? Why wait until twenty six are dead? More people should have been armed in church, and everywhere else, you say, to allow for a more prompt response? How many responses will come too early? How many times will a good guy with a gun, confused by all the noise and all the other drawn weapons, aim and fire at the wrong weapon wielder, triggering a frenzied scene of randomly flying bullets after the fashion of a maudlin Clint Eastwood movie? Good guys and bad guys do not exist. We are all both good and bad, in varying proportions. Circumstances bring out what they bring out. The more guns, the more gun violence. The fewer guns, the less gun violence. Note England and Australia, and note America. Look at the statistics, and the facts behind them. Then consider the angry state of our American citizenry, especially those, who in a fit of madness, voted for Trump. Do we really want those people armed in public, ready to personally defeat evil the very moment they think they see it? I'd rather take my chances, unarmed.