I had a different post in the pipeline, an introspective musing on the arrival of autumn weather and the things I look forward to this particular fall. It wasn't coming together (I'm sure it will) but LWOTP woke up angry this morning. This post asked to be given a hearing and did me the courtesy of nearly writing itself.
This New Yorker article was written three years ago, and of course it could easily have been written yesterday because NOTHING HAS CHANGED. Go ahead, give it a read and tell me you don't recognize the echoes of the past week, the past six months, the past three years and beyond.
The Simple Truth About Gun Control
Sometimes satire has the most to offer in unbelievably awful situations. Here's the article The Onion has run each of the last three times one of these events has occurred. Different dateline, same wrenching story.
‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens
I'm angry and I'm tired of having the same conversations over and over and over after yet another mass shooting. I'm tired of hearing people clinging to their weapons when we know that the likelihood they will ever actually need to use them against another human being – truly need to use them to protect themselves or their families – is vanishingly close to zero. We KNOW what we need to to do stop this insane loss of life. Don't BS me about "prayers for the families" and "but it's too early to talk about the causes." It's not. We KNOW what the causes are, and we KNOW how to fix this. Just as surely as antibiotics work on bacterial infections, sane gun laws would dramatically decrease the horrendous loss of life that we alone among developed nations seem willing to tolerate, time and time again, all in the name of a misguided (and very recent and self-serving) interpretation of a centuries-old “right”.
BUT BUT BUT!!! WHAT ABOUT THE GUBMINT!!! THEY WANNA TAKE AWAY MAH GUNZ!!! DANGER!!! DANGER!!!
Know where else the odds are vanishingly close to zero? The odds of our government coming to take away everyone's guns. If you honestly believe that paranoid, irrational, costly delusion – if you really think there's a government agenda that would come after your precious firearms, and that clinging to that delusion is worth the horrendous cost in human lives – go ahead and unfriend me. Now. Seriously. Walk out. Drop me a note before you go if you'd like to, but go. Because YOU are the kernel, the source, the core of this problem. YOU are the reason the NRA knows it can buy our politicians with impunity. YOU are the reason they can continue to obstruct any and all attempts to pass sane gun legislation or even study the public health effects of gun violence.
And if you go, as you go, take a moment to ask yourself: Are tens of thousands of human lives really that expendable? Is it really worth that cost, just so you can let others keep controlling you and feeding your fear?
I don't have all the answers. I don't know what I can practically do. But I do know how I plan to make decisions about how I vote and which candidates I will support. When I know more, I will do more. This much I do know: it's time to say "enough".
