My Job is More Important than Your Life

Be frank. The monologues, the dialogues, the tearful descriptions of victims, the calls for action, the finger pointing, and arguments (among others) have become tediously repetitive. One news outlet, in the wake of this recent Broward County shooting, replayed post-mass shooting comments from Speaker Paul Ryan over the past year that were so identical they actually felt comical due to their redundancy.

Although the bulk of the this unique American tragedy falls squarely on Republican Conservatism, one needs to also reflect on why Progressive Liberals are so inept at making changes to restore to health a society ever more handicapped by a killing disease.

Let me reflect on both, but first the problem.

It has become increasingly presented by domestic and international analysts that when it comes to non-lethal violence, virtual or real, the United States is not an outlier.  Whether it is due to anger, passion, greed, mental illness or whatever, bad shit is contemplated or happens everywhere with only minimal variation of degrees.

The US is a big nation, so raw numbers are also large, but when analysts dig deeper, Americans do not embrace violence uniquely. However, when it comes to mass-shootings (4 or more people killed by an assailant with a gun) the US is off the charts in a category of its own. If you add all shooting deaths, including suicides, then America truly becomes an island.

The reason is ridiculously and painfully obvious. Access to firearms, in particular certain types of firearms, allows violent people to carry out their violence with…you guessed it…shooting.  Aren’t you smart! Moreover, they view it as standard operating procedure.

The ramification of this gun violence is far more harmful than the publicized carnage.

The inability to address the social issue continues to lead the nation down a road of prevention as the sole means of dealing with the problem. Ironically, this direction benefits the advocates (and profiteers) of guns since it calls for even more guns to be distributed within the nation to be put in the hands of “good guys” (notice its “guys” not “gals”). Along with that add physical barriers (lock doors, walls, gates, metal detectors), and “procedures” (shooting drills in school, military style presence, e.g.). You end up with a nation of people more stressed, more angry, more afraid, and with more guns. This is a solution?

Republicans lawmakers and the Republican Party as a whole have fought even the slightest attempts to curb gun availability. To think they have done this out of some patriotic adherence to the Constitution should make anyone with half a brain laugh to the point of tears. They have taking this stand for only one pitiful reason: their “grade” from the NRA. They feel a ‘B’ grade or less from the NRA means their election in the Republican Primary is toast…period. They know because in many cases they used that same standard to defeat an opponent, along with the financial support of the NRA. Deaths of children notwithstanding, to Republicans keeping their job is what counts.

But what of Progressives with all their ‘D’s and ‘F’s from the NRA? I believe they just don’t get it.

The constant refrain we hear from gun control advocates is that we need to stop these mass shootings today. They reference the cause of these shootings as inappropriate weapons too easily acquired.  Their arguments are self-neutralizing because they are so unfeasible. They project the target of their efforts as the next mass shooting.  They cannot bring the problem down to earth. Every time I hear the phrase “…so this will never happen again” I literally want to scream.

It is reasonably estimated that there is a gun for every man, woman, and child in the United States. Nothing is going to stop gun violence in this year, this decade, or this generation. We need gun control laws of all kinds, at all different levels of government, because we need it to be a reflection of how we, as a society, feel about the use of guns to carry out our personal anxieties. That attitude which is reflected elsewhere in the world needs to be replanted here.

Banning the sale of certain weapons, restricting acquisition to certain individuals, and beginning aggressive buy-back programs will go further in the minds of young people because it would create a social imperative. That needs to be the goal, gun ownership be damned. There will always be guns…always.

Politicians need to do this so the next generation, often the young children being killed today, can expect that their peers feel the way they do, and that fear is not the driver of their lives.