Guns and Deaths: We Really Don’t Care, Do We?
By Peter Van BurenDecember 04, 2015
"Information
Clearing House" - "We
Meant Well" - -
More than one a day.
That is how often mass shootings (four or more
people wounded or dead) occurred in the United States this year.
Including the worst shooting of the year (so far), which unfolded
only yesterday in San Bernardino, a total of 462
people have died and 1,314 have been wounded in such attacks
these past eleven months.
And now, the pundits, from Fox to Maddow to the guy next to you at
the bar will rumble through the same old arguments: we have to do
something but the Second Amendment and it’s the damn NRA but
background checks wouldn’t have stopped them and I’ll need to arm
myself for protection and it is all just that these get so much
attention and the Internet but right-wing hate and wait until it
happens in your community and so forth and so on and, wait, did you
see CNN, there’s another active shooter…
Active shooter. The endless stream of mass
shootings has birthed its own vocabulary. Active shooter. Long guns.
Lock down. Ongoing situation. Device. Tactical. Person of interest.
Americans with little previous knowledge of weapons now know the
caliber of various typical active shooter long guns.
There have been only a handful of
Americans killed by terrorists, but no one throws up
their hands and says there is nothing that can be done.
A multi-trillion dollar “homeland” (no one but the
Nazi’s even used that term prior to 2001) security
complex was created, and we take off our shoes at the
airport and tolerate — no, welcome — the NSA spying on
everyone of us on the off chance it might help.
And despite the fact that there is no
evidence that any of that has ever stopped a
terrorist, we blithly accept that it “might have” or
that “we’ll never know if the security measures
dissuaded a terror attack; the easiest ones to stop are
the ones that never occur.”
Yet at the same time we are still
accepting something as illogical as if you buy a gun at
a shop you are subject to a background check while if
you buy a weapon at a gun show there is no background
check. Yet statistically there
is less likelihood of mass killings in states that
require more comprehensive background checks for all
handgun sales than in states that do not. We register
drones with the federal government but not weapons.
If there was one terror attack a day in America, you can
be assured no one would throw up their hands and say
"but what can we do." Instead, the president simply goes
on TV (again) to state the
non-statement of “The one thing we do know is that we
have a pattern now of mass shootings in this country
that has no parallel anywhere else in the world.” Kinda
material that writes itself.
And don’t say it — if more armed
people were the answer to shoot back, then America would
be the safest place on earth. There are some 300 million
firearms already out there.
It is the NRA. It is a lack of
background checks. It is a mental health problem. It is
all of those things. But it seems more and more the
underlying problem is we simply don’t care anymore. A
new normal too readily accepted under the falsehood that
there is nothing that can be done.
Peter van Buren is a former United
States Foreign Service employee who wrote the books
Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99 Percent and We
Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts
and Minds of the Iraqi People.
© 2015 Peter Van Buren
