Another mass shooting event

Another day, another mass shooting, and American politicians continue to pretend like they are paralyzed and unable to act. The people elected to office to deliberate on the big challenges and issues offer nothing but platitudes and prayers. They can’t even bring themselves to fund research into gun violence, as a public health matter, because of reasons. For the politicians self-aware enough to talk about mass shootings being abnormal, all they have to offer is impotent anger.

An 18-year-old man, himself barely out of boyhood, purchased tools of death on his eighteenth birthday and chose to use them in an elementary school. As of this writing, 19 children and two adults (teachers or school staff) are confirmed dead at Uvalde Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. There is a question of why he did it. It is a question that will forever elude us because the responding police eventually killed the alleged killer. But there is a bigger question of why mass shootings continue to occur and why America seems unable to profer adequate solutions.

The wealthiest, most advanced country in human history (not my opinion but that of many Americans) cannot get its shit together. This is not to say that any country can prevent mass death events of this kind. But America appears to go out of its way to make the tools necessary to carry out such horrendous acts readily accessible to its population. It does so under some absurd arguments about needing to hunt, protect property and family (often in that order), and should the need arise, staging the over throw of its democratically elected government.

American culture is wedded to the idea of the gun in such an unhealthy way that it is at times comical. Unfortunately, the love, worship, and adoration of the gun, results in what we saw today and what we have seen in previous incidents. Like when a lunatic broke the windows of his high-rise hotel room and sprayed a crowd of concertgoers below. Or like the time a crazed youth stormed an elementary school and butchered babies, or like the time… The list seems never-ending.

Perhaps things are getting better. It used to be that all the politicians would talk about how “our hearts are broken” and how they are offering up prayers. Journalists (i.e., TV presenters) would repeat that mantra as well, and insist that it was not an appropriate time to talk about gun control. But now, after so many horrific incidents and countless needless deaths, the hollowness of that refrain is apparent to even the most obtuse of talking heads. Now they talk wistfully about what should happen and if American society can continue to handle this. This evening I was listening to Wolf Blitzer cover the developing story. He kept dancing around the solutions, speaking about not knowing why American society has not been able to find a solution. You know why Blizter, you know why.

Of course, there are those idiots who insist on saying the same thing. Sen. Ted Cruz produced the following tweet:

After all the mass shootings in Texas and the decade since he was first elected, you’d think a supposedly intelligent former Supreme Court law clerk would have better words. But perhaps it is not stupidity, and Cruz is just a vile, callous human with no desire to see his constituents’ best interests.

But even those who seem interested in finding a solution to the problem offer nothing but hollow words and impotent anger. Listen to Joe Biden here:

This man has been in Government since before I was born. When he first entered Government as a Senator, many African countries were still struggling for independence from their European colonizers. If, in all these decades, he has been unable to build the networks and coalitions needed to do something, what then does his being “sick of it” offer? What does insisting that “we have to act” do? My man, you’ve been reelected several times and hold the highest office in the land; we look to you to act.

I need a drink.