Since the beginning of American history, the right to own guns has been a sick thread that has been tightly woven into the nation’s identity. From the myth of the frontier town to the ‘good guy with a gun’ narrative of today’s massacres, the specter of gun violence looms ever larger. With the relentless, frothing river of American mass shootings, we must be forced to examine the paradox that binds the Land of the Free to its firearms. American gun violence is a global disgrace.
Yesterday, an Army reservist and firearms instructor with mental illness shot about 60 people in a small town in Maine, killing at least 18. A Wednesday night at the bowling alley, a drink, and game of pool with colleagues at the local bar, or a walk in the night air in Lewiston will forever be linked to a mass murderer. The people of Maine keep electing a person, who fills a seat in the US Senate that, if not for her presence, would have passed gun control a decade ago. Every person who voted for Susan Collins got tonight exactly what they wanted.
It’s a grim tableau: the sirens, the candlelight vigils, and the rinse-and-repeat cries for reform that echo unanswered in Congress and State Houses settle calmly in deaf ears. In a land where liberty is enshrined, the freedom to own a gun with scant control is sacrosanct, even when faced with tens of thousands of lost lives each year.
The price of America’s enduring infatuation with guns is everyone’s life, eventually.
The American subservience to the antiquated Second Amendment—an almost sacral observance that has, over centuries, fostered a culture of gun ownership and an indomitable firearm industry—has wrought a gun-toting citizenry anathema to the notions of public safety. There are no good guns. There are no good guys with guns. There are no sane reasons to be armed with military weaponry. The milieu of gun ownership has always been a scam designed to sell guns and further marginalize people of lesser means.
We already know about the potent firearm lobby, whose piles of money and influence entwine both Congressional chambers, instantly clipping any seedling of gun control legislation. Money and the fear of losing power embolden each new generation of politicians to become more and more extreme. This deliberate ignorance toward public safety underscores a glaring dissonance in American life.
Gun tribalism pervades America and serves only to entrench the divide between the pursuit of happiness and the muscled press of authoritarianism. The gun control debate is emblematic of a broader societal schism, where ideological rigidity often trumps the collective aspiration for a safer society. Gun control is immensely popular as a direct question, but it does not filter through to voting. It is a dichotomy that impedes legislative progress and perpetuates a cycle of violence, despair, and inaction.
The compelling question, then, is: how many more lives must be lost with the gun obsession before the conscience of the nation is stirred into action? The answer is all of them, of course. Death and tragedy do not play a role in the political caucus of the 2A disciples. America’s firearm fixation is a global joke, and hardly anyone really cares. Everyone is in the firing line. Bullets don’t have a political party navigational system.
The road to reform is littered with half-measures and countless misses. In the current political climate, with a new House speaker being the most biblically extreme person to be elected into that role in US history, there will be no challenge to the insane American gun culture.
Duck and cover, people.
