10/01/2015

Ten More

I can remember when the McDonald's massacre in San Ysidro, California, happened in 1984. I can remember that my family was on vacation when we heard that a man with a gun killed 21 people at the fast food restaurant, including kids, the worst mass shooting in the nation up to that point. We've topped it three times since. But I remember the utter shock, the abject horror I felt, thinking about those families, thinking about them helpless.

I can remember when a Luby's cafeteria in Killeen, Texas, was shot up by one man, with a death toll of 23. That was in October 1991, and I heard about it on the news that night. It stuck with me because I had been to Killeen, and I had eaten at that Luby's, so I knew the space, knew what it was like to be there, could picture the different places where I could have hidden if I had been there.

I no longer remember where I am when I hear about the latest nightmare massacre in the United States. I am no longer shocked enough by their occurrence. And that makes me so sorrowful because that means I've become so numb to all of this that it barely registers beyond "Oh, what is it this time? What variation on the nightmare is it?"

The at-least ten people who were gunned down near Roseburg, Oregon, are victims of the shooter, yes. But this nation is filled to overflow with complicit criminals. At this point, if you are someone who doesn't believe in greater gun regulation you are an accomplice. No, let's go further: you are a murderer. If we're executing people who were in the room when someone was killed by another or planned someone's death, then anyone who opposes and works against tighter gun laws is guilty of murder in the same way, by facilitating it, by making it easier for the murder to occur, by creating the circumstances by which murder happens.

(Speaking of, if you want to make yourself sick to needing to vomit, read the alleged 4Chan posts by the shooter warning that something was going to happen, as well as the responses of others encouraging him to kill and then cheering when he did.)

We've given up so much in the United States to people who are wrong. Not just opinion wrong, but actually wrong. We know that stricter gun laws lead to fewer gun deaths. This is a fact. We know that states with loose gun laws have a higher rate of gun violence. This is a fact. These facts should make a rational society do something.

Instead, we're told that such facts don't matter. Instead, we've been forced to just suck it up after every massacre, whether it's children or college students or restaurant patrons, because of the cowardly inaction of our legislators. We're told that our guns will keep us safe. No, they won't. And you're a fool who will get yourself or somebody else killed if you believe that.

Like President Obama essentially said today, I'm just so tired of allowing the fools to even be allowed a place in our public discourse. If we don't treat the fools and cowards like fools and cowards, then we are damned to go through this again. And again. Repeat endlessly.