Thoughts on Las Vegas, and Mass Shootings in America.
With everything that has been going sideways in my life, with all the worries that have piled on top of each other to assemble themselves into a Voltron-inspired monster, I didn’t want to write on this blog.
Yet I am a citizen of the United States, and the worst mass shooting in our history has just happened. I am speechless. Horrified that something like this was possible, and from the sound of it, done simply because it could be done.
My job is to entertain: To inspire joy and sadness, to stimulate thought and discussion. When I create, it comes from my heart and mind working in concert with my fingers to let an idea flow from my mind to yours.
Something like this hits me hard. My wife is a teacher, and each time a school shooting happens I am reminded of how lucky I am that her school was not the one where it happened. Guns are a horrible problem in America.
I understand that many of my international readers won’t understand the exact depths of this health issue, but I will use my wife’s school as an example yet again. There is a man employed by the district, and his entire job is to prowl the roofs of the schools in my wife’s district. He is not looking for animals, for weather damage, or for any loitering souls. His job is to look for bullet holes in the roof.
Men and women in my wife’s district fire guns directly into the air at night on the empty parking lot of various schools in the district. The falling bullets puncture the roof, causing massive amounts of leaking. My wife, towards the start of this semester, had entire sections of the school closed off from heavy rainwater damage. These holes appeared after the roof inspector had already repaired a large number of such holes.
Guns are on practically every corner, and I 100% guarantee you that the NRA, GOP Congressmen and Congresswomen, and too many conservative citizens of neither group to count will state that the only solution to these situation is easier access to more and deadlier guns. The rhetoric will be that only a good person with a gun can stop a bad person with a gun.
No matter the fact that the bad person in this instance was not in a position to be stopped by anyone in the tens of thousands of people in the crowd, which included several police officers. Nevermind that when the police did close in on the shooters location, he had already taken his own life. Nevermind that the shooter gained access to over 10 automatic weapons with no prior history in collecting, shooting, or even a generic interest in guns.
No. Republicans will send their thoughts and prayers. Then the will demand we not politicize the shooting. Then, any reasonable discussion of automatic weapons, large clip sizes, reasonable restriction of civilian access to firearms, and even discussion of gun control measures will be shot down with arguments of Second Amendment rights, and how good gun owners are getting caught up by the few bad apples doing all this violence.
The lost lives? Unfortunate. The hundreds of people who are injured? These things happen. That will be the narrative. How do I know? Because that’s the narrative every single time this happens. Without fail. That will be the fallback. These things happen. It is tragic, it is unfortunate, and it is unpreventable. All we can do is arm ourselves even more so that the good person with the gun is in position for the next mass shooting.
There will be a next mass shooting. Politicians will ignore all the evidence which points out that gun ownership leads to higher rates of domestic shootings, suicide, and other horrible things. There will be vile statements made by the NRA, which will be lapped up by its members, and justifiably torn down by its opponents. Nothing will change.
American gun owners accept that these shootings will happen, and continue to happen. It is a price Republican politicians and the NRA have deemed acceptable to keep gun profits flowing. And make no mistake: After every single shooting there is a surge in gun sales. Manufacturers, gun shop owners, pawn shop owners and everyone else involved will have a hay day. And all of it will lead to the next.
All I can do is write. It’s what I’ve chosen to do with my life. I have thoughts on the issue, obviously, but I’m so jaded at our ability to even try and have the hard talks that are necessary to curb this issue that posts like this are all I can do. It won’t change much. Those whose minds are made up on the issue will remain made up on the issue. Those whose outrage and fear grows with each tragedy, myself among them, will rail that nothing is being done to try and fix the issue.
In the end, I too have hopes and prayers about the Las Vegas shooting. It’s a selfish hope, and a selfish prayer though. I hope that my writing becomes such a strong source of revenue that my wife can quit teaching, and I pray that it is fast enough that her current school doesn’t become yet another ‘unpreventable tragedy’.
Sincerely,
Justin
