I'm not a believer and don't visit a church on Sunday mornings. But there is certainly something about Sunday morning rituals that make people feel safe, secure, maybe even a way to shield them from whatever they are going to experience in the week ahead. Maybe it's the same reason people go to movies on Friday and Saturday nights, which is, as we now know, tragically ironic.
Hunter Thompson's most famous work was his "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72". In it there is a single line that neatly sums up the heart of the American character:
"This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it — that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable."
Now ironically (again) Hunter was a huge gun nut, but he was also a prophet. It applied to us 40 years ago when Nixon was re-elected, and it applies this Sunday. Just two weeks after a severely mentally disturbed individual entered a midnight showing of a highly anticipated new summer blockbuster with the arsenal of a small SWAT team and slaughtered twelve people, another massacre has taken place, this time at the worship services of a notoriously peaceful religion.
After Aurora, and after the Arizona shootings prior to that, the "Lone Wolf" meme was beat into America's conscience by the media. There is nothing you can do to prevent a lunatic from acquiring firearms and carrying out these attacks (except having someone else in the crowd take him out with a weapon they themselves are carrying). These individuals are off the grid, and you can't track them. And it's certainly no excuse to take away my guns.
It's time to call bullshit, or become more of a farce as a country than we already are. Today a group of people was targeted for extermination because (in all likelihood) the shooter(s) mistook them for being Muslim. What we are seeing is the culmination of the poison of hate radio, the ability for any citizen to procure his own military-style arsenal, and the inability of a homicidal jack-ass to even be able to (or worse, not even care to) differentiate between the people of the religion he was trying to kill, and the ones that he ended up killing instead.
You like your guns?? Fine, you can keep them (though what's sportsmanlike about shooting an animal that has no defense has never appealed to me, it's something I recognize as right). But you can't keep you assault rifles anymore. No more guns that can eradicate entire movie theaters and turn temples into crime scenes. You couldn't commit this act with a hand-gun, and you couldn't commit it with a shotgun, or a knife.
Today the NRA and the gun lobby has blood on their hands (again). So do the right-wing radio screamers, FOX News and Michelle Bachmann (whose decade long vilification of Muslims today culminated in a completely different religion being targeted for attack because they wore turbins). It's almost fitting this took place in Paul Ryan's district, and in Scott Walker's state.
This was inevitable, and it's actually a shock it hasn't happened many times before now. We are a nation that has a deep sickness related to guns and bigotry, and it's as deeply ingrained as bbqs on Memorial Day and fireworks on the 4th of July. It's who we are. All the money to buy guns, and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who makes us uncomfortable. The shame is for all of us, and the deeper shame is that we don't do anything about it, because we never have, and we never will.