So common is this that it no longer registers surprise or shock. Seemingly every day now there is a shooting, be it in a mall or a college or even just at a home. Every day, Americans are killing each other, often randomly. And nobody cares.
Nobody wants to talk about the ease with which guns are bought, sold and used.
I was in Europe during the Virginia Tech shooting. International media struggled to understand how someone could have such easy access to such deadly weapons. And for a time, a brief time, Americans wondered the same thing.
But just as quickly, such a heinous crime was chalked up to the act of a madman, something impossible to predict, prevent or understand. But that’s not so.
And again, today speculation focuses on what drove a young man to randomly open fire on a campus, killing at least five. I suppose this is because there is no reason to speculate on how he got acquired such deadly tools. Because these weapons of mass destruction are so accessible that there is no need to wonder.
The police and press are focusing on the over or under-medication of the killer, who may have been mentally unstable. While true, this ignores the over-weaponization of our country.
In a nation as large and diverse as ours, it is impossible to prevent all violence, particularly seemingly random acts. But we can, we must try. We must make it more difficult to get such destructive weapons and we must reduce the weapons' destructiveness.
Because we are killing each other far too quickly, far too easily and far too often to ignore this problem, to refuse to act.