You know their names: Fuentes, Gonzales, Kasky, Hogg. The kids from the school shooting in Parkland, Florida who have become child soldiers in the war for sane gun policy in the United States. They have taken heavy fire and braved savage, sustained attacks from angry “adults.” who support the current radical reading of the Second Amendment, for having the gall to get in front of cameras and go on social media to condem The Greatest Generation, Silent Generation, Baby Boomers, and Generation Xers for doing nothing to end the horror that is gun violence in America. The kids are right to damn us.
Look at that graphic. I have been all over the Internet reading about gun violence, but it was that graphic in a recent Vox article by German Lopez, entitled I’ve covered gun violence for years. The solutions aren’t a big mystery, that best illustrated the level of our insanity for me. It shows the number of guns per capita against the incidence of gun violence for countries around the world, and the upper right hand corner is a very, very bad place to be. Yet that is exactly where you will find “United States.” More strikingly, look at how far adrift it is from the other nations, like some remote island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Like a remote island, we find ourselves home to a creature that does not exist in this form anywhere else on earth. I am not talking about just mass shootings, but also the level of private gun ownership, the sheer number of guns in the country, and the amount of total gun violence and gun related deaths. When it comes to firearms, we are indeed exceptional.
Worse, we know this. We have seen the evidence telling us we’re engaging in madness, because the research has been out, and increasing in quantity, for years. The solutions to our problems are there in black and white, already proven effective by other nations, but we ignored them while rotely going through the same reactions again and again as a river of our fellow citizens’ blood flowed at our feet.
Democrats staging a sit In was the high point of the fight for the lost cause that is sane gun safety laws in America. Despite all of that blood, we, as a people, have come to accept the assertion made by hoarding gun enthusiasts and their suppliers, that one clause in one line in our Constitution mandates we do nothing to stop the carnage. We believe every adult has the “freedom” to purchase weapons made to commit mass murder, because who among us is really “free” if he doesn’t have that option? So the right of any American with an itch to kill to go out and buy a boatload of assorted guns that can be used to take away the lives of large numbers of people in seconds “shall not be infringed.” That is our current reading of the Second Amendment. Sounds crazy when you put it that way, doesn’t it? But we actually ascribe that level of bat-shit to the intent of our founding fathers when they penned that clause. Apparently we think they were very stable geniuses too.
In America the right to kill trumps the right to life, and our kids are damning us for it. Who can blame them? This is the Expired Ban Generation, the children who attended school after assault rifles came back in style. We made them do active shooter drills to prepare for the unimaginable rather than eliminate the danger. We reconfigured school buildings to make one entrance, installed locking doors with buzzers, manufacturered clear bookbags, hired armed guards, and otherwise turned the place they spend all day, five days a week, nine months a year, into a scary prison where children go to die instead of regulating the damn guns. Can we blame this traumatized lot for asking how could we choose hunks of metal over our own young In contravention of the millions of years of evolution that resulted in our existence?
In the kids’ view the adult population has a serious mental problem, and they are right about that too. So many of us blithely claim this is complicated when it is not. More guns lead to more gun violence, and having semiautomatic weapons and large magazines available lead to a higher body count. There is no mystery to solve, just the need for the political will to fix it.
Thousands and thousands of lives a year taken by guns isn’t enough to make us do that. About half the populace doesn’t seem to take the danger seriously for more than a few days until their child leaves school in a body bag, or a shooting happens close enough to home that they fear they will end up in one themselves. It’s like the threat of gun violence, unlike, say, the threat of “radical Islamic terrorism,” isn’t real to them until it is made personal. Imagine if that many people died from terrorist attacks each year. We lost 3,000 in 2001, and in response we totally reshaped our domestic federal law enforcement agencies, started two wars, and happily ceded some of our freedom to NSA, DHS, and Secret Courts in the name of being safe.
Meanwhile dozens are injured and die in Las Vegas in the span of a few minutes and we can’t even manage to ban bump stocks. Home grown terrorists get to buy as many hand held WMDs as they please to maximize the slaughter. And while the homicidal maniac checks out the feel of that sweet AR-15 Jack is selling we have the audacity to point at undocumented immigrants and yell “stranger danger!”
Perhaps things will finally change this time. The kids aren’t playing around and they have gotten a bill passed by the legislature in their home state. If we do finally move toward more balanced gun safety laws nationally. I cannot help but note that it’s a damn shame it had to be children standing up and demanding that American adults stop failing them that was the catalyst for that change. Our children lead the way to sanity, and we follow dragging our feet and making anonymous death threats against high schoolers on the internet. What must the world think about that? Do they get nervous about our bloated military budgets and huge nuclear arsenal and wonder how “those crazies in America” might use them to satisfy their blood lust? Because I would.