Gun Violence in America: "I Wonder When This Will Ever End"
by John Lawrence, November 9, 2018
NBC news anchor Luther Holt said something like this at the end of his newscast last night. I've got news for you Mr. Holt, IT AIN'T NEVER GOING TO END as long as there is a gun culture in America. You want to get to the root cause of this problem? It's simple: GUNS. No need to keep wondering. No need to check the shooter's social media and try to figure out what his motive was. As long as there is a proliferation of guns, there will be gun violence.
The militarization of the US also contributes to the gun culture. The California shooter was a retired Marine. No thank you for your service, sir. This meme that, if you could only find out what is bothering these shooters and then correct that, we would all be free of gun violence and free to enjoy our Second Amendment rights. Sorry, but that is not the solution. All these mass shooters have purchased their guns legally, and very few have criminal records that amount to anything.
Mental health is certainly an issue, but what is the good old USA doing about mental health? Why making any kind of health care including mental health care prohibitively expensive, that's what. All these shooters had preexisting conditions, preexisting conditions of anger and rage. Nobody seems to give a damn until they go out and shoot somebody or a lot of somebodies. Those shooters that survive the shootings themselves go on to bask in tons of media and legal attention, go to jail, get 3 squares a day and an hour of exercise plus in some cases marriage proposals from infatuous women who never gave them the time of day before they shot up some joint. Guys caught redhanded in the act of shooting people should just be taken out and shot themselves without further ado like they would probably do in most countries in the world. Why waste legal resources on them? Why waste prison resources which purportedly cost $60K per inmate on them?
The other source of American violence is that condoned and glamorized by movies and television. You can't even channel surf without seeing someone draw a gun and shoot someone. No wonder English sitcoms are gaining in popularity. They don't have the gun violence that American sitcoms do, and not every American wants to sit there and watch people murdering each other and the glorification of criminality. Some impressionable souls who hate their fellow man, have no morals or scruples and hate themselves figure they have nothing to lose in engaging in suicide in the course of mass murdering others. This is a product of American culture and will continue unabated until the culture changes.
There have been over 300 mass murders this year alone, a little over one a day. Why is anyone surprised any more? This is a mundane, prosaic feature of American life at this time. Wasting time on it on the evening news sucks all the oxygen out of the room for more important matters like what the US is doing to Yemeni women and children. In case you haven't heard, in a nutshell, bombing them and starving them to death.
