gracchusdixit

Since the murder of two young television reporters in Roanoke, Virginia, by an apparently disgruntled former employee of a local television station, our nation has been enacting, for the hundredth time, the sort of political Kabuki that invariably seems to follow all these tragedies.

In the first act of the play, everyone expresses horror at the crime, rushing to extend their “thoughts and prayers” to the families of the victims.  In the second act, we are assured that the perpetrators are “deranged” and aberrant individuals, deserving either punishment or pity, but in no way typical.  In the third act, a few dissenting voices—almost always on the left and usually with a tone of weary resignation—call for “sensible” gun control.  In the fourth act, opposing voices—nearly all on the right—huff and puff indignantly against anyone who is unseemly enough to “play politics in a time of grief”.  In the fifth and final act, the same sanctimonious voices demand that the 2nd Amendment rights of “law abiding citizens” must be protected against the totalitarian interventions of big government.  And with all that, the curtain falls, the media coverage moves on, and we forget all about it.

Until the next time.

For in the United States of America, there is always a next time, as one shocking murder or massacre follows another:  Virginia Tech, Columbine, Aurora, Newtown, and now Roanoke.

More shocking than the attention-getting massacres, however, is the mundane, never-ending, largely ignored spilling of blood.  Each and every day, nearly 300 Americans are shot or shoot themselves.  Each and every month, more Americans are shot to death than were killed on September 11, 2001 in the attack on the Twin Towers.  Each and every year, guns claim more civilian dead and wounded than all the soldiers killed and maimed during ten years of senseless fighting in Iraq.  None of this would be happening if it were not for the fact that 300 million guns have been set loose in our homes, in our schools, and on our streets.

The justifications for our national addiction to guns, the excuses for all the carnage they cause, are as sadly predictable as the carnage itself.   We’ve heard the same justifications and excuses—and the same evasions about what to do—time after time, and we began to hear them again just minutes after the murders in Roanoke.

Jeb Bush offered this preposterous justification:

The federal government shouldn’t be involved in gun laws, because the country’s very different.  You go to a rural area, where guns are part of the culture, to impose gun laws from Washington that are going to work in New York City, or work in a rural area, makes no sense.

It doesn’t seem to occur to Mr. Bush that countless countries around the world have both urban and rural areas, that wherever “guns are part of the culture,” people inevitably get killed, that you’re just as dead if you’re killed in the hills of rural Pennsylvania as on the streets of New York.

Marco Rubio uttered this depressingly familiar and utterly illogical excuse:

It’s not the guns.  It’s the crazy people committing these crimes.  What law in the world would have prevented him from killing them?

To which the only sane answer is:  any effective law, if we had such a law, if it was enforced.  If Rubio’s ridiculous rhetorical question made any sense, we wouldn’t bother to pass any laws in the first place, and he would be out of work.

Scott Walker didn’t bother with justifications or empty excuses.  He simply lied.  After intoning that “the common thread we see in many of these cases is a failure in the system to help someone with mental illness,” he went on to claim that he had “stepped up” the effort to combat mental illness in his own state of Wisconsin. In fact, he made drastic cuts in mental health services and dramatically undercut Wisconsin’s once sensible gun laws.

No other nation in the so-called civilized world is so addicted to guns, and no other country can match our record of carnage.  Faced with the latest bloody page in that record, those who want to become our next President have nothing to offer the victims of gun violence but “thoughts and prayers”.  These are the same people who never tire of telling us that we are a great and “exceptional” nation.  Perhaps we are.  But not in the way they imagine.