A Fatalistic Culture
America's obsessions with guns comes with too high a cost.
America’ unending and unequaled obsession with guns is baffling.
While our country has achieved an enormous amount of wealth, status, and privilege, its predilection for firearms makes exceptional in all the wrong ways and for all the wrong reasons.
After all, other countries have grown in land and possessions after subduing and practically killing off indigenous populations.
We aren’t the only country to rid itself of a foreign oppressor.
We are typical in having had a civil war that resulted in extreme loss of life.
None of these American historical facts warrant our gun-crazy culture.
Other countries have their version of the strong and silent type who by using force of arms establish, preserve, and defend life, liberty, and happiness (or their version of these ideals).
John Wayne, Dirty Harry, and Rambo are ours, but myths and legends abound of heroes saving the day, saving and wooing the damsel in distress, and being the object of admiration for others too weak and timid to take violent initiative.
The differences between our culture and foreign cultures are why America appears to be reckless and capricious with the lives of its citizenry.
Reckless to where we thwart every opportunity to limit the ownership not just of handguns and rifles, but of handheld weapons of mass destruction who sole reason for existence is to maim and kill.
Assault weapons weren’t developed for the common defense of house and home.
They weren’t crafted to eliminate criminals.
They were created for warfare, for battling enemy armies on distant shores.
Those who favor originalist law seem to miss the fact that the Constitution’s framers, whose intents and motives are always held sacrosanct, couldn’t have possibly conceived of today’s AR-15.
A repeating rifle would have seemed ultra-futuristic to them.
Yet, we have twisted the Second Amendment to stymie laws that have kept millions safer than we are.
We have allowed the unabated rise of a wickedly callous culture, not a sub-culture because it does not operate underground or in the shadows, but in plain sight, flaunting every conceivable notion of safety and decency.
This gun culture blinds us to any solution that would affect reasonable protection against what happened in Buffalo and Uvalde.
This evil philosophy has infiltrated our socioeconomics, politics, and spiritual philosophies.
The NRA pays lobbyists to pay elected officials to do their bidding.
The elected officials block common sense legislation, and then offers hypocritical thoughts and prayers, and suggests the most infantile, moronic excuses as to why anything and everything is responsible for gun violence.
Except guns.
The NRA has helped to perpetuate a mythic “rugged individualism” that can only be maintained by allowing the sale and ownership of any kind of firearm.
Including the kind that should only be possessed by the military and law enforcement.
Including the kind that fire high-impact, devastatingly destructive bullets into human bodies that are not on battlefields and not committing crimes.
But in church, the grocery store, and schools.
Better that America be unexceptional, typical, and ordinary.
Most of us would rather settle for ordinary than mourn and bury the innocent dead.