American Ultra-Violence

This past month, a shooter opened fire in a bar in Thousand Oaks California. This touched me close to home because my co-publisher at Rouges Magazine was affected by the shooting. When it happened I regarded it as another instance of a mass shooting. It’s hard to get emotionally invested in each incident. Every week seems to bring a new moment of public terror as someone uses a gun to openly kill people in public. This week also brought news of another bar shooting where the black the security guard was shot by police after apprehending a shooter where he was working. They saw him with a gun and simply opened fire. 

Simply opened fire. 

That’s not a line you want to write about any situation.  This week the Washington Post published a list of all the people killed in mass shootings and called for the administration to take the crisis seriously. 

Every line that we thought would spur even reasonable republicans into action has been halted by the NRA and it’s irrational fear that reasonable gun regulation, like mandatory background checks that most American’s agree with, are one step closer to tyranny against all weapons to any description. 

People from other counties don’t understand the American obsession with guns or our collective inability to make basic policy changes that would improve our lives. Massachusetts was recently profiled by Vox and showed that their strict gun laws which require waiting periods and sign-off from a local sheriff make the state safer. 

There are a variety of pieces to this and some of them are economic. Desperate people do desperate things. Some of the violence stems from the rise of racism and anti-semitism. Synagogues have armed security to protect their worshippers. We can even blame some of it on political correctness. Is this the kind of America our founders envisioned?

Quite simply, it’s time for this nature of American Ultra-Violence to come to an end. It is a travesty that we have to live in a country where people can be gunned down in mass groups in public. Americans deserve better than that and we deserve a responsive leadership who is willing to make tough changes on a national scale. Nowhere is safe. The entire country is in a state of violence. Obviously the solution of more guns has not worked. It’s time to create some reasonable solutions to stop this level of violence. If this type of problem were being reported about in a country elsewhere, it would be decried internationally. Americans shouldn’t have to live in a world where mass shootings are common. It’s time to bring it to a stop.