World Leader in Death

“Violence runs through US society like an electric current offering instant pleasure from all cultural sources, whether it be the nightly news or a television series that glorifies serial killers.” Henry A. Giroux

Columbine. Virginia Tech. Aurora. Sandy Hook. San Bernardino. Orlando. Las Vegas. By some estimates I’ve read, there are 300 million firearms in the United States, and every single day in this country, 92 people are killed in firearm related incidents. After a mass shooting I always feel the same sense of unreality, numbness, and then outrage because no matter how murderous the rampage -- and the scope of the Vegas massacre is almost impossible to wrap one’s mind around -- nothing changes. The NRA still presses campaign donations on easily purchased members of Congress, and launches a PR blitz designed to blunt any criticism, and of course remind us all of the sacred Second Amendment. Politicians wring their hands, offer prayers, tell us to honor the innocent victims, but in the next breath declare that now isn’t the time to have a debate about sensible firearm protections. (If not now, when?) Whoever the sitting president is makes a speech condemning the violence, knowing full well that the carnage will continue in another place, at another time. Obama’s rhetoric after a mass shooting brought people to tears, but his beautiful words never changed a thing. (As emotionally stunted and inappropriate as ever, the current occupant of the White House offered his “warmest condolences.”)

Firearms are historically, politically and culturally embedded in our American DNA. Violence is as much a part of our creed as the Declaration of Independence and the Star-Spangled Banner, as college football and NASCAR.  

More details about the Vegas shooter emerge in fits and starts, as they always do in the aftermath of a mass shooting, though his motive remains murky. Was his intent only to inflict death and pain and trauma, to forever alter thousands of lives, or just to etch his name in the history book as the architect of the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history? Job accomplished on all counts. The man is in the annals now, the latest, but not the last, deranged white man with demons running around his brain and a huge cache of weapons and ammunition in his garage.

The numbness returns. A woman who trains in the dojo I attend was at that concert in Las Vegas on Sunday night. She survived unscathed, physically, but her husband told me that she has descended deep within herself, suffering from wounds unseen.

This madness never ends. America has never been great, and only good when it suits the powerful, but nobody can argue that we are not the world leader in death, at home and abroad.