Can We Openly Admit America Grooms Mass Shootings Now?
Mass shootings are a tragedy elsewhere. Here? They're routine.
Can we be frank together for a second? I’m not here to talk thoughts and prayers with you. That shit clearly doesn’t work.
Let’s talk facts. Mass shootings are America’s Ford Pinto and we’d much rather sing abstract praise about liberty than issue a product recall.
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These aren’t unforeseen circumstances. This is our normal. Anywhere else, people do more than throw up their hands and say “What can you do?” when some mother holds the remains of what is probably their child because identifying victims became difficult.
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Here in the land of the free, guns kill more kids than cancer. Or anything else for that matter, given that they are the leading cause of death among children and teens.
And I don’t want this to come off as an “aren’t the Democrats so much better than right-wingers” post. The country is gun crazy; where else would people respond to sneezing and coughing with buying a gun? We’re one of the few places where Poops McGee’s graduation photos even make sense, not to mention could become a rallying cry.
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Let’s stop pretending we don’t know why these mass shootings are a common occurrence. It’s because our culture grooms gun and vigilante worship. How else would you explain the widespread adoption of a Punisher ethos among the people whose only job is to literally uphold the law?
Part of it is a desperate thirst for recognition.
And despite the red herring chalking the shootings up to a lack of mental health resources, valid as that is to address, many of these shootings were made of sound mind.
“Thoughts and prayers” are just the politician’s version of “That’s the cost of doing business.” And business will continue to boom until we start giving an actual fuck about how easy it is to access guns and take lives with them.
I know there’s been backlash against people exercising their constitutionally backed First Amendment right to protest in front of people’s homes, but something has got to give. Voting ain’t cutting it, and if protesting in front of governors and lawmakers, chanting the names of the children, mothers, fathers and grocery store shoppers is what it takes to prevent 18-year-olds buying assault rifles as soon as possible or domestic terrorists from shooting up Black churches, so fucking be it.
God bless America. And if you’re reading this, God bless you. Because based on widespread crisis fatigue and the fact that we’ve we’ve already had 213 mass shootings this year, I doubt that number is gonna drop off any time soon. And God bless the parents from these schools who were not able to hear their children breathe again:
Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s. He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.
