Amusement is not the right word. Frustration falls short, as well. Astonishment, chagrin, a mouth gaping, eyes bugging, voice stammering wonder — nothing really captures it.
Let’s just say my response to the noise that follows one of this country’s daily mass shootings involves a lot of rueful head shaking.
It has become routine to the point of predictability. One group will urge often reasonable control over the weapons trade. Another will counter, quite accurately, that mental health issues often play a role in the bloodshed, so the problem rests in proper care. More recently, a new and almost cartoonish point of opposition has appeared, in which we are reminded that neither terrorists nor criminals abide by gun control laws. Others just fall back on the increasingly empty offer of condolences.
Within this vocal ping-pong, the same trite one-lines appear. You know them by heart: “guns don’t kill people …,” “only criminals will have guns …” and so on. We are well-practiced at this, and it shows.
Yet all of it amounts to an exercise of avoiding the issue. Politicians, as we know, have little interest in budging on the matter — at least as long as we allow them to place fonts of campaign cash or fear of an electoral backlash above the lives of innocent victims. Hard liners bully any moderate thoughts. And those who clamor about mental health as a cause tend to be the same ones seething over the expansion of health care coverage.
But it doesn’t need to be this way.
Certainly the majority — the overwhelming majority — of gun owners use them with great concern for safety and strive to remain within all laws. I lived in the high plains for a few years surrounded by farmers and ranchers who stocked weapons for both hunting and protection. It is almost impossible to imagine these people misusing a rifle. I have friends who hunt or target shoot for fun, and they do not treat any aspect of it casually.
So an outright ban on ownership — something almost no one actually calls for and would be of questionable constitutionality — is off the table.
Just as certainly, the number of triggers pulled, bodies riddled and corpses buried in this country belies comprehension. Every day, on average, 7 children or teenagers die from gun violence in this country, dozens more receive wounds. Every day, shots hit almost 300 people, leaving close to 90 of them dead as a result. Each year more than 32,000 Americans die as a result of gun violence. And this particular year we have averaged more than one mass shooting per day.
To paraphrase Donald Trump, someone is doing the shooting.
Apply those losses to, say, the war on terror and we might just decide to bail and leave the Middle East for others.
Proponents of greater control understand that neither legal limits nor thorough background checks will eliminate mass shootings entirely. But if a restriction, if a delay, if a technology, if a longer peek into someone’s history prevents 100, 50, 10 or even just one mass shooting a year, they believe the measures justified.
So reasonable gun control laws —something often called for and that are in one form or another even favored by a majority of NRA members — should be on the table.
Of course, that means the avid opponents of gun ownership must listen to the gun enthusiasts. That means that the extremists who buy up semi-automatics and 100-round clips in response to every perceived threat to their rights must hear those who ask why a single shot is not enough.
That means we have to be adult about it. And so nothing changes.
