Shouldn't we all just consider ourselves accessories to murder by now? I mean, what else does our unforgivable disinterest each time an important guns bill comes before the House or Senate make us?
Oh, we didn't pull the trigger on the latest life destroying American mass shooting ourselves, but it's time we recognized – and I mean really understood -- that our cold indifference did nothing to stop it either.
Inaction is a kind of action, after all. Choosing not to get involved is actually making a choice.
Looking the other way when history is demanding you make a hard choice might feel like you're staying out of it, but all you're really doing is helping the legislation to pass that poll after poll proves most of you actually oppose.
By contrast, those who support the NRA and what we now idiotically call our “gun culture” -- as if owning a Glock 17 was the intellectual equivalent of attending a play or reading a novel -- are passionately committed to ensuring we never see another sensible gun bill reach or pass the House or Senate.
Forty nine young people were barely a week dead in Orlando in the largest mass shooting in modern American history, and yet this week our divided Senate blocked all plans to curb guns -- even plans to restrict the sale of high powered firearms to suspected ISIS terrorists.
If you want to know how completely the corporations now influence or control our national politics, just look at the way they influence or control the decisions that can literally result in our life and death.
On Monday, eight days after Orlando, almost every Republican Senator voted to keep letting terror suspects buy guns. Almost every one of them.
Gun rights activists talk about the need for access to high powered assault weapons as their “god given” right. As if Jesus himself had preached a sermon on the need to own a semi-automatic rifle. As if an AR-15 was all that was standing between you and the zombie apocalypse.
But national polls prove that it is not at all clear to most Americans why a citizen would ever need to own a military grade semiautomatic, capable of creating multiple fatalities in the space of a minute.
Gun enthusiasts scoff at our apparent naiveté, however. If only the Pulse nightclub in Orlando had had a guard with a gun to retaliate against the shooter said multiple conservative commentators (Donald Trump is still saying it). Then perhaps the outcome could have been better for the terrorized.
Well, Pulse did have an armed guard on site as a matter of fact. His name was Officer Gruler, he was an off-duty cop working security at the club and he exchanged fire with the shooter but was completely overpowered by his AR-15 semi-automatic. Because real life is not a spaghetti western.
Politicians in pay or in thrall of the gun lobby often lie to us. Trump lies to us when he says that perhaps a gun other than the shooters on the scene would have changed the whole situation, because he already knows there was another gun on the scene and it changed nothing, and saved no one.
Still, you would think that an uncontroversial request like expanding background checks and acting to prevent terrorists from making gun purchases would sail through the House and Senate. Until you understand the vice-like grip the NRA has on our lawmakers.
It's undeniable now that for too long our Congress has been completely out of step with voters’ sentiments, but they won't change unless we change them. It's our votes that really scare them.
In Bertolt Brecht's extraordinary war play, Mother Courage and Her Children, his main character weeps over the dead on the battle field; then she pulls the gold teeth out of their heads.
Our own House and Senate are doing likewise to us now, crafting bills that put guns into the hands of our enemies, then pausing to offer their thoughts and prayers over our broken bodies, then quietly taking another big personal contribution and endorsement from the arms industry that the NRA represents.
Our streets are flooded with guns because they make billions for our homegrown gun manufacturers. Our Republican politicians support unfettered access to weapons of mass destruction like the AR-15 semiautomatic because influential and cash rich lobbies like the NRA pay them to, and their supporters demand it.
People are making millions from the mayhem. Murder is financially incentivized.
We are living in the increasingly off the rails society they have created for us, and while we look the other way we are always going to be. Vote them out this November
Comments