The sickening, sickening massacre in Orlando last weekend has had a range of effects on America’s national, multi-layered electronic conversation, from some truly inspiring expressions of love, sympathy, and defiance among the survivors to the sorry spectacle my gun-nut Facebook friends setting their hair on fire over the dim possibility of some Congressional action on arm sale restrictions.
God, I’m sick of this grisly movie, running over and over again – innocents cut down in large numbers by some psycho bastard with an easily obtainable assault rifle. The graves are not even filled in before AR-15s start flying off the shelves, hastily purchased by paranoid hobbyists who see black helicopters everywhere. One dealer in California, I believe, claimed that while he normally sells 15 of these death machines a day (!), that rose to 15 an hour after Orlando. Bonanza, in more ways than one.
Gun enthusiasts always speak to their constitutional rights, but what is this if not a hobby, really? None of these fuckers need a machine gun for self-defense – they just like to play with the thing, fire it off at targets, tote it around like a real soldier, fantasize over it five ways from Friday. It’s the industry (manufacturing and retail) that plays up the self-defense angle, most ardently through their lobbying group, the NRA. It’s a dangerous world! they warn. You have to protect your family, tough guy. (Of course, the manufacturers also emphasize the macho war-fighter image that an automatic weapon confers onto its purchaser.) All bullshit, of course, with respect to their core market. So … why do the rest of us – the vast majority of the country – have to pay such a high price to protect their hobby?
The short answer is, they have a good lobby. Very effective advocates, the NRA, and they can hold Congress’s feet to the fire like almost no one else. The fact is, it looks like legal action may be the only way to undermine the power of this industry. The families of victims need to sue the manufacturers. We need to find a way to make the manufacture, sale, and possession of assault weapons a prohibitively costly liability. Once the profit goes out of it, however that may be achieved, the air will go out of this tire. And maybe we’ll be able to get through a whole year without another Orlando.
Here’s hoping.
luv u,
j
The shooting cannot surprise us, any more than extreme weather can in the wake of Sandy and Katrina. We go through this process every few weeks. We see the head shaking, the somber tones of voice, the promises to do more … and then we’re back at the beginning again. In America, each day is a new beginning; yesterday is forgotten with the next sunrise. Some see this as our promise as a nation, but it’s more of a curse. We keep tripping over the same fold in the carpet, again and again. Somehow, we are helpless.