On Las Vegas

Pardon me as I rant here.

This happens too often, and I am not gullible enough to believe that anything will change because of it. This is the society that we have built, one with more mass shootings than any other society in the history of mankind.

This is the society that we have built, where a country music concert becomes a killing field.

This is the society that we have built, where a black man shooting up a crowd of people is a "thug," an Arabic man doing so is a "terrorist," and a white man doing so is "crazy."

This is the society that we have built, where my initial fear after the Las Vegas shootings was that they were done by someone named Yusef Mohhamed and that crackdowns on our civil liberties would surely follow. What happened to being a nation of laws? What happened to judging the action, not the actor?

This is the society we have built, where people piously offer their "prayers" after each mass shooting and then refuse to do, literally, anything else about the problem. That strikes me as the person who apologizes for wronging you and has precisely zero plans to do anything to avoid wronging you again in the future.

We have seen the problem, and the problem is us. We will all have to answer to our maker for this someday. I don't know how I will explain myself other than to look at my shoes in shame.

Happy Taco Tuesday. Hug your kids.

UPDATE: I wish I had good news. However, upon further review, I don't.

The five years since a gunman killed 26 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, have seen one of the most intense bursts of gun legislation in U.S. history—almost all of it intended to ensure that more guns can be carried into more places.

. . . . .

A mass shooting increases the number of enacted laws that loosen gun restrictions by 75 percent in states with Republican-controlled legislatures. We find no significant effect of mass shootings on laws enacted when there is a Democrat-controlled legislature.

This may explain why gun advocates insist that the immediate aftermath of a spectacular massacre is “too soon” for the gun discussion. They want the pain and grief and fear to ebb. They want ordinary citizens to look away. Then, when things are quiet, the gun advocates will go to work, to bring more guns to places where alcohol is served, where children are cared for, where students are taught, where God is worshipped. More killings bring more guns. More guns do more killing. It’s a cycle the nation has endured for a long time, and there is little reason to hope that the atrocity in Las Vegas will check or reverse it.