Do You Understand?
I Don't.
If we woke up this morning and read that a Middle Eastern terrorist shot and killed 58 people and wounded more than 515 more in Las Vegas last night, we wouldn't sit here and say we couldn't do anything to keep this from happening again.
We'd be outraged. We'd demand action.
After 9/11, we started two wars, all supposedly to keep us safe and to keep a terrorist attack like that from ever happening again in the US. We’re still fighting those wars, fifteen years later.
We revamped out entire airport security measures. We walk through machines that basically let people see our naked bodies to keep us safe. We all take off our shoes to keep us safe. We search for tiny bottles to put mouthwash and contact lens solution in (not enough to last on a long trip, either) to keep us safe. We endure body cavity searches to keep us safe. We put up with people searching our babies diapers to keep us safe.
We created a huge new government agency, all to keep us safe. We tightened our borders to keep us safe.
We spend more than $600 billion a year on our military to keep us safe. We have more than 800 military bases in 70 countries to keep us safe.
But when a white American with his own arsenal of weapons kills 58 of us and wounds 515, we say there's nothing we can do. No one could have predicted. No way we could have stopped it.
We offer lots of thought and prayers, plus our blood to replace the blood the victims lost.
Does it really matter whether the person who kills Americans is another American or someone from the Middle East or who supposedly practices a religion some of us find scary?
People are still dead. I doubt their loved ones take comfort in knowing it wasn't, supposedly, a terrorist attack?
I have trouble believing they do.
The part that really infuriates me is that people say we need our guns to "keep us safe." Which by any objective measure is not true.
We have way more guns than any developed country in the world, and we have more gun deaths than any, too. If guns made us safer, we'd be the safest country in the world.
Accepting that we have to have these guns means that we accept that every now and then, someone will have a mental breakdown or face a life crisis and decide he needs to take his automatic weapons and his bullets and shoot as many people as he can. It will happen.
We'll dig through his social media pages and talk to his neighbors and relatives later, and we'll try to make sense of it. We'll try to find a reason why, and we won't. Not really. He lost a lot of money. He's going through a bad breakup. He's depressed.
We'll never weed out all the other people who have suddenly lost money or had a bad break up or got depressed and had his own arsenal on hand, but didn't commit mass murder, from the ones who will. And even if we could, we aren't willing to keep certain people from having guns.
Mentally ill? There are lawmakers who fought for your rights to have guns.
Beat your wife repeatedly? Lawmakers fight for your rights to have guns.
There's a bill right now that was scheduled for a vote in the US Congress to allow people to have silencers for their weapons, so they can shoot silently.
Imagine Las Vegas without the sound of gunfire as a warning. Of the 22,000 people at the concert, I bet most of them ran because they heard gunfire.
Could we at least keep silencers illegal so the next time this happens, the victims and the potential victims could have the sound of gunfire as a warning to run or take cover? Can we do just that?
Saying we have to have all these guns means we don't know where the next attack like this will happen. But for some Americans, last night it meant their husbands, their wives, their children, their grandchildren, their parents, their best friends, their uncles, their aunts, their friends were there, and a lot of them died.
We never know when we'll be the ones there at the next shooting or when our children or husbands or parents might be. It's a risk we all have agreed to take by doing nothing about guns.
We never know when it will be our children's school or our grandchildren's. We've accepted that our children go to school every day and they must be afraid often that someone will come in shooting. They've seen it happen too many times. They have drills of what to do if a shooter enters the school. It's a part of our everyday lives now. We've accepted this.
We've accepted that there is nothing we can do.
I can't accept that. I refuse to.
We're not powerless.
******************
Even before this … especially the last month or so, but partly since we elected Him … It’s still hard for me to believe he’s actually our president.
But anyway … I keep thinking about facts. They made it so we can’t have a discussion based on facts. So that so many people believe there are no facts, or others have put so many false “facts” out there, no one knows what’s true and what’s not anymore.
We can’t possibly make good decisions without facts. Not everything is an opinion, although many people would have us believe that.
I can’t believe I live in a country that’s not fact-based, not reality-based. How can we hope to make any intelligent decisions without facts. It’s as true for gun control as it is for health care, for economic justice, for equal rights.