I wrote about guns.
19 kids and two teachers are dead in an elementary school in Texas. It’s the 212th mass shooting of 2022, on the 144th day of the year.
The first push notification I got about this said that one kid had died in a school shooting and my first reaction was to be glad it was only one kid. My brain is broken by the frequency of these events.
Now it’s 19.
Kids.
School shootings are not untouchable acts of nature that we are powerless to confront. This is a man-made problem, fueled by money and ignorance and inaction from those in power. It is a calculated choice, to value a gun more than a person.
I have spent my entire life hearing about events like this. My family moved to Littleton, Colorado in 2001, three years after the shooting at Columbine High School. We as a society have made no substantial effort to fix this problem since. It has only gotten exponentially worse.
Elected officials perform sadness and shock when this happens. I find this to be meaningless. Unlike the rest of us, they could fix this if they wanted to. They do not, because they make more money if the status quo remains as is. We live in a country governed by minority rule, beholden to these people who do not care about us. They don’t even care about kids.
To the rich politicians who get on the internet to tell us all about how hard they are praying, I say: I do not give a single shit about that. Your God is not listening to you. You are making the choice to hide behind your religion in order to avoid doing something substantive because it will not benefit you personally. Speaking to some hypothetical benevolent higher power does not absolve you of the responsibility of using the actual tangible power you have been given, the power that you have taken and used to enrich yourself and your friends as people die in their classrooms and their churches and their homes and their grocery stores. May you never know peace, may you never sleep well again, may the hell that you believe in swallow you whole.
I do not care about the 2nd amendment. I do not care about your “right” to own a weapon of war. The Constitution is not some divinely ordained document that cannot be amended or reconsidered or interpreted in a new way. You are welcome to say whatever you want about your right to bear arms, but it is an incontrovertible truth that you are making a calculation to value that intangible belief over the lives of the people around you. I do not care about “responsible” gun owners, I do not care about people who enjoy hunting, I do not care about people who just think it’s fun to shoot a gun sometimes. If my hobby was also enabling mass death I would simply pick a different one.
The commodification of lethal weapons is so bizarre. There is an entire political and social apparatus built around the glorifying of guns. They tie weapons to being manly, to being patriotic, to being cool. It’s a badge of honor to carry this thing around that would enable you to kill someone in seconds. You can buy coffee branded with guns, you can buy bumper stickers with pro-gun slogans. Would you like a cute case for your mass murder device? Ladies, you can get your gun covered in rhinestones! Hope you don’t use it to kill kids.
It cannot be overstated how much of an outlier the US is in this regard. Americans make up 4.4% of the world’s population and own 42% of the world’s guns. This is fucking absurd. There are too many guns in this country. It is as simple as that. If guns made us safer we would be the safest country in the world. To act as if there is nothing to be done here is to willfully live in ignorance. This does not happen anywhere else.
There are real, tangible solutions to this. They aren’t a secret, they aren’t obscure, they aren’t even that complicated. Every other country in the world has figured this out. This is a policy choice that we make every day. They’re banning books and masks and gender affirming health care while kids are getting shot. I cannot have autonomy over my own body but I can pop into Walmart and get as many mass murder devices as I want.
I find that writing helps me process and that’s often why I post these stream of consciousness thoughts on this silly little website I made. But I find language to be insufficient to describe the absolute depravity of allowing the systematic slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people over the past few decades to go unaddressed. The one thing I try to do is to seek clarity in the words I chose. Don’t say “this isn’t who we are.” This is absolutely unequivocally who we are, who we have chosen to be. Don’t say “this isn’t normal.” Normal is whatever happens regularly. Our country has failed us. Our leaders have failed us. I think they will continue to do so. Let’s be honest about it.
Freedom is a foundational principle of the United States. We are told from infancy that this is a place for self-determination, where anything is possible, we can achieve anything we want if we just try hard enough.
We are not living up to these ideals. The “greatest country in the world” cannot even keep its own children alive. What kind of freedom is this? I am not interested in it.
Next month the Supreme Court will issue a decision ruling that concealed carry laws are unconstitutional. Texas removed all concealed carry restrictions last year. More guns, fewer restrictions. Massacre. Repeat.
It took one day of peaceful protests outside Brett Kavanaugh’s house for the Senate to pass a bill. They can move quickly on an issue when they want to. They do not want to move on this. Our institutions are not going to fix any of this. The people who run them do not think there is anything to be fixed. We live in a murderous oligarchy, and the people at the top of it are proud of it.
Let’s stop pretending otherwise.
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