Madness at the End of Days
The blood has dried on the walls of Robb Elementary and on the linoleum of Tops Friendly Market. America’s latest back-to-back spree of unprovoked mass carnage is ready to be sponged off of our conscience and squeezed down the drain of our collective amnesia.
It has been 23 years since the atrocity at Columbine High School ushered in our new age of unending, unpredictable mass killings. But in that time a century’s worth of violence has stunned, and then numbed, the population of the United States.
One after the other these mini-holocausts have arrived — Virginia Tech, Pulse, Las Vegas (to name only a very few.) And just when we think that no functioning democracy could possibly generate more of this Somalia-worthy horror, the stakes are raised even higher: Sandy Hook, Parkland, and now Robb Elementary… as though a subconscious desire for ever younger, sweeter victims is being answered by maniacs whose AR-15’s draw forth our tears with the skill of concert violinists.
The river of blood flowing from these incomprehensible acts of violence has all but drowned America’s hope of ever grappling with the issue of gun control. The reckless regime of gun ownership that the Second Amendment has cursed our country with has created a problem so monumental that it has united both Democrats and Republicans — the Two-Party Mafia that can see eye-to-eye on almost nothing except Israel — inside a mutual non-aggression pact forbidding either side to put the issue of real Federal gun control before the voters.
Consider Buffalo Congressman Brian Higgins, whose only response to the bloody mayhem at Tops Friendly Market has been to bow his head for a televised moment of silence and then blame the Senate filibuster rule as the reason why some toothless legislation concerning background checks has not been able to advance to a vote in 20 years. That was the full extent of Higgin’s anger at what he and his ilk call a “hate crime”, a debased term that is thrown around so casually these days that you hear it used when someone gets a pronoun wrong. What really happened in Buffalo is that a confirmed fascist terrorist showed up in Higgins’ district and turned a store’s worth of shoppers into wet hamburger explicitly for the reason that they had black skin. That is a bit more than a “hate crime”.
I cited Israel a moment ago: try to imagine the same killer turning up in Jerusalem and slaughtering a crowd of Jews, leaving behind a manifesto slandering the Jewish people in every third sentence (as Payton Gendron’s manifesto actually did.) The bombs would begin falling on the West Bank before anyone even checked the author’s name. Now that’s looking out for your constituents! But in Buffalo, Higgins can expect to coast to an easy re-election without even making an offer for the government to cover the funeral expenses of the cash-strapped residents of the neighborhoods that lost their loved ones.
Aloof as he is, Higgins still knows what time it is better than Republican Congressman Chris Jacobs does. In what would have to be called (in today’s cringing political culture) a display of balls the size of asteroids, Jacobs, whose district includes some Buffalo suburbs, confronted the massacre at Tops by calling for a renewed assault weapons ban. Less than a week later the first-term Congressman announced that he would not be seeking re-election, so swift did the GOP’s knives come out for him.
This is the madness of the gun control debate that we find ourselves in 23 years after Columbine, and weeks after a cavalcade of violence that has also included dozens of lesser shootings (including one at a hospital.) We are a population of First World citizens tolerating failed state levels of gun violence. We know that we must do something about this insane state of affairs… and yet every time the moment of truth returns we are confronted with a well-organized and massively well-funded agenda of denialism, one that has been crystallized into that cynical ritual that all Americans have come to hate: our leaders’ hollow invocation of “thoughts and prayers”.
However, in the wake of the twin massacres in Buffalo, NY and Uvalde, TX, an interesting side-by-side experiment has just been run, and the results of this experiment could give gun control advocates some hope that a new strategy for attacking this issue may have finally found its moment. More on this next week.
Jason Yungbluth draws comic books, including one called Weapon Brown.
Previously: Of Gendron and Brandon
Next: Murphy’s Law
