Gun violence in America… What can be said? Honestly, not much. It’s too complicated, intractable, and at this point in history, moot. Some countries can deal with their guns, but their ability to do so is cultural; our culture just can’t do it. And there is no changing this culture. You can’t even get Americans to accept the perfectly reasonable metric system, much less grow a healthy gun culture.
Yesterday, I forwarded some incredible pictures about other
parts of the world to a couple of friends.
To one I prefaced the email with “some unbelievable pictures from parts
of the world that defy my comprehension”.
A lot of the pictures involved what I can only describe as
over-population: lots of people per square meter of space. One of the friends I sent them to, knowing how
I can rant and rave about the stupidity of the masses, responded by telling me
that I was lucky to live in what I often think of as “this little-populated
hell hole” because otherwise I would explode….
I had to concur that there could be worse places to live in…
… And because it was late, and there had been another bloody shooting in America, the word “explosion” prompted this:
... speaking of exploding: what's with all these
fucking shootings in america--- these fucking cowards gotta go spend time in
some of these places... I can't believe it lately, it's like a sick joke: every
day some fucked up person shoots people for no reason... was in the studio
today listening to the news of one more shooting and I truly started believing
god existed and was just "having a good time”--- it's the kind of shit a
God would think of as a joke... ok, I'll stop babbling- I'm only making
sense in some very weird alternate universe... it's late and I should be in
bed...
So yeah, every day, some sick joke… This morning, I wake up to find out that the
joke has become nuanced. I woke up to the news that yesterday’s
shooting in Texas resulted from the altercation between two people. Both were gravely injured, as well as, a bystander
maintenance person at the college where it happened… The nuance is that the reporter made it sound
like this shooting was ok because these two people actually were having an
argument, unlike in the spate of shootings we have been having, where the
targets were chosen randomly.
Y…eeee…sss ...an argument can be made for this shooting being
different in kind from some of the many others… And mmm…aay…bee .... in some very weird abstract
moral scale, random shootings are more reprehensible than “shootings for a
reason”.... But let’s get real here, these
two guys (I assume they were guys) were having an argument in a college: a place purported to deliver higher
education, though, like whatever argument they were having, that is entirely
debatable.... But what kind of argument could
have possibly engendered such violence?
“You asshole, Popper is right!”
“Fuck you it’s Wittgenstein all the way! Take this!” Pop, Pop
Ok, I would venture that the argument was not over two dead Austrian philosophers
who hated each other. But when the fuck is it
alright to pull a gun and shoot another person during an argument, whatever it
might be about, in a public space, in a supposedly civilized country?!
Seriously, the, what to my ears sounded like
a, most cavalier attitude displayed by the NPR reporter towards this “reasonable”
shooting … and here I interrupt to stress NPR,
a most liberal of stations, making the reporter’s attitude even more perplexing… Anyway, the NPR reporter’s cavalier (or maybe she was just relieved, because disagreements are "easier" to comprehend than random violence) attitude this morning just
further confirmed that something is seriously amiss in the good ol’ US of
A.
Like I said: intractable and moot.
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