America is sick…

I keep hearing this fucking thing that guns don’t kill people, but people kill people. If that’s the case, why do we give people guns when they go to war? Why not just send the people?

–Ozzy Osbourne

As I watched a church burning on the news in Grand Blanc Township, Michigan, on Sunday, little did I know that it was just the climax of several lethal mass shooting events that commenced earlier that weekend.

By Monday, it had become clearer that four people were killed, two of whom perished as a direct result of the fire apparently set by the gunman. Eight more were injured. However, there were five other incidents of mass shootings before this across four states, resulting in nine deaths and around 33 injuries – all in the same weekend.

The other shootings occurred in Louisiana, North Carolina and Texas. These separate incidents were added to the list of over 320 others, bringing the total deaths from mass shootings to 324 this year. The incidents, fatalities and injuries being tracked on the Gun Violence Archive are sobering.

It’s redundant for me to point out that America has a menacing gun problem. Philosopher Bertrand Russell made a prescient observation six decades ago about the prevalence of hate and the resulting propensity for violence within American society. His optimism for the heroism that could lead to an end to this malaise was never reciprocated.

America is sick and her sickness endangers the whole world. Given America’s immense power and resources, a cure must be found within. The first thing that is needed is an education teaching that hate must be avoided, that excellence does not consist in violence. To achieve this change of outlook is an immense task which America’s “Radicals” must attempt to carry out. Whether the necessary heroism will be forthcoming, I do not know. We can only hope that it may be so

Instead, guns became an object of affection and worship, second only to celebrity worship. Meanwhile, the hate that fueled this worship was amplified through years of political corruption funded by the National Rifle Association (NRA), and socialised in misdirected patriotism and Christian Nationalism. In evading the responsibility to take firm action to control the proliferation of gun ownership, politicians from all sides of the corrupt political spectrum have ensured that the platitude about “thoughts and prayers” became the nationally accepted response to every mass shooting.

Meanwhile, a new trend has emerged in public discourse after every mass shooting. There appears to be a perverse fascination, no, obsession, with the political affiliation and sexual identity of the perpetrators of mass shootings. While everyone, from every conceivable side, indulges in the blame game, the apparent cause and solution are pushed further away from the conscience. Once again, it has become a pastime on par with celebrity worship.

In the aftermath of the shootings, President Trump, the self-proclaimed stable genius, is threatening to deploy troops to Portland, Oregon, which is on the opposite end of the country from where all the weekend’s mass shootings occurred. He wrote on Truth Social that the troops would ‘protect War-ravaged Portland.’ In reality, there is no active war in Portland. Still, it’s apparently completely normal to protect a country from an imaginary war rather than a real scourge ravaging the citizenry.

It appears that America is unwilling to address one of its most pressing problems. It wants to spin it, monetise it, luxuriate in it. That heroism that the thinking world wants is hardly likely to materialise until human rights are revered more than Second Amendment rights.