Last Monday I had the opportunity to experience “American Exceptionalism” up close and personal.
My wife and I were waiting for an appointment in medical offices on Broadway in Boulder, Colo. The receptionist said to a colleague, “Active shooter at King Soopers, Broadway and Table Mesa,” a few miles down the road. Like most of the nation, we watched through the evening as the scale of the massacre was revealed. Ten more human sacrifices to the Gun Gods of our exceptionalism, joining the eight souls lost in Atlanta less than a week before.
The planet has three nations that guarantee the right to bear arms: Mexico, Guatemala and the United States. In Mexico it is legal but nearly impossible to buy a gun. Guatemala has rigid restrictions and permitting requirements. We stand alone in our gun insanity.
The Second Amendment is an American abomination. I won’t explicate the extensive historical evidence that demonstrates that the founders did not intend an individual right to own any weapons, much less military-grade assault weapons. Gun-rights zealots have a handy National Rifle Association propaganda kit to quote in rebuttal. Every argument against gun control is disingenuous nonsense. Most American support gun control. Most Republican lawmakers oppose gun control. Money talks.
I will concede that gun control would have only modest impact on gun violence. We Americans have some 400 million guns, including an estimated 11 million semi-automatics like the one used in Boulder. Any gun control measures would be like trying to corral hundreds of millions of horses that have fled the barn and hidden in houses all over the land.
Gun rights people love the slogan: “Guns don’t kill — people do.” Yes indeed. People with guns.
This is just rehashing arguments that can’t be won. Until or unless the Second Amendment is repealed, we will be awash in guns and blood. Just collateral damage, rather like the hundreds of thousands of COVID-19 deaths that are the collateral damage accompanying that other precious right — to live without mask tyranny. This is the American way in the 21st century; the right to do “whatever the hell I want.”
There is no sacrifice so small that some folks will refuse to make it.
The problem is not merely the assertion of a right to bear arms. It is the implicit right to use arms. Really, tell me, what is the purpose of possessing a deadly weapon if not to put it to use? The madman in Colorado didn’t buy a semi-automatic weapon to admire in a gun rack. By granting him the unfettered right to buy it, we granted him the right, in his tortured mind, to use it.
Because this is the other reality we refuse to face: Our culture, born out of violence, remains steeped in violence. The heroes of fiction, film, television and video games take matters into their own hands. Only sissies turn the other cheek or turn to someone else to save them. Boys are taught to fight back, not back away. Bone-shattering violence in hockey, football and other sports is shown on video loops as the “boys” have a few pops and cheer for the most brutal.
Yes, yes, I know. Most boys play video games and don’t grow up to spray bullets around a grocery store or a spa. Most men, and more than a few women, can watch MMA and not go home and cold-cock the next-door neighbor.
But it is this climate that produces a pandemic of mass murders not seen anywhere else in the civilized world. Almost invariably, America’s killers have endured real or imagined slights. They’ve been bullied, humiliated, isolated and rejected. In their minds they have been the victims of repeated injustice.
The shooters in Atlanta, Boulder and too many other places to name did not make a decision to do something wrong. They lashed out to right a wrong, to inflict pain to ease their own, to deliver justice to a world that had failed them. They sought justice just as they’d learned to do. Take matters into their own hands.
It doesn’t excuse them and cannot, will not, ease our grief.
But this is the American story and I’m afraid it may be too late to change the ending.
Steve Nelson lives in Boulder, Colo., and Sharon. He can be reached at stevehutnelson@gmail.com.