ARE MASSACRES REALLY A COMPLICATED PROBLEM?
By Robert V. Wills
As I indicated at
Discussion Group Saturday night, I don’t see why the endless string of gunshot
massacres in the United
States is such a complicated question. It
really boils down to the one obvious factor present in the United States
and absent in the rest of the globe.
All of the elements
present in U.S.
massacres are present all over the world—all except one. Angry racists, furious
fired employees, and nobodies seeking notoriety are present in every country.
So are violent video games and movies. So are schizophrenic loners and social
rejects of every stripe. Of course we have psychopaths and oddballs. But so
does every society, and murder is as old as Homo Sapiens’ history and will
always involve humans wracked by stress, rancor, or delusion . . .
No, the pure and
simple cause of American massacres is our one unique factor: the assault weapon
and the clips and magazines that allow mass homicide in minutes. No other nation on earth makes it legal for a
non-military, non-law enforcement individual to own an assault weapon. Its only
purpose is to kill multiple humans quickly. There is no other use for it,
either in hunting or self-protection, and never has been.
And don’t for a
minute get suckered by the N.R.A. argument that the founding fathers specified
in the Second Amendment that every U.S. citizen is entitled to “bear arms,”
meaning almost any arms. That baloney has persisted because no one ever read
the precious Second Amendment carefully and in the context of 1789 “arms.”
Someday the Supreme
Court will rule rationally on the amendment and empower the Federal and/or State
legislatures to add assault weapons to the list of dangerous items that no
non-military, non-law enforcement person can use, own, or possess—an atomic
bomb, a machine gun, a 500-pound bomb, a flask of Sirin, or any other lethal
device capable of mass homicide in minutes.
Senator Feinstein got
a ban on assault weapons through Congress in 1994. It never got challenged by
the Supreme Court: yet the Republicans refused to extend the ban in 2004.
With Trump in the
White House and Mitch McConnell running the Senate, there will be no ban on
assault weapons. So stay tuned for a lot more massacres and a bushel full of
thoughts and prayers in a semi-civilized, paranoid world . . .
Robert V. Wills
9/2/19
