.
“America” — meaning that almost-entirely-white, very-largely-male portion of the population that gets to write the laws and set the norms for the rest of us — has an addiction problem. “America” is addicted to guns, to the noise and the power and the ever-ready hard shaft of The All-American Weapon. Like any other addiction, presumably it started as a way to salve some unspeakable pain, to lubricate the sharp edges of the consequences to some decision gone terribly wrong. But now it’s an overwhelming burden all its own, a disconnect at the heart of all our political interactions, something that even those of us who don’t share the addiction have to plan our lives around.
James Fallows, in the Atlantic — “Two Dark American Truths From Las Vegas”:
… The dead and the wounded, and their family and friends, of course deserve most support and sympathy. But their fellow countrymen should reflect on two dark truths the episode underscores. I was going to end that sentence with “reveals,” but that’s not right: We know these things already.
The first is that America will not stop these shootings. They will go on. We all know that, which makes the immediate wave of grief even worse.
Five years ago, after what was the horrific mass shooting of that moment, I wrote an item called “The Certainty of More Shootings.” It was about the massacre in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, and after acknowledging the victims it said:
The additional sad, horrifying, and appalling point is the shared American knowledge that, beyond any doubt, this will happen again, and that it will happen in America many, many times before it occurs anywhere else.
That remains true now. I expect it to be true five years from now. I am an optimist about most aspects of America’s resilience and adaptability, but not about reversing America’s implicit decision to let these killings go on…
Here’s the other dark truth about America that today’s shooting reminds us of. The identity of the shooter doesn’t affect how many people are dead or how grievously their families and communities are wounded. But we know that everything about the news coverage and political response would be different, depending on whether killer turns out to be “merely” a white American man with a non-immigrant-sounding name.
That’s who most mass-shooters turn out to be, from Charles Whitman at the University of Texas tower back in 1966 onward. And from Whitman onward, killers of this sort are described as “deranged” or “disturbed” or “resentful,” their crimes a reflection of their own torment rather than any larger trend or force… These people are indeed deranged and angry and disturbed, and the full story of today’s killer is not yet known. It is possible that he will prove to have motives or connections beyond whatever was happening in his own mind… But we know that if the killers were other than whites with “normal” names, the responsibility for their crime would not be assigned solely to themselves and their tortured psyches….
This is who we are.
I was going to add, “—unless we decide to change,” but that’s the kind of mandatory-uplift note you put, because you have to, at the end of a speech.
This is who we are.
There’s only two “cures” for any addiction: the addict can give up his drug, or he can chase the high until it kills him. Right now, I’m not feeling optimistic about the ammosexuals among us — or the powerful white men who profit from their desperation — ever giving up the temporary high just because it’s predictably going to destroy them. (Along with every other person they love almost as much as their guns.)
Tuesday Morning Open Thread: This Is Who We ArePost + Comments (131)