Bouncing off of Adam’s post about the Odessa murders…
Last night a bunch of folks gathered together for some fun, a high school football game in Mobile, Alabama. A teenager showed up with a gun and shot ten other kids. By some astonishing good luck, no victims died. Nine of them had to go to the hospital and six have been released from care already. The shooter left the scene and turned himself in this morning.
So there you have it: two cities, two crowds just going about their business, trying to have some good times on a weekend, and two assholes who demonstrate as brutally as possible the the right to free assembly can’t be fully trusted in these United States.
Second Amendment absolutism is at war with the right to assemble, to express our ideas freely, to pray if and as we choose.
Practically or actually unregulated guns directly threaten civil society.
Gun violence does more than just murder individuals. It threatens the ability of Americans to express the consent of the governed.
The citizens of Mobile, of Odessa and Midland, of everywhere in the US, no longer have the full enjoyment of their rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of an afternoon’s entertainment.
I know that mass shootings produce a relatively small fraction of the death toll from firearms; suicide takes two thirds of that total. But terror is not about the absolute destruction terrorists are able to inflict; what counts is the impact on the terrorized society, the change in our behavior, our expectations, and our ability to make free and unfettered choices about whatever it is the terrorists care about.
That’s what mass shootings do: make it harder for all of us to live the way we want.
The fight against the NRA, #MoscowMitch’s GOP and the rest of the gun cabal is a campaign against those who are, right now, using the tools or terrorism against the United States of America.
Georges Seurat, The Circus, 1891