A mass shooting happens in America every three to four months or so. Charleston, home of my beloved alma mater, took its turn in the barrel yesterday.
CHARLESTON, S.C. — A white gunman opened fire Wednesday night at a historic black church in downtown Charleston, S.C., killing nine people before fleeing and setting off an overnight manhunt, the police said.
At a news conference with Charleston’s mayor early Thursday, the police chief, Greg Mullen, called the shooting a hate crime.
“It is unfathomable that somebody in today’s society would walk into a church while they are having a prayer meeting and take their lives,” he said.
The police said the gunman walked into the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church around 9 p.m. and began shooting.
Eight people died at the scene, Chief Mullen said. Two people were taken to the Medical University of South Carolina, and one of them died on the way.
“Obviously, this is the worst night of my career,” Chief Mullen said. “This is clearly a tragedy in the city of Charleston.”
And with equal predictability will be the cycle of excuses, recriminations and most disturbingly the Fox News deflection of the real blame for these events. Tired old shibboleths about the intent of the Founding Fathers in writing the 2nd Amendment will be trotted out for the 989th time. Real change, however? Just NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. This is the mediocrity America accepts as the cost of “freedom”.
Freedom? Really? How about the freedom for the rest of us to be able to conduct the daily transactions of society without fear of being shot by some lunatic?
The ammosexual defense of their kink is predictable and almost certainly incorrigible. Driven (and heavily armed) that’s a view that’s managed to hold political sway over the mushy majority for whom the notion the the liberty of the gun-sniffing few outweighs the freedom of the rest of us to assemble, travel, speak without fear of suppressing fire. What drives that is, at least in part, the normalization of gun fetishization. Which is what you see above. And is what must be shamed out of the public square.
Nope, No, No sirree Bob. Because, “Murica!”. Second Amendment. Protect against tyranny in government. Pick your own sick and twisted metaphor.
The truth is made worse by the reality that no one–really no one–anywhere on the political spectrum has the courage to speak out about the madness of unleashed guns and what they do to American life….
The reality is simple: every country struggles with madmen and ideologues with guns, and every country–Canada, Norway, Britain–has had a gun massacre once, or twice. Then people act to stop them, and they do–as over the past few years has happened in Australia. Only in America are gun massacres of this kind routine, expectable, and certain to continue.