The families suffering from a perfectly avoidable horror in Texas have my sympathy.
But I’m not sending thoughts and prayers. Because those are useless, and generally just serve to make the people sending them feel they’ve done something.
No, I’m sending something else: anger.
Anger at the idiocy of an advanced nation, dedicated on paper to freedom and liberty, being too stupid to realize no right is absolute, and that the ability to enforce your sick pathology on others isn’t “freedom” — it’s self-interest run amok.
Anger at cowardly elected officials who, fearing they might face a challenge at the ballot box, refuse to work the problem. Even though one of the most conservative jurists we’ve ever elevated to the Supreme Court, Antonin Scalia, said they had the power to do just that.
Anger at the unholy alliance between gun rights organizations and firearm manufacturers, who saturate public discussions aimed at trying to solve the problem with threats and hollow chest-thumping claims they are only defending the Constitution. They’re not — they’re pursuing their naked self-interest…over the bodies of slaughtered innocents.
And anger at the electorate, which wrings it hands every time one of these horrors is perpetrated…and then shakes its head and walks away. Glad it wasn’t their loved ones who paid the price of our collective inaction…at least today.
It’s way past time to do something about this. The first step is easy, and can be done privately: never, ever vote for any candidate who doesn’t make better gun control laws a priority. If enough of the idiots who have built a career by catering to paranoid fear about “excessive” gun regulation don’t get elected or re-elected, the rest will figure out how to pivot to a more sensible position.
How many more innocent lives need to snuffed out before we’ll use our vaunted high intelligence to change the rules? How many more children will we let die, screaming for the parents they will never see again, just so crazy assholes can “exercise their rights”? How many more families will we allow to be savaged because we are unwilling to take a stand and demand action?
The choice is ours. It has always been ours. Time to demand a better world. Time to demand change.