It’s started. The unconscionable and cruel “if only’s.” Especially about the police.
The Uvalde, Texas massacre and others like it can be blamed for but one reason: our gun laws are immoral and insane. By assigning any blame to the police, we distract from that dispositive and ugly fact.
If police departments around the country can learn better tactics from what happened at Uvalde or Buffalo or Parkland or Sandy Hook, I’m all for it.
But by turning our attention to mistakes the police may have made, we change nothing except to sap attention and energy away from the insanity of our gun laws and the cowardice of those who support them.
This morning I read a piece by David French in the Dispatch. His point was that when you put on a uniform you have to be prepared to die in the line of duty. He accused the police at the Uvalde massacre scene of cowardice. (His words were “failure of courage” and “no other moral choice,” as he danced around the word “cowardice,” when that was what he plainly meant.)
But how do you expect the police to act when they are severely outmatched by the lethality of the weaponry used by the criminals?
Blaming the police also seems like a terrible way to attract people to serve in our police forces. They are already underpaid for a dangerous and essential job.
Our gun laws have placed us in a more twisted version of Shirly Jackson’s famed dystopian short story, “The Lottery.” In that story, villagers gather once a year to select at random one person to be stoned to death by the community. At least in Jackson’s village, the blood lust and the killing is controlled to one person per year.
In America now, we live in “The Lottery” every day of the year.
Which is worse, the cure? No guns. The disease? People die. Or prevention? Regulation. I guess that’s a personal choice, but I prefer prevention.
David I think you need to challenge your own thinking here. This is a sickening situation and there is a lot of emotion in your response. Work through your thinking:
This is an exceptionally rare event, and there are more guns than people in America, why do you think gun control is feasible? How will you get rid of all the guns? Imagine you work a miracle and abolish the second amendment, then what? How are you actually going to get all guns out of the hands of private citizens? Go door to door, go through everyone’s closets and collect them all and then what? How will you deal with resistance?
Because that is what you have to do to ensure no extremely messed up individual can ever do something like this. America is a big place. It is three times more people than the UK, Australia, and New Zealand combined, with large land borders all of those countries lack.
I would love for guns to disappear from America overnight. But I am not going to waste my time trying to protect my children from guns when there are literally thousands of greater threats to their life and happiness that I can address. You should not be wasting yours either. There are so many more worthy problems that are mundane and not so tragic and impossible to address.