A Brief and Perhaps Insensitive Post About Gun Control

So, just a brief response to the most recent horrible, terrifying and particularly cowardly mass shooting in the U.S.

Originally, I wasn't going to write anything and keep my thoughts to myself, because my thoughts, honestly, didn't seem horrified enough (or so I felt). News of mass shootings in this country have become more or less commonplace over the last few years, and thanks to the way the human brain works (think of Anderson's critique of "imagined communities" and all the more science-y evidence since that's backed up his ideas), it's easy for me to be saddened by news of a faraway catastrophe involving others attached to me only by the loose label of "fellow Americans," but it's hard for me to summon up the outrage that I see all over the Facebooks and the Twitters. A tragedy that hits close to home is, in fact, a tragedy. A tragedy that hits somewhere else in your state or country is more often than not just an opportunity to use said tragedy to advance your own agenda (political, personal, what-have-you). Or at least that's how most people seem to want to treat it. And who can blame them? Thousands of miles away, we can be distantly horrified at the objective fact of the callous slaughter of innocent kids, but we can't really do anything about it, except to try to change the conditions of the part of the world that's geographically closer to us so that it can't happen again. It's a weird position to be in.

From that position, here's what I'm thinking. One of my colleagues wrote on Facebook today, in response to this massacre: "How can you be shocked?" I thought the same thing, and knowing that someone who I respect was of like mind made me able to move past my guilt and start investigating why it was that something like this could not be shocking. And I think it's actually quite simple (all political maneuvering and other such bullshit aside): we have agreed, as a country, that we will continue to allow civilian access to unnecessarily efficient and deadly weapons, and the price we necessarily pay for this is that someone uses those weapons in an unlawful way against innocent people. That's the nature of the trade-off we've agreed to (collectively). If it's no longer worth the price we're paying, then we can make access to these weapons illegal (and thus more difficult). It's that simple. Opponents of gun control tacitly insist that their right to own ridiculously powerful guns originally created for 20th century total warfare is more important than the lives of those who die unjustly as a result of the availability of those guns. I, always having been more of a socialist than a capitalist or a democracy-ist (really, what is the form of that word that I'm looking for?) would happily give up such a right in order to prevent such shootings from happening. I'm happy to live a little less free (though not a lot less free, mind you) to make society as a whole a bit safer. Many people aren't, and this is and will continue to be the result.