A Murderous Routine

The American gun lobby and congressional representatives mock the victims of gun violence.

The latest American slaughter in an Aurora, Colorado movie theater hadn’t yet disappeared out of the headlines before the next one already happened. This time it was a white racist, Wade Michael Page, who went berserk in a Sikh temple. All six of the people he murdered before he was finally shot were members of a minority.

Again we see the same ritual of statements unfurled in the media and government chambers: the tributes to and expressions of sympathy for the victims, the assurances that this isn’t “the real America,” the promise that no stone will be left unturned to find an explanation. All a way to choose a cast of positive heroes and heroines, examples of people who showed greatness in the tragedy in an attempt to put a human face on the events for television. It’s no coincidence that crimes like those that were perpetrated in Aurora and Oak Creek are called “tragedies,” as if we were dealing with ancient Greek drama pieces. As if it was all fated to be. As if the nation is helpless to do anything about the murderous routine that plays out regularly in shopping centers, universities, movie theaters and houses of worship.

Of course every criminal is separate and unique. The shooter at the Sikh temple was a notorious neo-Nazi, a star in the racist skinhead music world who expressed his hatred of people who looked “different” with tattoos on his body and in the words of the songs he composed. And yet, up until a few years ago, Page served as a “psychological expert” in the United States Army.*

But there is one thing all these killers have in common: the unbelievable ease with which they can get their hands on a gun. It’s easier to buy a gun than a beer or an automobile in America. To buy beer, you need proper proof of identity showing you are over 21 years of age. The number of privately owned guns is higher in the U.S.A than anywhere else in the world, as is the number of those murdered by firearms each year.

After every mass shooting, gun sales skyrocket and officials of the National Rifle Association weapons lobby representatives of both political parties sympathetic to their cause and mock the victims posthumously.

The NRA does so by claiming the victims might have survived had they also been armed. The politicians do so by refusing to debate the question of why civilians in the United States need to be armed. Top political leaders in Washington knuckle under to the gun lobby and neither the current president nor his Republican challenger is advocating any radical new gun control measures.

And none of them would dare question the long-since obsolete constitutional right to own guns, a 221-year-old right that originated in an era when muskets had to be reloaded after every shot and the nation had just won a war for its independence. That political cowardice is the other facet of the murderous routine rampant in the United States.

*Page was trained in “psychological operations,” among other things, in the army, but was discharged in 1998. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-19167324)