Arms-Saturated America Is Making Itself Sick

After all the massacres and killing rampages in the United States, my horror has given way to dull stoicism. The arms-saturated country is making itself sick. It callously puts up with murder.

“There was a time when I reacted to mass shootings with outrage and disgust — but also with hope. Hope it was perhaps the last.” In a melancholic and futile tone, a 67-year-old reader of The New York Times began a confession about his feelings regarding the mass murder in Orlando.

He spoke to me from his aching heart. Then he started to tell me he doesn’t feel this outrage anymore. With every new massacre that his country’s infatuation with deadly arms didn’t manage to contain, his feelings were deadened more and more and eventually died off.

It was the same for me: Arriving in May 1999 as 13 people at Columbine High School died at the hands of two young mass shooters, and leaving after the latest shooting in Isla Vista in California in May 2014, my horror has given way to a dull stoicism. If America, in the name of freedom of arms, wants to live and die this way, so be it.

As Many Dead from Bullets as from Traffic Accidents

My callousness, which grew after dozens of surges of hope, applies to the nation, not to individual victims. Every one of them in Denver and every one of them in Florida get my sympathy. According to data from the FBI, 8,124 Americans died in 2014 from bullets, roughly as many as in motor vehicle accidents. Children who play with weapons are included in this statistic. Over the years, we grew accustomed to asking American parents in arms-saturated Virginia if they owned weapons when they were hosting children’s parties.

In all bloody seriousness, being killed by a firearm in Germany is as statistically likely as being killed by a “falling object” in America. Two people per million meet their death in this way. In Japan, firearms result in one fatality per 10 million; that corresponds to the risk of being killed by lightning in the United States. Arms-saturated America is making itself sick.

The craziness has played out in this tiresome way hundreds of times. Germans, with their fondness for motorways that have no speed limits, provide their own antisocial neuroses. But while cars can kill, they are not manufactured for killing. Together with countless Americans who callously accept the mass murders with a sense of hopelessness, I admit this: I am unable to mourn with America.