The American Rot Has Begun to Show

Sure, the access to guns in record numbers is a problem but the hatred of one another is the cause

The elementary school shooting in Texas is the 212th mass shooting this year. It is the 27th school shooting. It is also the deadliest mass shooting in the U.S. so far in 2022.

The obvious political football to kick down the field is guns. We have approximately 120 guns in America per citizen. For every man, woman, and child in the United States, there are 120 firearms circulating. Lotta fucking guns. NEWSFLASH: We ain't gonna do a goddamned thing about the guns. We probably can't. That many guns floating around is like locusts descending upon the nation if locusts never died. If our stagnant political system could bother to pass ridiculous "Repeal the Second Amendment" laws, it would be generations before we even got it down to a mere five guns per person.

There is simply not enough political will to stem the tide. The country is divided almost in half when it comes to the Red/Blue disease and the bizarre. almost cartoonish idea of compromise has been wadded up and tossed like a used condom filled with the sperm of dreams of actually accomplishing anything pragmatic.

If a rabid dog attacked people, mangling them in the streets, it may be interesting to wax on about the abuse the dog suffered at the hands of other people but that intellectual ruminating doesn’t stop the dog from biting down on a four-year old’s arm hard enough to crack the bone, does it?

As complicated as life is, as terribly complex the system of intersectionality and psychological barriers we face is, there is a simplicity to embrace.

If they didn’t have guns, they couldn’t kill people so easily. But they'd still want to kill rooms full of children and grocery stores full of black people.

This is not a value judgment on anyone’s state of mind. This is not a moral argument. This has fuckall to do with the hardships someone has gone through that brought him to a point where shooting someone seems to be the only recourse.

Simple math. If he didn’t have a fucking gun, those people would still be breathing.

The dilemma is that he's always going to be able to get that weapon.

You don't take a completely irrational population, after spending a few years in lockdown in fear of an invisible virus and prone to yelling at each other for either wearing or not wearing a cloth mask in a Sbarro, and give them unfettered access to the largest arsenal of personal weapons in history. It's just dumb. It's dangerous. It's catastrophic.

"The world is on fire."

It's a common refrain these days. I think, from my vantage, that the world has always been in some state of "on fire." The only genuine difference is the burning is amplified by the internet. The world was on fire in the 80s but we mostly only knew about the multiple bonfires in our smaller circle of information. In 2022, that one time the crazy lady screamed at the Dunkin Donuts guy because he insisted she wear a mask would never cross our line of sight but today there are numerous insane anti-vaxxers doing this, caught on a smartphone, and projected a billion times over.

There have always been a bunch of wars, a bunch of diseases, a bunch of crackpots muttering to themselves about the conspiracies concocted from inside their spider-infested brains. It's just that now we have to face the reality that there were always more of them out there, beyond the borders of our narrow existences, than we thought were possible.

In eighth grade there were killer bees coming to America from Africa. I saw it on the news. I freaked out. I created my own makeshift bee-keeper costume and wore it to school until the principal insisted I stop wearing it as it was a distraction from the purpose of going to school—which if you watch Euphoria is fucking, taking lots of drugs, and feelings. Maybe three mentions of the killer bees (which magically did not materialize in Kansas) on the local news. If I had been able to track in real time a daily update on the killer bees from Africa, I might never have taken that outfit off and been diagnosed with a sort of media induced PTSD.

I might have even bought a flamethrower. Cuz bees, you know.

Growing up, I got to live through the end of Vietnam, the Watergate scandal and resignation of the president, the gas crisis in 1976, the election of Ronald Reagan. In every school, we practiced duck and cover techniques that were only taught to give us something to do when the inevitable ICBMs came down to level the planet. I watched on television the Challenger Space Shuttle explode in mid-air. The Iran-Contra scandal. The Ethiopian Civil War. The Iranian hostage situation. The Soviet-Afghan war. The McMartin Trial that started the hysteria about pre-school teachers performing Satanic rituals with kids.

The world has always been on fire. The amplification of those myriad horrors has us all jacked up. So many of us buy guns. We are surrounded when we go to the grocery store or gym or church by freaking out just under the surface people lacking coping skills or perspective with the capability to pull out a life-ending weapon over the last bag of bagels.

So, yeah. Let's chip away at all the guns. Absolutely. You can't clean the plastic bottles out of the ocean all at once, you gotta do it a few at a time. Let's get some dedication to the ridiculously huge challenge and do our best to avoid the societal ADHD that prevents from focusing on one thing at a time.

Let's also stop looking to gun control as an answer. If it was, it would be by now. Let's start looking into financial penalties on comically huge scales to those with illegal guns but more importantly those who sell illegal guns. Let's require insurance with each firearm like we do cars. GEICO will be thrilled. Let's open up a distinct possibility of class action lawsuits against the NRA and bankrupt those motherfuckers in paperwork.

Let's also start genuinely coping with our anxiety, fear, and rage at one another because that's the rot in the floorboards of the country. Plenty of reasons for this ludicrous turn from being civil and compassionate to being a giant bag of dicks in every interaction. There is more decency in holding a door open for a stranger you can see than every tweet ever written for a cause that affects people you’ll never know. The first is an act of service; the second is a linguistic selfie taken and shared for approval.

There is an illness in this country. It goes beyond our pathological clinging to guns. It’s an anti-social malady that has everyone behaving dogs with rabies. 

We have become numb to violence. The largest crime surge in decades. Armed robberies are up. Shoplifting is up. Road deaths are up. Car break-ins are so common that people leave their windows down and leave notes hoping that criminals can read in the first place (they can't because our public school system is a decaying corpse).

2020 marked the highest single-year increase in murder except for, you guessed it, 2021.

We're freaking out, pissed off, and some of us really love those guns. Taking away the guns solves part of the issue but the raging, drooling desire to hurt other people out of fear or inconvenience is the culprit, gang.

Yes, we GenXers were irresponsible, rude, busted everyone's nuts about differences, were probably (mostly) scared of gays and hateful because of it but we weren't so anti-human. We saw other people as people rather than warriors in some cause or another.

You want to change the culture? Quit being such an asshole.