The Bloody American Story

On Monday afternoon, blood pulsed onto the parking lot and floor of a Boulder supermarket as life drained from 10 victims of the most recent gun violence.  Before the blood dried, a nation riddled with bullets called for thoughts, prayers and, finally this time,  legislative action to address gun violence. 

My wife and I were in Boulder at that moment, waiting in the lobby for a medical appointment.  The receptionist mentioned to a colleague that an “active shooter” was at King Soopers on Broadway and Table Mesa.   Moments later a Boulder police car screamed by, siren wailing. We were on Broadway, about four miles north of the carnage.  

Some said, “Guns don’t kill, people do.”  The NRA responded by posting the text of the Second Amendment on social media.  Such callous disrespect at a time of unspeakable agony for the victims’ loved ones!  Perhaps if the 25 year-old King Sooper manager Rikki Olds had been carrying, she could have stopped this.  Her uncle described her as “. . .so energetic and charismatic and she was a shining light in this dark world.”  

Colorado Representative Lauren Boebert issued a special offense within two hours; a fundraising email reading, "I told Beto 'HELL NO' to taking our guns. Now we need to tell Joe Biden.”  Her depravity is bottomless.

The only consequence of mass murder in America is to increase gun sales. Every single time.   There is no reason to believe this particular episode of American Bloodbath will be any different from all the others.  A flurry of thoughts, prayers and profit, then relegation in fine print to the endless litany of massacres.

I suppose some gun control measures would be better than doing nothing.  But the gun people are partially right. People kill people. It is easier, of course, with an assault weapon.  As of 2019 the NRA estimated that 11 million AR-15s or equivalent were in private hands.   

The only real solution would be to take them away.   A ban would be a good start.  But I fear that not even the 20 cold, dead hands in Boulder will inspire anything but empty gestures.  Gunslinging Lauren Boebert and her Republican pals will make sure of that.  They are such dedicated patriots that they would have others  die in service of the 11th Commandment; Thou shalt not mess with the Second Amendment  

America has a mental illness.  I don’t mean the sketchily reported paranoia of the Boulder shooter or the pitiful intersection of sexual guilt, bigotry and religious fervor that blinded Atlanta’s shooter to the humanity of his victims.

The American illness is the viral spread of male entitlement that requires taking matters of perceived or imaginary injustice into one’s own hands.  It is not new, but like the coronavirus it has mutated into a more lethal form.  Unlike the coronavirus there is no vaccine or health mitigation strategy to treat this disease.

The rise of armed militia threatening government officials is no anomaly.  The thugs who stormed the Capitol didn’t like the election, so they bravely, brazenly, took matters into their own hands.  In my small Colorado community, men on a shared message group  “dare” the perpetrators of petty crime to “Stop by and see me!  I’m locked and loaded.”  In towns and cities all over America, men parade around with assault weapons. I’ve written about gun violence for decades and received scores of explicit and implied death threats. 

The heroes of fiction, film, television and video games take matters into their own hands.  Only sissies turn the other cheek or turn to someone else to save them.  Boys are taught to fight back, not back away.  Bone-shattering violence in hockey, football and other sports is shown on video loops as the “boys” have a few “pops” and cheer for the most brutal.

Yes, yes, I know.  Most boys play video games and don’t grow up to spray bullets around a grocery store.  Most men, and more than a few women, can watch MMA and not go home and cold-cock the next-door neighbor.

But it is this climate that produces a pandemic of mass murders not seen anywhere else in the civilized world.  Almost invariably, America’s killers have endured real or imagined slights.  They’ve been bullied, humiliated, isolated and rejected.  In their minds they have been the victims of repeated injustice.  

The shooters in Atlanta, Boulder and too many other places to name did not make a decision to do something wrong.  They lashed out to right a wrong, to inflict pain to ease their own, to deliver justice to a world that had failed them.  They sought justice just as they’d learned to do. 

 It doesn’t excuse them and cannot, will not, ease our grief.

But this is the American story and I’m afraid it may be too late to change the ending.