Another mass shooting. We’ve had six of these large-scale shootings in the past 10 years alone, claiming more than 200 lives.
Sunday’s shooting was the largest, taking 59 lives and resulting in injuries to more than 500 others.
The debate begins again, but I have little confidence that anything substantive will change.
We have become desensitized to the slaughter, cynical of our leaders’ vows to take steps to curb the violence.
“Nothing can be done,” says the country that has tried nothing.
These massacres are not routine in other countries where real measures — sometimes very harsh measures — have been taken in response to such attacks.
Here? The only gun legislation currently on the table in Washington is a bill that would allow for the sale of gun silencers, which I suppose will spare the next mass shooting victims from hearing the shots that cut them down.
Second Amendment absolutists coldly declare that these sort of shootings are the price we pay to be a free nation.
If you are inclined to believe that, I challenge you to call up the footage from Sunday’s shooting, close your eyes and just listen to the gunfire that a single shooter sprayed down on a helpless gathering of concert-goers.
The Second Amendment does not allow citizens to possess hand grenades, rocket launchers or tanks. They are too lethal. But a citizen is allowed to possess semi-automatic weapons, which can be easily converted to automatic weapons, and mow down people in a matter of seconds. Madness.
Listen to the staccato of the bullets that killed and maimed those people in Las Vegas and tell me the Second Amendment, alone among all amendments, can have no reasonable restraints. Tell me it’s worth the price.
Tell me if you would feel differently if it were your son, daughter, dad, mom or sibling out there dead and dying on that Las Vegas sidewalk Sunday evening.
Tell me, if your child were a victim, would you just shrug your shoulders and say there is nothing anyone can do?
Tell me, how comforting you would find the “thoughts and prayers” offered up by politicians whose pockets are full of NRA blood money.
Whatever useful purpose the NRA may once have played, today it is an insidious, manipulative force that has successfully defeated every single piece of gun legislation over the past 20 years. The NRA is no longer an association of gun enthusiasts. It is the political wing of the gun manufacturers, which provides the millions of dollars the NRA spreads around Congress to control the narrative in Washington on any gun legislation.
In the wake of every mass shooting, gun sales go up, the NRA adds supporters and congressmen grow their campaign war chests.
So, Sunday was a good day for gun manufacturers, the NRA and an awful lot of congressmen.
But it was a tragic day for America.
It won’t be the last.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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