In Dante’s Inferno, a Renaissance work of fiction that details nine circles of hell, the deepest one is not a burning pit. Quite the contrary, it’s ice cold. Think of the saying: She’s cold. It means the person is pure evil; that person has no soul.
The pit of hell, the most desolate realm of evil, came to mind after debating this week yet again the issue of gun control. At this point—after the mass shooting deaths in Uvalde coupled with the revelation that gunshot wounds are now the number one cause of death among children in the U.S.—I am ashamed of my country and my state.
This week’s mass shooting at an elementary school may not have occurred if Texas did not encourage 18-year-olds to buy military-style assault rifles—those weapons of war that spray bullets to kill many people in seconds flat. These are guns that blow bodies to bits. That is the reason, if we’re being honest, the parents of the 19 dead schoolchildren were asked for DNA to identify mounds of bloody flesh.
Not left unnoticed, gun-loving Americans display little to no remorse, just like the typically young gunmen who commit these heinous bloodbaths. I bet their eyes have never welled over any of the dozens of publicized shooting massacres which undeniably have increased since the federal assault rifle ban was lifted. What an evil mistake.
That damn movie
Since Bonnie & Clyde, the movies were never the same. And our culture followed suit. Both became more violent and high-powered guns more glamourized and expected. Dallas’ famous gangster couple drove state to state lickety-split carting shooting machines that were used to fight the first world war. Oh for the days when the public used to debate handguns in 1980-81 when John Lennon then President Ronald Reagan and his press secretary James Brady were shot. In between those two eras, high-powered assault rifles were not easily obtained by the public and rarely used. We used to not have mass shootings. We only saw them in the movies.
The movies weren’t the only visuals that relied ever more on heavy artillery, blood and blasts to flesh and an obscene body count. At the end of the 20th century, video games came out with the premise to shoot as many ‘people’ as you can, and you win. The ‘shooter’ games featured a gun to hold and red blood spurting from dead bodies on screen. Boys loved playing them, their parents seeing no problem with developing killer instinct.
Then Columbine happened.
Oh how shocked our nation was as we watched on our TVs the surreal image of high school kids running from their school, hands held up in surrender less the cops take them for the assailants.
Since 1999 and Columbine, nothing has changed when it comes to mass shootings, at schools and everywhere else. Mass shootings have only increased.
As we grappled with Columbine, psychologists told us ‘the brain thinks everything we see is real.’ So we ought to be careful what we watch and what we spend hours watching. After the mass shooting, they told us the youth generation as well as American society has grown numb to gun culture and shooting deaths. We are several generations now who’ve seen people get shot on TV shows and movies several times a week, perhaps hundreds of times a year. The shooter video games also desensitize us so that we never stop and ask ourselves “What am I doing?” when we kill and kill and keep on killing in order to win a bloody game.
Let’s play Dysfunctional Family Feud!
The Uvalde school shooting brought out empathy in me, and I don’t even have children. But it wasn’t hard at all to put myself in the place of a mother whose kid was shot to death at school or even the parents whose children are hospitalized with gunshot wounds. The news and reality of a growing death toll was like a punch in the gut. I opened my mouth in a silent cry, like a wailing mother. The reality of what happened, what we’ve gone through vicariously time and again with no end in sight, brought tears to my eyes … because I know a parent who loses a child wants to die herself.
But in my world, others remained stoic. Unmoved. Glacial. Stiff upper lip. I could hear their responses as to why no remorse: “We don’t even know those people.” And … since Sandy Hook, “We don’t even know if that really happened.” All mass shootings in the U.S. are real, not like Dante’s imagined Inferno. Yet he knew something about evil being cold.
Meanwhile back at the ranch, the Texas Governor and Legislature have yet to admit their extreme error in allowing teen-agers—notoriously irresponsible and unable to soberly think of the consequences beforehand—to purchase and own virtual Tommy guns. Bonnie and Clyde weren’t much older when they brandished submachine guns into banks to steal other people’s money and shoot anyone who got in their way including law officers.
Shoot, a few days after the Uvalde elementary school massacre, the Lone Star State hosted the NRA convention, despite a couple of big-name music acts backing out and a tasteful change in plans to substitute a video address by Gov. Abbott instead of his scheduled live appearance. Any date the NRA chose would be framed by a mass shooting, they’re so common. At least pro-gunners were met with thousands of Americans who demanded responsible gun laws instead of irresponsible ones like here in Texas.
In debates on gun control among people I know—practically everyone 2nd Amendment spouters—I’ve been told that high-powered military-style assault rifles have been in use since the 19th century and have been available to the public. Horsefeathers. Then I’m told, incredulously, the solution is more guns; if everyone had a high-powered assault rifle, there would be no more massacres. Then I’m countered with what they think the real issue is: not military-style assault rifles or too many people with guns but mental illness.
Americans, please.
We have our share of crazies who hear and act on “KILL! KILL! KILL!” But we don’t have any more sociopaths than we’ve always had before these military war rifles were easily available. What we do have is lax gun laws, nonchalant cynical gun rights advocates, American greed, and the NRA mantra: The solution to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. They have the gall to declare classroom teachers should be armed with guns. The American education system has come to this? This would never have been allowed in the days of the wild west … unless the teacher was Belle Starr.
Folks in the NRA suggest instead of being ashamed of our great nation over all the senseless shooting massacres, Americans should just ‘deal with it.’ Times have changed, and we need to learn to live with many people having lots of guns and daily mass shootings at ‘soft targets’ and funerals and medical bills and lawsuits and reconstructive surgeries and physical therapy and counseling and opiate addictions and ruined lives and unhealed trauma and getting over it and moving on. There ain’t no turning back the clock. Ain’t no going back to the days of Bonnie and Clyde … er.