The Latest Shooting

The bride and I have been aways this week, and I was totally unable to work my iPad to do some posts from the road.  Thus Mister Tristan (the blog, not the 7 year old human being) has been dark for the better part of a week.

I found some commentary on the campus shooting in Oregon that I will share, as these snippets capture pretty well my thoughts:

From Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo:

I'm embarrassed to say I get more numb to these shooting tragedies and I think it is because at this point we know with a moral certainty that absolutely nothing will be done to keep guns out of the hands of the rageful, narcissistic, delusional or psychopathic individuals who commit these atrocities. 

As a society, we've made our choice. 

I send my prayers and best wishes to the victims and their loved ones.

From Shakespeare's Sister:

I am already dreading the inevitable "this is not the time for politics" silencing of anyone who quite understandably argues in the wake of another school shooting for stricter gun laws. I am already dreading the inevitable othering of the shooter, trying to cast him as crazy and existing in some kind of vacuum outside the rest of the culture. I am already dreading politicians offering their prayers, instead of any meaningful legislation to prevent more school shootings, which have become so routine they hardly have the capacity to shock any of us anymore, even if we are angered and saddened beyond words.

From Digby's Hullabaloo:

It’s hurricane season and all along the east coast residents are girding themselves for major weather. Every once in a while a major storm makes landfall and property is destroyed and lives are lost. One hopes that doesn’t happen this year. But natural disasters are a fact of life people just learn to live with. Tornadoes, earthquakes and tsunamis, major floods and fires are considered to be acts of God and while we try to mitigate the damage everyone knows that we cannot stop them.  It’s just the way it is.

In America, gun violence is just another natural disaster. Like an earthquake for which you can never really be prepared, most people have come to see a mass killing like that which happened in Oregon yesterday as being unpreventable. We might as well try to stop the sun from coming up in the morning. All we can do is try to comfort the survivors and help people cope with the aftermath. On any given day we could personally be the victims of gun violence or turn on our TVs and computers and witness some kind of mass shooting, horrifying domestic dispute that ends in carnage, accidents or criminal activity. And that’s normal.

To the rest of the world, this is simply insane. Elsewhere they treat gun violence like a public health threat and limit the public’s exposure to it through strict gun regulation. Different cultures have slightly different approaches but there is no other developed country in the world that treats gun violence as if it were a simple fact of life they must live with.