Quote of the Day (Adam Hochschild, on American Violence Viewed From Abroad)

"If reason played any part in the American love affair with guns, things would have been different a long time ago and we would not have so many mass shootings … Almost everywhere else in the world, if you proposed that virtually any adult not convicted of a felony should be allowed to carry a loaded pistol—openly or concealed—into a bar, a restaurant, or classroom, people would send you off for a psychiatric examination. Yet many states allow this, and in Iowa, a loaded firearm can be carried in public by someone who’s completely blind. Suggest, in response to the latest mass shooting, that still more of us should be armed, and people in most other countries would ask what you’re smoking."—American journalist, historian and lecturer Adam Hochschild, “Bang for the Buck,” originally printed in The New York Review of Books, Apr. 5, 2018, reprinted in Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays (2018)

School’s been open less than a week in most parts of the country and already, at Apalachee High School in Georgia, four people have died and another nine injured at the hands of a 14-year-old. Well, that didn’t take long, did it?

It’s been 6½ years since Adam Hochschild’s article appeared, but nothing fundamental has changed for the better in our American landscape darkened by guns.

If anything has altered, it’s the increased sense of same old, same old. You know: another schoolyard shooting; another mass shooting. It’s become so routine that the New York Times didn’t even make it the major story of the day.

Seven years ago, a former President referred in his inaugural address to “American carnage.” If this latest incident isn’t described as such, the phrase has no value.

As Hochschild noted, it doesn’t have to be this way. As noted in Jonathan Masters’ June 2022 global comparison of U.S. gun policy for the Council on Foreign Relations, other nations have similar high levels of gun ownership, but they have responded with appropriate measures after mass shootings. No cliches about “guns don’t kill people; people do,” no “thoughts and prayers” sent to families and friends of victims; no obscene claim from a Vice Presidential candidate that school shootings are “a fact of life.”

This erstwhile hillbilly elegist might want to remember that another form of American violence, lynching, was once considered “a fact of life,” and bills to outlaw it routinely died in committee on Capitol Hill.

It took more than a century and 200 failed attempts before the Senate passed and President Biden signed into law a bill that makes lynching a crime punishable by up to 30 years in prison. None of that helped the more than 4,000 lynching victims in Southern states from 1877 to 1950.

Years from now, people will ask the same question about gun violence that they do now about those past “necktie parties”: Why did it take so long to act to stop this?

Maybe it’ll only be the prospect of lost dollars that will bring our current irreconcilables to their senses about stalling passage of even the most elementary attempts at gun safety.

Forget about foreigners wanting to live in a country where their lives are at risk. What about even tourists from abroad who would rather stay home where they can be safe, and not spend here on foods, goods, lodging, and transportation?

(The image accompanying this post, of Adam Hochschild speaking with the Wikimedia Foundation, was taken June 16, 2017, as a screenshot from File:Adam_Hochschild, Co-Founder, Mother Jones.webm.)