Quote of the Day (Mike Kelly, on Luigi Mangione’s Alleged Weapon)

“[G]host guns represent a far different element in the overall gun debate. For starters, they have been used far too often by criminals. They are cheap and often without serial numbers and other identifying characteristics, making them almost impossible to trace. And because they were constructed primarily with plastic-like materials, they are often difficult to detect at security checkpoints in airports and at such mass public events as concerts. To put the dilemma another way: These are homemade guns. But they are hardly amateurish. They work — well.”—Columnist Mike Kelly, “Mangione Probably Used a Ghost Gun. Are We Outraged?”, The Record (Bergen County, NJ), Dec. 22, 2024

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.)

Quote of the Day (Garry Wills, on the School Shootings That Make America ‘The Disgrace of Nations’)

“We are the disgrace of nations because we can’t stop killing our children—along, of course, with their teachers, relatives, and innocent bystanders. We don’t even seem to want to stop doing it, not effectively, at any rate. We say we should, but we don’t. We just can’t. We are worse than the drunk who says he should stop drinking but doesn’t. At least drinking is (or was) pleasant in its early stages. But how can killing be pleasant at first?”—Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Garry Wills, “The Court Kills,” The New York Review of Books, Apr. 4, 2023

(Photo of Garry Wills by Lauren Gerson, taken on March 10, 2015 at the LBJ Presidential Library, where he was joining the Friends of the LBJ Library to discuss his book, The Future of the Catholic Church with Pope Francis.)

Quote of the Day (Elizabeth Warren, on the Epidemic of School Violence)

“We lose eight children and teenagers to gun violence every day. If a mysterious virus suddenly started killing eight of our children every day, America would mobilize teams of doctors and public health officials.  We would move heaven and earth until we found a way to protect our children. But not with gun violence.” —Senator Elizabeth Warren, A Fighting Chance (2014)

Four years, and nothing has happened since those words were written—except that, if anything, the situation has worsened. How could this be? When will it turn around?

Quote of the Day (Lyndon Johnson, With a Futile Attempt at Gun Control 50 Years Ago)

“Last year, two million guns were sold in the United States. Many of them were sold to hardened criminals, snipers, mental defectives, rapists, habitual drunkards and juveniles.

“There is no excuse for this. 

“There is no excuse for a holdup at gun point on a dark city street or an armed robbery in a house where children are sleeping. We are long past the point where we can allow lethal weapons to be hawked by the same mail order techniques used to market frozen steaks or baskets of fruit. We are long past the point where we can allow an enemy of society to buy and use a weapon of death and disorder—when existing state laws would not even allow the same person to drive a car, or to vote.”—President Lyndon B. Johnson, “Letter to the President of the Senate and to the Speaker of the House of Representatives Urging Enactment of Gun Control Legislation,” September 15, 1967

Lyndon Johnson—who became President when predecessor John F. Kennedy was murdered with a gun, and whose last year in office was darkened by the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy—would be appalled at the toll that guns have now taken on U.S. society. Last year,according to the FBI, a record 27 million guns were sold in this country—more than 10 times the number that appalled LBJ a half-century ago. We have become immune to each time a gun is employed in a different way: to kill schoolchildren, say, or a hall of concertgoers in Las Vegas.

Is this something for America to be proud of????

Quote of the Day (Tyler Brule, on the Post-Shooting Suffering of the Vegas Massacre Survivors)

“With more than 500 people injured, Nevada's medical system is going to be overwhelmed for years to come by the need for specialised physio, psycho and occupational therapy treatment that demands doctors with battlefield experience rather than sports therapy training. Rather than waiting for the next attack, media outlets might commit to rolling coverage of what it’s like to live with the disfiguring injuries inflicted by such weaponry.”—Tyler Brule (himself hit by two bullets while covering the Afghanistan war), on the largest mass shooting (for now) in U.S. history, in “The Fast Lane: What It Feels Like to be Hit by a Bullet,” The Financial Times, Oct. 7-8, 2017

Quote of the Day (Gabby Giffords, on the Orlando Shooting and the ‘New Normal’)

“Some will say that our nation must accept this as the new normal. Some will say that there is nothing we can do to make our country safer from gun violence. It’s not true. We cannot let armed ambushes become the new normal in our country. We have to do better than this. And we can. We have to do more to ensure hatred doesn’t find its evil voice in the crack of a gunshot. We are heartbroken that this attack allegedly targeted our country’s LGBTQ community as they celebrated Pride Month.”— Gabrielle Giffords (pictured) and husband Mark Kelly, on the Orlando mass shooting, quoted in “Statement by Former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and Captain Mark Kelly on the Tragic Mass Shooting at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida,” http://americansforresponsiblesolutions.org, June 12, 2016

Quote of the Day (E.J. Dionne Jr., on the ‘Circular Illogic’ of Gun Extremists)

“[A]s soon as the weapons extremists have said that sane action is useless in the face of so many guns, they turn around and assert that those who support universal background checks and other small steps are secretly in favor of gun confiscation. Wait a minute: In one breath, they are implying, against all their other assertions, that the problem really is too many guns; in the next, they are condemning those who propose any regulations as would-be despots who want to disarm the country — the only thing their own rhetoric suggests would make a real difference. Welcome to a new philosophical concept: circular illogic.”— E.J. Dionne Jr., “The Gun Lobby’s Con Game Will Come to an End,” The Washington Post, Jan. 6, 2016