The One With Aldacron

One of my students here in Korea, a 50-something executive at a Samsung affiliate, recently articulated something that has been in my mind for a long while. We were discussing a shooting incident in the U.S. that I had read about on the internet. I don’t recall if it was a school shooting or one of the cases of domestic violence frequently reported in local media across the country, but that’s irrelevant. His point was very simple. He has never been able to understand how it’s possible for Americans to accept all of the gun violence pervading the nation as the status quo.

I wish I had an answer for him, but it’s something that’s been puzzling me for years as well. Gun rights supporters love to say that guns don’t kill people, people kill people. That’s all well and good, but the fact is that people are needlessly dying all over the country because easy access to guns enables them. Tim Rutten made a very good point in a recent LATimes Op-Ed:

All these wrenchingly tragic crimes are linked by a common factor — the ubiquity of guns in America. Given that we’re in the midst of the most hotly contested presidential campaign in recent memory, you’d think that all this bloodletting might become a campaign issue. If you thought that, you’d have reckoned without regard to the gun lobby’s near-total victory among the politicians of both political parties. The 2nd Amendment fundamentalists who cluster around the National Rifle Assn. are the most successful single-issue constituency in modern American politics.

The truth is that guns make the malicious, the malcontent and the mad powerful. They confer the power of life and death on the demented and deranged — and yet we do nothing. There are more guns circulating in the U.S. today than ever before, somewhere around 250 million, according to projections by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

I don’t believe for a minute that criminalizing guns will make the problem go away. It would just push all gun purchases underground. But we do have a problem and guns are at the root of it. The even bigger problem is that no one in our government is addressing the issue in a sane way. Instead, we get this:

It isn’t as if our lawmakers aren’t willing to do something to protect our students, however. Twelve state legislatures — those in Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Virginia and Washington — are considering bills that would allow students who obtain concealed-weapons permits to carry guns on campus. Presumably, they’ll only fire in self-defense.

Confronted with this sort of social idiocy, it’s hard to know whether to chortle or choke.

I sometimes wonder if I’m not really asleep, suffering through some nightmare of a demented parody of reality. The brazen stupidity demonstrated by many government officials, at all levels, in the United States is just too ludicrous to be real. The same can be said for the “values” and “ideals” of too many of my fellow citizens.

I’m not holding my breath that a real solution will be found. America is eroding from the inside out from a wide range of social and cultural problems. Until we get a majority of people in government who truly care more about the country than their political careers, people who value reason over faith and emotion, people who aren’t beholden to powerful, self-serving lobbies and political interests, there can be no cure to many our ailments.

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