God, Guns, and Gold

In the immediate wake of the horrific events in Texas eleven days ago, a friend said to me, “I take it you’re going to write about Uvalde this week.” I said, “Why don’t I just re-run my essay from the last mass shooting?” (There are several.) After all, it’s not even two weeks old.

Because, you may have noticed, this kind of gut-wrenching, mind-numbing, wholly avoidable tragedy happens with tedious frequency in our country. No one said it better than The Onion: “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.” Proving once again that jesters are the best truthtellers.

When Uvalde happened we had not even yet processed the white supremacist mass murder in Buffalo of ten days before, also carried out by a disturbed teenaged gunman with an AR-15 variant and high capacity magazines. In the less than two weeks since then, there have been twenty more mass shootings in the US, including an especially horrific one in a Tulsa hospital.

The cyclic rate of this blog is not as high as that of an Armalite.

Post-Mortem, Again

I can’t add much to the points that have already been widely made across the mediascape in the aftermath of these two tragedies in quick succession — and just as readily ignored by the gun-fetishizing American right wing, which includes the mainstream Republican…