"A lot of my friends survived Route 91," Carl Edgar told the Los Angeles Times Wednesday night. "If they survived that, they will survive this." He meant the incident of mass murder at a Thousand Oaks, California, bar hosting its weekly country music night, where a 28-year-old man walked in around 11:30 p.m. and shot 12 people dead. Some of Edgar's friends—some of the people to emerge from the Borderline Bar & Grill last night—had survived the attack at the Route 91 Harvest country music festival on the Las Vegas strip just over a year ago. They survived the deadliest mass shooting in American history, only to visit a neighborhood bar back home and once again find themselves hiding and running from another hail of a mass murderer's bullets.

This is the America we have made for ourselves. You can survive one mass shooting—an unprecedented atrocity which left 59 dead and 527 wounded—only to find yourself the victim in another one because you chose the wrong bar on the wrong night to go dancing with your friends. If you're an American, you can be shot anywhere: at school, at the mall, at a concert, at the movie theater. To be an American is to know that when you venture outside, you have a better chance than the citizen of any other country in the developed world of being shot by a complete and total stranger with easy access to incredibly powerful weaponry.

The Route 91 Harvest festival shooting in Las Vegas, Nevada David Becker Getty Images

The mass shooting Wednesday night out in California was the 307th of the year in this country, according the Gun Violence Archive, which characterizes any incident with four or more victims as a "mass" event. It was the sixth in the last seven days. That includes a shooting at a Tallahassee, Florida, yoga studio on Sunday. That night, a 40-year-old man with a history of harassing, assaulting, and hating women walked in and shot seven people, killing two, before he shot himself to death. One victim said she was in Child's Pose when a bullet ripped into her body.

The Florida shooter fit a classic profile: a man with a history of abusing women who turns down a lethal path. There is an exhaustively demonstrated link between a record of domestic violence and mass shootings. After a gunman who had been court-martialed for assaulting his wife walked into a Texas church and murdered 26 people almost exactly a year ago, NPR reported that, by some estimates, over 50 percent of mass shooters have this kind of background. The Parkland shooter abused his ex-girlfriend. The Orlando shooter abused his wife. The Virginia Tech shooter harassed women on campus. The Las Vegas shooter was repeatedly seen berating his wife in public.

A vigil after the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI Getty Images

And yet there has been no move from lawmakers to fix the obvious holes in the so-called Lautenberg Amendment, a 1996 federal law that "made it illegal for anyone convicted of domestic abuse—even a misdemeanor—to buy a firearm." For instance, the Texas church shooter's history of domestic violence, which included breaking his young stepson's skull, was simply never added to the National Criminal Information Center database, which is part of the background-check system. Beyond that, there's the wider-reaching "boyfriend loophole," because the Lautenberg Amendment only applies to people who are married, have a child, or live together. If you beat your girlfriend but live separately, you can still buy a gun.

The mass shooting last night out in California was the 307th of the year in this country. It was the sixth in the last seven days.

In Las Vegas, the shooter compiled an unholy arsenal of 47 guns because there are no laws about how many military-grade firearms one civilian can—or should, or fucking needs—to own. But what many fixated on was his use of a "bump stock," an add-on that, in effect, makes a semiautomatic weapon fully automatic. That means the shooter does not even need to press the trigger each time they fire a bullet that could extinguish another human being's life. Just hold on and fire away. Remember when everyone decided—even the NRA!—that we could ban the sale of bump stocks, which at the time were pretty much legal for anyone to buy online without a background check? Some states moved to ban them, but absolutely nothing happened at the federal level. In a great many jurisdictions, fully automatic weapons are essentially still legal.

Maybe nothing happened federally because, by February 2018—four months and change after Las Vegas—NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch was on This Week with George Stephanopoulos suggesting the group was against a legislative ban on bump stocks, saying it was up to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms to regulate them. Except the ATF said it lacked the authority to ban them, meaning an act of Congress was necessary. In any practical sense, the NRA was blocking a ban on bump stocks a few months after one was used to rain death on the Las Vegas strip.

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This is not an accident. The National Rifle Association blocks any measures to restrict access to firearms in this country as a scorched-earth political strategy, sure. Not one foot backwards. And as an industry lobbying group representing the interests of gun manufacturers, it opposes any measure that would subtract from the number of possible gun owners—and, of course, the number of guns sold. But beyond all that, the NRA is invested in the culture of fear that now forms a steady drumbeat of American life, as we venture out to concerts and the mall with the haunting possibility lurking in the back of our minds that we will be shot to death by a lunatic just for being there.

That is why the NRA supports "stand-your-ground" laws like the one in Florida—the one that made legal the killing of Trayvon Martin and that a Florida man used as justification when he shot another human being to death over a parking space. That's why the organization backs "open carry" laws like the one that now governs Texas, where people can carry their military-grade weapons around in broad daylight in a demonstration of power and intimidation. That's why they back laws like the one in Tennessee that allows people to carry loaded firearms in bars—because alcohol and deadly weapons are always a great mix.

They also ravenously support the proliferation of the most dangerous weapons and ownership models possible. They oppose assault-weapons bans, bans on high-capacity magazines that so often feature in mass shootings, waiting periods to buy guns to prevent rash acts of violence, limits on how many guns or how much ammo a civilian can buy. They support anyone who passes a flawed background-check system getting their hands on any weapon without so much as a safety-training requirement that often pales in comparison to a driver's test. Anyone can have anything at any time. It's chaos. It is to be feared.

The aftermath of the Thousand Oaks shooting Wednesday night. Wally Skalij Getty Images

This is also why the NRA now has set up an entire media arm to spout the party line—and not just about guns and gun ownership. A group that once billed itself as representing hunters and sportsmen now regularly publishes propaganda about immigration and Central American gangs who are coming to kill you. As Adam Serwer pointed out in The Atlantic, this new initiative coincides with a drop in gun sales after President Obama—long a subject of NRA fear-mongering—left office. It's a sales tactic borne of desperation. The message, in all these initiatives, is that you should be afraid. It's a terrifying world, after all. Maybe you need a gun to defend yourself against it.

That's why the response from the NRA and their Republican allies after every mass shooting is that no measure that would restrict the number of guns sold will work. Nothing that would deem certain citizens unworthy of gun ownership—a history of violence, worrying signs of mental illness—can be made disqualifying by an act of Congress. The only solution, they tell us, is more guns. We should arm teachers. We should have armed guards. We should all be armed, even in bars. Did you notice all these solutions lead to gun manufacturers selling more guns? The desired outcome is a relentlessly militarized society, where every citizen must be armed at all times to ensure their own safety, and you can shoot someone who scares you in the supermarket parking lot.

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This is a philosophy which holds that where there are more guns, there are fewer shootings. Is the only way we can protect ourselves from mass shooters really for everyone to be armed themselves, at all times, with the hope they will get in a shootout with a domestic terrorist and win? And does that really count as fewer shootings—or is it just as many shootings, but with the Right People dying?

Should the women at that Tallahassee yoga studio have been strapped while they assumed the Downward Dog? Should the college kids at the Thousand Oaks' Borderline Bar & Grill have all brought their own weapons, pawing at the safety while they danced to Jason Aldean, waiting for the would-be mass murderer to enter so...everyone could shoot through the packed crowd back at him? After the Texas shooting, gun fanatics held up the case of two men who confronted the shooter outside with AR-15s of their own as evidence that the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. This was held up as a positive scenario, of America's Gun Culture Working: that a man with a history of violence shot 26 people to death in the pews of a church, but that two other guys with guns stopped him killing even more.

Should the women at that Tallahassee yoga studio have been strapped while they assumed the Downward Dog?

Perhaps you, like the president, think the solution is arming people outside these venues, which the gun crowd calls "soft targets." Does not just every school, but every business, need to have armed guards outside to stop a deranged man killing customers? Who is going to pay for that? Surely the NRA's Republican allies wouldn't impose such a draconian Big Government mandate on small-business owners. So will taxpayers front the bill, locally or nationwide? And what happens when the guard is overpowered by the shooter's military-grade rifle? What if the shooter is holed up in a location high above the killing field, as in Las Vegas?

Of course, none of these are actually solutions. It is not a worldview dictated by evidence or reason. This is a world where the only true currency is fear. The National Rifle Association represents the interests of gun manufacturers, and those interests are to sell more guns. Nothing else is relevant. The NRA customarily went quiet today after another incident of mass gun violence, but they had this to say in the hours before the Thousand Oaks massacre:

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Someone should tell self-important anti-gun doctors to stay in their lane. Half of the articles in Annals of Internal Medicine are pushing for gun control. Most upsetting, however, the medical community seems to have consulted NO ONE but themselves. https://t.co/oCR3uiLtS7 — NRA (@NRA) November 7, 2018

That's right, doctors. Shut up and treat the collateral damage of our national bloodletting. Treat the wounds of those who picked the wrong day to go out and dance with their friends. Tell the families of those we have chosen to sacrifice for our freedom that their child, or their parent, or their brother or sister won't be at the Thanksgiving table this year.

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As a Trauma Surgeon and survivor of #GunViolence I cannot believe the audacity of the @NRA to make such a divisive statement.



We take care of these patients everyday. Where are you when I’m having to tell all those families their loved one has died. @DocsDemand #Docs4GunSense https://t.co/XrY1G3hIi2 — Joseph Sakran (@JosephSakran) November 7, 2018

In the end, though, we must listen to those who bore witness to another episode of American horror. After each one of these spasms of violence, we note the location and the gun used and the shooter's background—almost always white and male—and of course, how many are dead. It's a checklist we all do, before we place it on the mental wall next to all the others and continue about our lives. Because we have accepted it.

And that's just the deaths. There is growing study of the longterm, debilitating effects of those injured in these incidents. Previously, we rarely gave those merely shot, but still alive, very much thought. We rarely took into account that many of the more than 500 injured in Las Vegas may never return to their lives before. Perhaps one of them loved to play basketball, but will never play again. Their friends will know now to go to the gym without them. Just another sacrifice for freedom.



But as one witness interviewed in the aftermath last night will show you, sometimes you don't even need to be physically harmed for an American mass shooting to inexorably alter the trajectory of your life. Sometimes it's enough to see so many young lives torn out of the world by a madman let loose in a nation that has itself gone mad.

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This interview with a man who narrowly escaped the #Borderline Bar in Thousand Oaks with his son tonight is one of the most heartbreaking things I’ve ever seen. What is happening in America? When will it end? When will we say enough is enough? pic.twitter.com/eAgbfINv2e — Ev Boyle (@evboyle) November 8, 2018

"They're all young. I'm 56. I've lived a life. They're all young."

We have accepted this, so we will move on again—until the next outbreak of mass murder, at which point we will assume the routine. In between, many tens or hundreds or thousands more will lose their lives or suffer debilitating injury in our national epidemic. Since the first day of 2018, according to the Gun Violence Archive, more than 12,000 people have been killed and 24,000 injured by guns. 570 killed or injured were children. 2,427 were teenagers. 252 were police officers. Convicted domestic abusers will gain access to guns before the next mass shooting deemed worthy of national attention, and they don't need to commit mass murder to do their damage. The research shows guns are an escalating factor in domestic abuse cases, which can cause abuse to turn to murder.

"Women in the U.S. are 16 times more likely to be killed with a gun than women in other high-income countries," according to Everytown for Gun Safety, making the U.S. the most dangerous country in the developed world with respect to violence against women. 50 American women are shot to death by intimate partners every month.

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But the solution to all of this, we hear, is more guns. Guns in schools, guns in theaters, guns in parking lots, guns in the home—even if having a gun in your house significantly increases the risk of gun homicide or suicide occurring there, and makes it 11 times more likely a child will be killed by a firearm in the home. Despite the fact that America is already home to a gun for every citizen—half the world's civilian-owned firearms for five percent of the world population.

Of course it doesn't make sense. It's not an appeal to reason or the evidence. It is an appeal to a section of this nation that, over the last decade, or two, or three, has been tumbling into an abyss of resentment and anger and almighty fear. In America, the gun is marketed as an antidote to fear by those growing fat on the profits of selling them. The gun is power. The gun is security. The gun will save you from the hordes of migrants invading our southern border. It will allow you to engage in John-Wayne heroics at the mall when the mass shooter walks in and starts killing people—a scenario vastly more likely in this country than in any other developed nation.

No, like all the great American marketing tactics, it's rooted in breathless deception. The gun is no antidote to the fear. The gun is the fear. Its proponents hold it up as the last line of defense against a tyrannical government. Never mind that even an AR-15 won't be much use against a dedicated military force equipped with tanks and Predator drones. It is a fantasy peddled by people who spend their whole lives trumpeting their love of freedom, and hold it up as the only legitimate value in a democracy. A world where everyone could be out to get you, and you can't leave your house unarmed, is not a free world. It is tyranny.



Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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