Gun control, mental health, whatever: nothing will keep us from killing.

Drew Angerer, Getty Images

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Let’s get one thing out of the way — very few of you actually care about the fact that people were killed in Las Vegas last week. The US has launched 100 drone strikes in Yemen this year alone. Have you argued with your relatives more about how we bring that policy to an end, or about how we stop a totally random and unpredictable phenomenon like mass shootings? If killing people was a problem for you, then your answer would be different.

And Yemen isn’t the only place we are killing people. On March 20 of this year a U.S. drone bombed a school and crowded market in Taqba, Syria killing 84 civilians, including 30 children. Which did you pay more attention to, this incident or football players kneeling during the National Anthem? Did you make sure to call your members of Congress and ask them to stop dropping bombs on school children, or do you just do that when your garbage-ass health insurance might get more expensive?

Maybe it’s not that you don’t care about people being murdered, you just only care when it’s Americans. But then what about the 200,000 people a year killed by air pollution? Not really a blip on most of y’all’s radar. The hundreds of thousands of people estimated to die because of poverty? Didn’t really rise to the meme-making priority, did it? Here’s one that somehow missed wall-to-wall coverage — Texas’ maternal mortality rate. Have you opined on Facebook about your solution for this as much as you have for gun control?

No, it’s not murder or even murder of people we give a fuck about — because we don’t give a fuck about anyone. It’s mass shootings in particular that inspire the whole charade, and it’s because everyone else is talking about it and we don’t want to be left out; that’s way more important than some dumb kids in Syria. Everyone else is talking about it because the media go fucking haywire for these things. Mass shootings are great TV. They go all breathless and breaking news-y and fill the air with unprincipled speculation until the frenzied revelation of any new “details” — killer’s name, first estimated death toll, a picture of the guy, etc.

We get to watch it and be outraged, heartbroken, stunned, and hurt by all of it. But we don’t express any of these things about the thousands killed for our cheap consumer goods and low taxes. We aren’t good people upset by a bad situation. A mass shooting is now a ritual of mourning that signals to ourselves and our fellow Americans that we really are good people when the truth is we aren’t. The truth is that we are terrible people.

That’s why gun control is so appealing for so many — it gives us an additional moralistic hook to hang our self-righteousness on. We tune into the news to see how our side is doing in the symbolic contest of virtue performance, and even to see which version of the game we’re going to play. Is the guy white? Is he a Muslim? Was it “political”? Depending on how the chips fall each particular time we get to debate gun control, immigration, military action, racial profiling, police, mental health, or whatever.

Even if we did any of the things we say we ought to do, it wouldn’t change anything, because we NEED these shootings to keep happening. They are way more important to our national myth at this point than the Star Spangled Banner ever was.

I’m not saying this from a place of moral superiority. I’m just as fucked as the rest of you, but it’s important that sooner or later we realize that we are moral disasters. That we are the heirs to a half millennium or more of unrelenting murder that continues to this day. That our entire way of life is absolutely, without question dependent upon the misery, enslavement, and brutal oppression of billions of people and that we don’t care at all.

Maybe in a different era or set of circumstances wildfires or car crashes or even maternal mortality would have served as the thing we could freak out about so we can justify not freaking out about our blood-drenched status quo. But this is what we’ve got for now, and — until we finally bring the crime that is this country and its empire to an end — we’ll keep having them. Take away the guns and they’ll stab people or set them on fire or run a car into them or blow them up with a propane bomb just like they do in other parts of the First World where the state has disarmed the public.

Gun control can stop this phenomenon like killing sex ed kept kids from fucking. It’s in our nature. It’s as deep as it gets, and so if you’ve decided to send thoughts and prayers, think about that and pray for forgiveness. God knows we’ll need it.

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