Just yesterday, Tuesday, January 23, a gunman opened up at the Marshall County High School in Benton, Kentucky, killing two and injuring nineteen. This is the tenth school shooting in the United States just this year.
Here's what is going to happen. Officials will reassure us that the shooter is in custody and everyone is safe. Condolences will be offered to the families, victims and survivors in a public press conference. They will send loving thoughts and prayers their way. At that point all the talking points will kick in. Someone will say, "This is not a gun problem, it's a mental health problem. It's a problem with evil and evil will always be with us." Those words will be most likely be uttered by the same people that slashed the state's mental health budget that year. Then someone else will say, "This is an inappropriate time to talk about things like the gun violence that haunts our land. That's an insult to the families. It just politicizes it." And then, as a final salvo, we will hear these words: "We already have laws on the books for all this. No further regulation can possibly help."
But they will never pick up that conversation again. Until the next shooting, that is. And then we will go through the motions of that same ritual one more time. The delaying of conversation is intentional because it is meant to never happen.
Our elected officials - national and state - are absolutely beholden to big money that will not let them speak or act to address this issue in any meaningful way. They are absolutely impotent and silent.
The overwhelming majority of American citizens want a reasonable approach to the epidemic of gun violence but our political leaders are no longer accountable to the public. A very powerful lobby controls them, owns them.
You would think that following the mass slaughter in Las Vegas our congress would have done something - even one thing - to address this. But no, nothing.
This is the place where an incensed few will cut and paste legislative positions from the gun lobby and send them to me unedited. They are always the same: This is why we can't do anything - except arm more people and sell more guns.
And people of faith? Oh, we just tend to the dead and conduct the funerals. We send up prayers and console the grieving. But we are not supposed to question why this plague exists and why it is worsening. No, we can't, we shouldn't ask that question. And never, ever do anything about it. Never imply that this is a social illness, a social sin that is destroying us.
Oh, the shooter in this most recent killing spree? He was not a dangerous immigrant who should have been deported yesterday. No, like most of the other mass shootings in our country, he was one of us.
"How long, O Lord?"
"Until you do something about it, beloved."
