There is a cultural disconnect in our society that is fueling the gun violence on our streets. Commencing with the military-industrial complex who produces vast arsenals for global arms sales and Americas engagement in perpetual wars. Which in turn, subsidizes the militarization of our civilian police departments. Moreover, the sport and entertainment industries glamorize the culture of warfare to week-end warriors in pick-up trucks, who fancy themselves Lexington patriots clinging to their muskets in defense of marauding invaders and a tyrannical government. This quaint notion is then methodically exploited by the gun manufacturers and the NRA to lobby congress against any common-sense legislation that might minimize the wholesale slaughter occurring on our streets. Unfortunately, the profiteers who relentlessly stoke the fears of a paranoid sub-culture, over the obsessive fears of a tyrannical government, justify the cultural costs of their actions by clinging to an ambiguous interpretation of twenty-six words in the constitution. However, when the second amendment was written 226 years ago, the founders were referring to musket balls-not 13.3 rounds per second. Imagine trying to write laws today that govern the use of weapons in the year 2243.
In contrast, one failed attempt at a shoe bomb and we all take our shoes off at the airport. Yet despite the massacre of twenty elementary school children in Connecticut, fifteen high school students in Columbine, forty-nine young adults in Orlando, twelve patrons in an Aurora movie theater, eleven people in a Washington naval yard and fifty-nine people attending a Vegas concert, we do nothing. We can no longer tinker around the margins of reasonable legislation that uses cozy colloquialisms to describe domestic terrorists and weapons of war in our society. It’s not that it’s too early to talk about solutions to gun violence; I fear it’s too late.