Nightmare, Again

Not again! That was my first thought when news of the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre flashed on my TV. My second thought was a sentence DH Lawrence wrote in 1923: "The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer."

Many years ago I bought a collection of short stories written by Harlan Ellison. The book’s title (and the title of its first story) was The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World. It’s a good story and it won the 1969 Hugo Award for Best Short Story. In the story, a man named William Sterog goes on a killing spree. Later in the story we learn that a race of advanced beings have been draining madness from their world and dumping it on humans. As a reason for mindless killing, that concept works as well for me as any other reason that “experts” may invent.

There are over a hundred thousand schools in America, so even with the occasional school shooting, a student’s chance of getting shot at school is vanishingly small. Schools are safe. That said, one more school shooting is one too many.

Mass shootings are relatively rare, but that isn’t the point. The point is that their frequency and deadliness are increasing. The first mass shooting I remember was the clock tower shooting at the University of Texas in 1966. The next mass shooting was at the California State University, Fullerton, ten years later. Then eight years after that, there was the McDonald’s shooting in San Ysidro, California.

Fast forward to 2012 and we have the Sandy Hook massacre preceded by the shopping mall shooting in Oregon earlier this week, the Sikh Temple shooting in August, and the Aurora movie theater shooting in July. At least one planned mass shooting was thwarted by police. At this rate of increase, in 20 years stepping out your front door will be like stepping into the gunfight at the OK corral.

There are 300 million guns in America, so we probably can’t completely stop mass shootings. But we can diminish them. It’s just a matter of coming to a consensus about where, exactly, is our line in the sand. We won’t let civilians buy and sell atomic bombs because we don’t want to have millions of instant casualties. That crosses our line in the sand. You can’t go to a store and buy a pipe bomb because we don’t want hundreds of people to be killed and maimed instantly by a deranged person. That crosses our line in the sand. So how many people do we want to allow a school or mall shooter to kill at one time? A hundred? Seventy five? Fifty? How about less than ten? If our line in the sand is at 10 lives lost in a mass shooting, then clearly a hundred-round magazine should be illegal for the same reason pipe bombs are illegal.

A few months ago I was speaking with a friend who owns a significant gun collection. There had been a mass shooting in the news and he was grumbling that “anti-gun people” were going to use it as an “excuse” to take away his guns. I told him that I was actually in favor of crazy people not owning guns. His reply was, “Take guns away from crazy people today and everyone else will lose their guns tomorrow.”

And there’s the problem: the gun lobby views any restriction on guns as the beginning of a slippery slope. So they fight even the most reasonable and common sense approaches to the problem of mass shootings. Twenty young children are dead and I doubt any significant action will be taken to prevent it from happening again. I hope I’m wrong, but I think it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better.