Horror in Connecticut; a violent, gun-obsessed America gone mad

By Michael J.W. Stickings

After what happened in Connecticut on Friday, I have little desire to write. About anything. It's not because I don't have anything to say, it's because I'm so saddened and so sickened that part of me doesn't want to care anymore about the United States. And I wonder why the hell I bother.

There isn't much I can say about the horrific mass shooting that left so many people, including so many children, dead. No words seems adequate to capture it. It's not that horrific things don't happen all the time, it's that a horrific thing like this touches us deeply because it was so close to us, to all of us with children, to all of us who know people who have children, to all of us who are capable of human feeling.

But I will say this...

This was not an isolated incident. This was not some one-off committed by a lone psychopath with no connection to anything else going on in society. No, this was yet another horrifically violent act, mass murder committed with guns, in a violent and gun-obsessed culture that refuses that deal with its own violent obsessions and tendencies.

This was worse than anything I can remember, including Columbine, yet it was also more of the same.

You won't hear this from conservatives, of course. Theocratic assholes like Mike Huckabee say that this happened because God was removed from schools. Others will say -- and you'll hear this all over Fox News especially, if you haven't already -- that now is not the time to talk politics, and so let's not talk about guns and gun control, shame on you liberals for politicizing a tragedy. Still others will say it wasn't the guns it was the madman with the guns. And, yes, there have already been calls for guns in schools, as if having more guns in society will somehow make society safer.

These people can all go fuck themselves.

If America gives a shit about being something other than a violent wasteland, it must act now -- belatedly but better late than never -- to rid itself of its massive gun problem:

A problem that is far worse in the U.S. than in other comparable countries:

As James Fallows writes:

Guns don't attack children; psychopaths and sadists do. But guns uniquely allow a psychopath to wreak death and devastation on such a large scale so quickly and easily. America is the only country in which this happens again -- and again and again. You can look it up...

Thousands of people die every year from gun violence, an unspeakable number at schools, and -- we mourn and "move on." "Nothing to be done."

Well, no more fucking excuses. No more fucking bullshit. It's time to do something "meaningful," as President Obama put it, not just with serious gun control measures but with broader efforts to put an end to the culture of violence that plagues America.