America, Gun-Sick!

Another massacre in America. It happens. Often. There is a pattern. A dead-eyed, hollow-headed idiot, usually a dweeb, a "mental defective" with some terrible haircut, arms up with a cache of guns and unleashes a torrent of bullets on innocent people. Places like schools, movie theaters, malls, churches.

Hate. Stupidity. Madness. Sickness.

And we all shudder, and "tsk, tsk." And say "terrible."  Listen to John Stewart, or Barack Obama. We know the issue, we understand the problem. It's appalling. And our political system is at a standstill. A stalemate.

Maybe America's love affair with guns is actually a sickness itself? We can get all "Freudian," it seems fruitful - a gun is a phallic symbol, a symbol of power, of death, and those who are obsessed with guns, who must arm themselves, are just sick people. Scared, weak, pissed off, attracted to death and dreams of violence. Maybe gun ownership itself is a kind of sickness?

Is it a surprise that many gun owners end up shooting themselves? Or "accidentally" shoot their friends and family members? I think of Chekov. He tells us if you have a play with a gun on the mantle that gun must go off sometime during the play. I think of a gun like that. It must go off.

So yes, other Western democracies have no problem regulating guns. With much success. We could do it too. As Adam Gopnik so eloquently tells us we can become "gun-sane." It is not impossible. It is not hard. Why don't we? It's not a matter of logic, reason, or inability to come up with an answer, it's a matter of sickness. Gun-Sick.