middle-of-the-night thoughts on gun control

The next time there is a mass shooting. And the next time, and the next. When I or someone else you care about is gunned down while going about their daily life, I don’t want your thoughts and prayers.

I want you to remember some things.

I want you to remember how every single time I said “You know, maybe criminals shouldn’t have easy access to guns,” you heard “the government is going to strip every law-abiding American citizen of his guns!”

I want you to remember how quick you have been to point out that a certain regulation wouldn’t have prevented a certain tragedy, while ignoring that some regulations would prevent some tragedies.

I want you to acknowledge that this country has become so beholden to the idea of a constitutional amendment written over two centuries ago, that we haven’t noticed that the NRA, and not the American people or our representatives or our courts, are now the sole arbiters of what it means.

I want you to further remember how many times you believed the NRA’s scaremongering and decided that yes, anyone’s right to own a gun was far more important that everyone’s right to not get shot.

I want you to remember how many times you insisted that more guns, more metal detectors, more armed guards in churches and schools and movie theaters was the answer. I want you to realize that these solutions are putting a Band-Aid on a literal bullet hole. To realize that these expensive, inconvenient and burdensome measures may not solve anything until they are universal, and when will that be?

For that matter, please recall how Universal Background Checks, an idea supported by up to 90% of Americans (and previously by the NRA), may likely never come to fruition because lawmakers will insist they are too expensive, inconvenient and burdensome.

Remember how many times you decided that regulating women and marriage to the nth degree was acceptable and necessary, while deciding that regulating weapons of mass murder was never acceptable and never necessary enough to risk pissing off the NRA.

You’ll share statistics that not that many people, proportionally, die of gun violence, as if that is any comfort to the families of dead six-year-olds.

I want you to remember how many times you forgot that mental illness exists everywhere and only in America does it lead to mass homicide on a regular basis. I want you to remember how the same lawmakers who insist that gun regulations can’t account for mentally ill people with weapons, will cut mental healthcare funding every chance they get.

I want you to remember all of these things, but you won’t. You’ll take every opportunity to misconstrue the words I’ve written here and malign the motives of other gun-control advocates. You’ll may even dig in on your insistence that bunch of children who just saw their classmates gunned down don’t have the right or intellectual maturity to protest gun violence.

You’ll continue to brush off the pain of victims and survivors, to offer thoughts and prayers on Facebook and nothing else.

None of this will bring back the next person to die in an act of mass murder. None of of your anger or rationalizations will fix anything. No, you are too afraid of losing your guns to even consider that maybe, just maybe, it’s time for a national discussion.

I feel sorry for you.

You’ll win the war of the memes, but you’ll lose your soul.