suicide is not enough

If you're struggling to get a grip on yet another anonymous slaughter of innocents at the hands of someone who looks an awful lot like your neighbor...
Is it about guns? A culture of enthusiasts with greater access to said ordnance than anywhere else in the world, ever? Hollywood movie posters glamorize guns like big, sexy, shiny penises, held aloft by our most famous actors (and actresses too!). Do they even make video games anymore without gratuitous firearm slaughter? Is nobody playing Smurf? Let me guess, the new one has Gargamel 2.0, with auto-reloading shotgun.
Do you know how many guns we have per capita in this country? Almost one. Almost one gun floating around for every friend, neighbor, relative, rival, grandma, infant, and tween you've ever met or seen. Nobody else comes close. At number 2, wimpy Serbia has barely more than half a gun for each citizen (if our great nations declared war, we'd wipe 'em out while they were all trying to figure out how to fire half a gun). 75% of the world's nations have to live with about a tenth of a gun per person.
Live with it, indeed.
And the absolute anti-U.S. of the world's gun community? Tunisia. Would you believe me if i told you they had just one one-hundredth of a gun per person? If you're skeptical, pat yourselves on the back - i just lied.
It's actually one one-thousandth.
If you took away all their guns that are in glass cases, not having been fired since the french occupation in 1881, it sounds like they might have NO guns per person.
But you know what?
It ain't about the guns. When you look at the worldwide gun death rates, the causality link you're expecting isn't there. There are nine countries with hyper-high rates...and the U.S.A. is not one of them! We're merely around the top of all the rest. This may just say a lot about the appalling level of violence in places like El Salvador, but still...we've got the same gun death rate as the Philippines, yet their guns per capita rate is paltry.
The Philippines: an NRA lobbyist's wet dream.
I wouldn't have devoted this much time talking about guns if they weren't relevant, though. Anyone who imagines that 300,000,000 available guns doesn't have a staggering impact on U.S. gun deaths, is so far beyond idiocy there's no almost no point in talking with such a person.
But there was a time when, if you wanted to kill somebody, you had to want it. You had to really work for it, dammit. It took stomach! Fortitude! Now, it takes barely more effort than pointing your finger.
If we were like Tunisia, we'd have 300,000 guns in this country. If we had 300,000 instead of 300,000,000, is there anyone dim enough to think that murder/suicides (and more importantly in the big picture, domestic violence fatalities) wouldn't plummet?
If we had 300,000 guns, is it possible that a man in Connecticut wouldn't have walked into a school today and murdered twenty children? Not his children, mind you. Just twenty children. Mine. Yours. Anybody's.
None of that, however, is the point.
The point is that it's not about guns. Even if we took them all away, that man would still have tried to kill as many people as he could this morning, before killing himself.
Why?
Because we've entered an unpredecented era in human history.
The era when suicide became not enough.
Before the 20th century, the most shocking human act imaginable was suicide. Homicide has always been a close second, but nothing has ever disturbed us like suicide. Nothing has ever been as haunting. How else could it be, when the fear of death is the most profound and primal of all fears?
When you've reached the point where ending your life makes sense, part of that psychology was usually knowing the effect it would have. Suicide was the ultimate "I'll show 'em...they'll never forget me, the image of my dead body and the thought that they were to blame". Suicide has always been the most intensely personal act...yet at the same time, it's also always been the ultimate example of "acting out". The ultimate claiming of the last word.
Kill others? People will hate you.
Kill yourself? People won't know what to do.
But here in the 21st century, simple suicide has lost its power to overwhelm (as few humans in this day and age haven't seriously pondered it at some point in their lives). Combine that with the culture of celebrity America is the global epicenter of, and a bizarre cocktail arises: people who need to make the ultimate statement, when the ultimate statement has been reduced to "pitiable, but not surprising".
What's left, when suicide has lost its sting?
Kill.
Kill, and kill some more.
People you don't even know.
As many as you possibly can.
Suicide + a body count = the only death that touches us anymore.
And the only shock left in this world? Point the barrel of a gun at the head of a child.
And squeeze.
BAM!!
They won't forget me.
BAM!!
Twenty-six times today, a man in Connecticut told us he would not be forgotten.
That's not about guns. Or Asberger's.
It's about the million and three disappointments and lonelinesses in that man's life. In everyone's life. He wasn't born a killer. If his life had been filled with all the love, acceptance, and touch he needed, he wouldn't have been capable of hurting a squirrel.
But we don't love in this world. We negotiate.
We don't accept in this world. We manipulate.
We don't touch in this world. We maintain our "personal space".
Five years ago, the Vatican declared that Hell doesn't exist.
Has the Vatican ever been inside the head of a parent denied the chance to comfort their blood-soaked child as they died?