Americans Keep Shooting Each Other – And It’s Getting Boring!

• It’s Time To Turn The Channel On This Gun Murder Mess And Move On To Something Else

A Commentary by Doug Draper, Niagara At Large

Want one more example of a U.S. president who doesn’t have the finger on the pulse of his own country? Then check out this statement, released this November 28^th, by President Barack Obama in the wake of another mass shooting in America.

“This is not mornal,” said Obama. “We can’t let it become normal.”

“If we truly care about this — if we’re going to offer up our thoughts and prayers again, for God knows how many times, with a truly clean conscience — then we have to do something about the easy accessibility of weapons of war on our streets to people who have no business wielding them. Period,” Obama concluded. “Enough is enough.”

Enough is enough? In all due respect, no it isn’t, Mr. President. At the current rate of occurrance in your country, there will likely be one more mass shooting before Christmas, all to receive 24/7 coverage, like a reality TV show, as other issues from climate change to your nation’s crumbling infrastructure and lack of health care and education opportunities for poor and lower income people get the bum’s rush on CNN and the other major American cable networks.

Since one of the latest shooting frenzies at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado, some American media outlets have made much of the fact that none of the 14 Republican candidates running for their party’s presidential nomination has come out and condemned this particular incident or taken a stand for more guarded gun sale rules.

But is seems clear to this outside observer, at least, that these Republican candidates have more of a finger on the pulse of Americans – at least the ones that routinely support their party – than the president does.

They know that the National Rifle Association runs the U.S. Congress, at least so far as the passage of any gun legislation is concerned. And so much so that, as New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton noted recently on NBC’s Meet the Press, the NRA gun lobbyists have managed to press Congressional members to keep laws around the sale of guns  so weak that even individuals on U.S. terrorist watch lists can easily purchase them.

The Republican candidates also know that many of their supporters will go to the wall for their Constitutional 2^nd Amendment right to “keep and bear arms” – even if one of the costs is more than 30,000 gun-related deaths (more than twice the number of American combat deaths during the more than decade-long Vietnam War) by homicide and suicide in their country each year.

As for the recent spraying of bullets at the Colorado Planned Parenthood clinic, they also know that many God-fearing Americans want these clinics and the abortion, contraception and other services they provide shut down. Not that anti-abortion groups in the country advocate shooting up these clinics and in the case of the latest incident, they have already issued their stock statement of condemnation. But they happen anyway, and every so often a shootist manages to pop off a doctor.

This character muttered “no more baby parts” to the police after recently bullet drilling a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado. Yah, but apparently it was okay for him to play judge, jury and executioner and blow away a police officer, Iraq war veteran and father, and a young woman and mother.

Maybe these anti-abortion groups or “right to lifers,” as they are so want to call themselves, ought to consider the possibility that if they throw all their hyper rhetoric about nurderers, baby killers and their graphic photos of bloody fetus parts in to a cultural stew that is armed to the teeth with just enough wackos to open fire for whatever their twisted minds think is “the cause,”  you are bound to end up with a Dr. Barnett Slepian (who, by numerous accounts, was a reluctant abortion provider who once said the procedure “is not pretty. … not easy,  and in a perfect world … would not be necessary”) getting gunned down through a window of his Buffalo, New York area home.

As one of my favourite cultural critics, the late George Carlin, once put it; “Right to lifers will do anything to save a fetus, but if it grows up to be a doctor, they just might have to kill it.”

Whatever the reason for mass shootings – whether it is some nut who shoots up his old school he came out a loser or some screw ball who fills a movie audience full of bullets because he can’t stand to see other people having fun – there isn’t even enough will or courage  in America to stop the mass circulation of the kind of fast-fire weapons specifically designed to kill people.

So as much as I know that some of my American friends and the country’s president would like to see something done, I’ts pretty obvious to see that it ain’t going to happen.

With little more than a year left in his presidency, Barack Obama might just as well move away from the notion that repeated mass shootings aren’t the norm in his country and focus on issues like climate change where he may still have a chance to do some good.

Visit Niagara At Large at www.niagaraatlarge.com for more news and commentary for and from the greater bi-national Niagara region.

(NOW IT IS YOUR TURN. Niagara At Large encourages you to share your views on this post. A reminder that we only post comments by individuals who share their first and last name with them.)