There’s no way that it should take the consistently deeply funny humor website The Onion to remind us of the existential tragedy that is our national lot because of the ongoing mass murder of Americans by Americans, But that was the case once again after last month’s gun rampage in Maine — 18 dead, 13 wounded.
“‘No way to prevent this,’ says only nation where this ever happens” was The Onion’s headline Oct. 26.
Its editors have used the same headline over many dozens of stories since it first ran above an article on the Isla Vista mass-murder gun riot of 2014.
The godawful repetition, back yet again, adds up to a morbidly apt description of what one critic calls our country’s “reverberation of despair.”
I’ve mentioned The Onion’s hed before. I still know no better indictment of what ails us.
There will be people who say, because they always do, that it’s not the guns, it’s the mental illness — lots of the same people who say of homelessness that it’s not the lack of housing, it’s the mental illness.
To which I say, are we the only country in the world with crazy people?
Because in France this year, there have been zero mass shootings. Have you ever been to France? Suffice it to say that there are crazy people there.
The United Kingdom: zero mass shootings in 2023. I love the place so much I’ve been there six out of the last seven summers. Brits are as crackers as the rest of us. More so.
South Korea: zero mass shootings this year. And, look, I don’t want to indict half of an entire peninsula, with its artists, writers, designers and entrepreneurs who right now are in a cultural moment that is remaking the world. So let’s just say that plenty of Koreans in my experience are … personality-plus.
Germany: One mass shooting this year. Because, Germany.
In the United States, including Lewiston, there have been over 560 mass shootings this year, using the definition of four or more people killed or injured.
That isn’t just an order of magnitude difference from those other affluent countries in the world.
We’re not another country compared to them — we’re in another galaxy, a guns-blazing, insanity-epidemic one.
International firearms statistics are as slippery as that solution you use to keep the barrel of your Beretta shotgun blued, so that some Second Amendment professionals have enough time on their hands between clay-pigeon sessions to cook the numbers to show that per capita Americans really don’t shoot each other as much as it seems that we do.
That’s because they aren’t really talking about statistics on mass shootings — unloading on a bunch of fellow Americans out of sheer cussedness — but rather about gun deaths in a few crime-ridden Central American countries, or war-ridden central African ones.
But they can’t deny that we have a squillion times more mass shootings than anywhere else; that it’s getting worse, year by year — 273 in 2014 to 417 in 2019 to 647 in 2022.
And they ought not deny, though they will, that the real reason we have so many more mass shootings is the supply issue — more guns than people — and that the laws that are supposed to regulate crazy people’s access to said guns are either struck down or not enforced, as they weren’t when this Maine guy spent weeks in a mental hospital and then went out and bought an arsenal to add to the one he already had.
Local sheriff’s deputies knew about it, knew he was a walking mental breakdown who had talked about shooting up the place, and didn’t do anything.
What, America, will it take to find a way to prevent this?
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com
