The Leading Cause of Death for Children? Guns.
Firearm deaths surpassed car accidents in 2020 as the #1 cause of death of children under age 18.
“We must do more to combat gun violence.”
This is the new “thoughts and prayers.” President Joe Biden said it yesterday after the school shooting in Nashville, Tennessee. He also once again blamed Congress for not doing more. He is fully aware that this is not a strategy. It is a cop out. The president must act as if Congress no longer exists, because it doesn’t.
Congress ceased functioning as an effective government branch over a decade ago. The president does not know what to do about this. No one does yet. Imagination must be used when a situation has no solution within the bounds of normal governmental operations.
Let that sink in. Washington, D.C. is asleep as thousands of village idiots can become domestic terrorists as one-person armies whenever and wherever they like. The D.C. uniparty accepts this as normal.
Village idiots across the country have more firepower available to them now than kings and queens did just a few centuries ago. Since they have no other power, they fetishize the object that allows them to have the artificial power that they would otherwise never have.
Let’s think about what a gun actually is. It is an inanimate object that has the ability to propel small metal cylindrical objects at a speed of 1,800 miles per hour. These cylinders penetrate and destroy human bodies like sledgehammers destroy watermelons. Not even kings and queens of centuries past would have deserved the amount of firepower the average village idiot can attain within five minutes today, if they so choose.
Gunpowder was a Chinese invention in the ninth century. There is nothing American about it. Guns were introduced to the Americas by Spanish sailors under Christopher Columbus’ command (an Italian).
Firearms therefore are a Chinese and European import. There is nothing American about them.
Guns were tolerated by society when our culture respected their power, and gunmen mostly only shot people they knew. This is not the case today, and hasn’t been for decades.
This can only end one of two ways, neither one pleasant. One, guns are forcibly removed by government agents of the United States. This is near impossible for many reasons and would be the end of the United States as we know it.
Two, a collective trauma so severe to the national psyche must affect a majority of citizens simultaneously. Isolated shootings do not budge the national needle of anger/panic that is needed to achieve positive action. It would have to be a 9/11 level of catatrosphe, but involving guns being used on our soil on a widespread, nationally coordinated basis.
Both of these are unthinkable, thus why nothing has changed.
America has yet to suffer the traumas of millenia of war on its soil, as Europe has.
At this rate, the 21st century is going to be our version of Europe’s 20th century. The only way to learn this lesson is the hard way.