If a foreign nation invaded America and as a result, 20 people every day were killed, at random, and no place was safe in America from violence–you could be dragged out and killed in your school, your home, your church, your mall, your car, in the park or on the street or at the movies or standing in line waiting for a burger–we would be at a near-riot condition, demanding our national defense do something to protect us from this daily violence which kills our mothers, our children, our wives, our brothers, our friends, our leaders, our pastors, our politicians, our police officers, our fathers, our sons, and us.
Instead–we shrug our shoulders and hope it won’t be us.
We let lobbyists pay Congress to keep things as they are. We let crazy white men rant at us for hours on TV and the radio, scaring us into submission about the escalation of violence and making us crazy with fear. We let this killing continue, day after day, because we are “free.” Free to be killed, anywhere, at any time, by anyone who thinks he needs to solve a problem. But “free.”
This sickness isn’t just the violence. This sickness is us, accepting this as normal, thinking that gun violence isn’t violence, thinking that the price of human life being destroyed day after day is worth it in order for us to think we are somehow better, somehow safer, because we allow weapons to flow so freely in our society. Violence at a rate no other civilized nation–no other nation claiming even to be “Christian”–allows or experiences.
It’s time to stop this.