Editor’s Note: This article was written Oct. 2, following the Umpqua Community College shooting
By Jim Downard
One more man, this time in Oregon, likely mentally troubled, has taken up arms to kill people for reasons that would be plainly insane if not done by someone mentally troubled.
I commiserate with President Obama’s weary sense of futility here, making yet another expression of shared grief and frustration, too many people’s lives ended, not for some vital cause but because some nutball was able to get gun and ammo with ease, and was off for some horrible vendetta.
What to do? Can anything be done? Even were all the gun regulation and background checking sufficient to make the NRA go ballistic in place, would that ever really preclude the nutball getting some weapon and embarking on their horrible vendettas?
We go through this ritual more often here because our culture is awash with guns, as engrained as fast food drive-throughs, and our social networks are so inept at spotting the nutballs before they move on to the vendetta, and able to do something about it.
Religions and politics play a role. How could they not? But those are the veneers of violence, not the underlying dynamic, the roar of the mad that we can never quite get rid of as a species.
Other countries have their nutballs, a Chinese man who hacked at school children some years ago. The Norwegian maniac who wanted to purge the land for a Christian revival he did not himself have much genuine faith for. And then there’s that hideous frat party called ISIS, where testosterone-amped aimless young men have found more than enough firearms and jihadist ideology to ramp up their newfound vendetta.
The nutballs are there, and some of them will continue to bring grief and snuff out lives who might have mattered so much had they not accidentally fallen within the crosshairs, but the world moves on. Legislators and pundits and ideologues will dither and blather and fall silent as the next YouTube video captures the geist’s attention. And the world moves on.
Just not for some.
And we must wonder at all those might have beens, and what can those who remain do next, to make a difference lest the crosshairs fall on them one day.
