A sick country filled with guns and that just doesn’t care: Parkland, Florida edition

I’m taking a leaf out of The Onion’s book and sticking with an evergreen post title, because there’s no point in writing a new one every time this happens.

The New York Daily News correctly diagnoses the United States:

More than a dozen shot dead in a South Florida high school on Wednesday. Many more wounded by the gunman.

Mourn though we do, mourn though we must, it is time to admit a painful fact: As a nation, we do not care.

If we cared, we would make at least an honest effort to fight the corrosive culture of violence that infects so many of us.

To attack mental illness as the scourge it is.

Most of all, we would try to change laws that, based on a delusional and suicidal interpretation of the Second Amendment to the Constitution, let anyone wield the power to kill in bunches.

In the real world, where we don’t care, the horror stories and the pictures of the dead and wounded will sear our minds and hurt our hearts for a short time.

Then we’ll get ready to do this all over again soon enough.

We have collectively decided this is the way we wish to live. This perverse form of American carnage is not our scourge but our brand.

I’m reminded of Jeremy Scahill’s equally apt summation: A sick country filled with guns. “A country where a cabal of high-powered lobbyists, bought-off politicians, and gun manufacturers profits off of massacres, where the meaning of the Second Amendment has been twisted so intensely that it no longer matters why it was written or what it was actually intended for.”

It’s also a country where 16-year-olds are smarter than the adults who run it.

“As our legislators and leaders, they shouldn’t be offering prayers and words because those mean nothing,” [shooting survivor Lyliah] Skinner said. “We need action, because action’s what’s going to change what’s happening.”

[…]

“If kids aren’t even allowed to … purchase their first drink of alcohol, then how are we allowed to buy guns at the age of 18 or 19?” she said. “I feel like that’s something that we shouldn’t be able to do.”

Don’t worry, though: The grown-ups in charge have already decided that any talk of curbing the obvious causes to the country’s most predictable and easily preventable problem is premature until we have “all the facts” and that anyone who wants to take guns out of the wrong hands, or restrict the sale of military-style weaponry to civilians, is “politicizing” the issue.

So as always, absolutely nothing will happen. But you already knew that. An eternally rising pile of dead students, nightclub patrons and music festival tourists is the price the US has long resigned itself to pay to ensure that gun-fondlers can stockpile assault rifles.

(via Joe.My.God. & @cnnbrk)