Stephen Paddock, the mass murderer in Las Vegas, continues to puzzle law enforcement and investigators. He will most likely never be understood.
As I mentioned in my last essay and blog post, I think we have to seriously rethink our humanity, and consider how vulnerable we all are both personally and as a society, to the deadly effects of mental illness. This is not something new, and it is not something that will go away.
I have no confidence in our political system to do anything useful regarding gun legislation. Congress will talk about it, offer their empty prayers to victims, and say perhaps the gun issue needs to be looked at. But the NRA has a death grip on Congress and state legislators across the nation. The NRA controls gun manufacturing, gun sales, and the gun lobby. Nothing will change there.
Money, and lots of it, fuels our political system. Not the safety of the nation. Not the value of our children. Not the security of special events outdoors or indoors. There is only one thing that is absolutely sacrosanct in our political system and that is money. It has always been a source of manipulation and corruption, but now it is a source of evil. It transcends any values this nation has whether in the Constitution, in religion, in the family, or anywhere else.
This notion, fiercely advanced by the NRA, that the government is going to take guns away from people, is a cheap, fanatical trick to stir up gun owners and manipulate their emotions. To pretend, as the NRA does, that any gun legislation enacted to stop or at least help prevent the kind of slaughter committed in Las Vegas will take away all guns, is a mocking insult to our intelligence as a people.
I am a gun owner. For years I hunted quail and dove with great friends in the Texas Hill Country. We ate everything we killed. I am not afraid of the government taking people’s guns. No one is going to take guns away, period. That simply will never happen in this country and those who keep saying it will are simply manipulating the emotions of others.
But our society is full of some deeply disturbed people, some of them, like Paddock, who appear to be no threat to anyone. And yet, at some point, something propels them to outrageous acts of violence and death. If we think that is going to just quietly go away or that we can manage these people by owning guns then we are blinded by denial and ignorance.
Don’t expect politicians to care about this. Money and power can completely corrupt conscience, soul, spirit, mind, and heart. That’s an ugly fact about humans.
We each one of us must be more vigilant and more responsible, for ourselves and for family members and friends. Someone knew Paddock had more than 50 firearms and massive amounts of ammunition in his house. If not, then he was completely abandoned by family and friends who had to have never visited the man at all. And if so, that is a travesty to the man.
Hunter S. Thompson, the crass but brilliant journalist and writer, once observed: “The main problem in any democracy is that crowd-pleasers are generally brainless swine who can go out on a stage & whup their supporters into an orgiastic frenzy—then go back to the office & sell every one of the poor bastards down the tube for a nickel apiece.”
That may be harsh, but sadly, it fits too many of our leaders today. Political and otherwise.
We’re on our own. We have to take charge of our lives and our society ourselves. We have to stay awake. We always know when something is off. We always have gut checks. It is time to respect them. And act on them. Congress is not going to do it for us.
© 2017 Timothy Moody
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