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How I learned to stop worrying and love the gun

You might live to die of natural causes. Uh, depending on the breaks.

Black comedy is perhaps the way to best comprehend how the United States of America celebrates freedom: with families running for their lives in Highland Park, Illinois, one of the wealthiest cities in the country, and in Phildelphia, the nation’s birthplace.

Six people died and dozens were injured in Highland Park when a shooter opened fire with a “high-powered rifle” from a rooftop during an Independence Day parade Monday morning. Police later apprehended a suspect, male, 22, after a manhunt. Thus ended hours of residents celebrating their freedom as hostages sheltering in place after their July Fourth holiday became an active-shooter situation.

In Philadelphia Monday evening, families fled in panic after hearing gunshots that injured two police officers duing a fireworks display. The officers were treated and released.

Spectators were so jumpy in Orlando that a panic ensued when people thought there were gunshots Monday night.

The smell of gunpowder? The sight of blood? The sounds of panic and sirens? By God, they’re enough to give some American males an erection. Freedom, baby. We’ve celebrated freedom this way over 300 times so far this year. Over 22,000 Americans have died by firearms this year alone, just over half by suicide and the rest by homicide or other deaths by gun.

It’s all-American anymore. It’s everywhere America anymore. It’s what Republican politicians running in 2022 promise to guarantee.

Gary Wills wrote in the New York Times Review of Books after the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre:

That horror cannot be blamed just on one unhinged person. It was the sacrifice we as a culture made, and continually make, to our demonic god. We guarantee that crazed man after crazed man will have a flood of killing power readily supplied him. We have to make that offering, out of devotion to our Moloch, our god. The gun is our Moloch. We sacrifice children to him daily—sometimes, as at Sandy Hook, by directly throwing them into the fire-hose of bullets from our protected private killing machines …

If the tragedies were not so real, Stanley Kubrick and Terry Southern might have turned our national madness into a farce. Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) once described a kind of nihilistic nuclear defense posture. Now we live it out every day.

The Onion re-posts the same tweet after every mass shooting. How many times so far? I don’t have the time or emotional bandwidth to count.

Is there a mental health clinic where an entire country can check itself in for 48 hours of observation?

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