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Barely 13 hours ago, a guy walked into a department store in Omaha, shot eight people to death and wounded five others.
The only discussion of this in GD revolves around the right of U.S. citizens to own firearms. In the Lounge, there's been no discussion at all.
And I wonder, what have we become? Not those of us at Democratic Underground, but we as a society.
Most of us can probably remember quite well the shootings at Columbine High School. We might also remember that the shootings were the primary topic of conversation for days afterward. But, just eight and a half years later, a "massacre" barely rates the front page.
Maybe we're just getting used to them. In those eight and a half years, there've been 15 additional shooting sprees in the U.S. with a total of 127 people killed.
Has this kind of ugliness become so commonplace as to rate barely a glance? Or do we just shy away from talking about it because it is so ugly? (I started to say "unthinkable," but that's not the case anymore — not when schools have "live" drills to "practice" for just such an occasion.)
It upsets me that we either don't talk about it, or, if we do, we talk mostly from a gun-rights platform, for or against. It upsets me that we don't talk about it from a platform of humanity. But there's little point in talking about why these things happen because it's obvious that the people behind them are insane, at least temporarily. There's also little point in rehashing "This wouldn't have happened if..." because we can pull ifs out of our hindquarters all day and all night long.
I dunno, man. It's late, I'm tired and I just wonder what the fuck's going on.
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