After Virginia Tech, people arguing for gun control said that the worst of it was that it would happen again, and after Aurora they said that it would happen again, and then after Newtown they said the same thing. Now, after Charleston, we’re saying it yet again. There is no victory or happiness in getting that call right. The worst of it, put another way, is that mini-massacres that would, in any normal country, themselves be subjects of horror have been moved down the scale of monstrosity. Fewer than seven or eight people dead, and it hardly registers anymore—the six-person gun massacre is merely another multiple murder.
Yet there are signs of hope amid the horror. This time,President Barack Obama spoke with a forthrightness to equal his usual eloquent empathy. He was brave and on point, and what he said can only be repeated: “Once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun…. At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries. It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency. And it is in our power to do something about it.” Against this, of course, was the suggestion, by a board member of the National Rifle Association, that responsibility for the massacre lay with the clergyman within the church, for opposing laws that would allow “concealed carry” in places of worship. Had he not taken that stand, the argument runs, there would have been a pitched gun battle in the church—a better thing, apparently, even though it would have only fulfilled the gunman’s mad fantasies of race war. Pitched gun battles in a Charleston church or a Connecticut elementary school, of the sort that some in the N.R.A. apparently dream of, would more likely be horrific blood baths, with crossfire and injured bystanders, not some well-tuned and well-timed action-movie scenario.
[For more of this story, written by Adam Gopnik, go to http://www.newyorker.com/news/...on-and-the-next-time]
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