I had originally intended to devote a significant part of this week's show to the scourge of guns. Obviously, I didn't.I started thinking about something that Gandhi was supposed to have said in a moment of frustration and despair: "What can I say that I have not said ten thousand times? What can I write that I have not written ten thousand times?"
I feel the same way right now on the subject of guns. I feel defeated, despairing, not knowing what I can say or how I could say it that would make the least damned bit of difference. I know that we have to carry on, that we have to keep going; I know that silence is surrender; but right now I can't find my voice.
All I keep thinking is that until we Americans as a people, as a culture, grow the hell up and throw away our childish fantasies that somehow we are all living on the frontier in the 1880s with nothing between us and who knows what danger except our trusty guns, until we grow the hell up and ditch the infantile vision of ourselves as action movie heroes ready to leap into action to defend the defenseless and save the day, until we grow the hell up and realize the our guns have brought us death and not deliverance, until that time the tens of thousands of people who die by gun every year in this country will continue to die by the tens of thousands.
I know this won't last, I know I will recover my voice; I know I will again embrace and be heartened by the fact that even with all those damn guns, a clear minority of American households actually have one, meaning that not owning a gun is by far the majority position; I know this will come up here again.
But not now. Today I just wonder what I can say or write that I have not already said or written too many times before.
Sources cited in links:
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/06/04/a-minority-of-americans-own-guns-but-just-how-many-is-unclear/
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