By Joshua Resnek
Americans don’t care about mass murders.
If we were outraged by them, we’d march in the streets across the nation by the millions to put a stop to them.
Or at the very least we’d take care to protect our schools from intruders with automatic weapons the way our banks are protected from robbery.
Or we’d impose new restrictions on gun ownership, increase mental health testing and require all potential gun owners to do at least as much as they must do to receive a driver’s license.
There is an inexplicable, astonishing unreality about American indifference to and acceptance of, repeated mass murders and savage gun violence.
All of this mass murder gun violence is unforgivable. Mass murders inside schools is so over the top in the annals of American violence that we should all be swept up by a call for immediate action.
But we aren’t.
We have not roused ourselves to incite the population to say enough is enough for decades.
A lawyer I spoke with said he believed “we need love.” He also suggested that we might think of getting rid of Congress and returning “power to the people.”
A local school teacher said “assault rifles should be banned.”
“Access to mental health needs to be widened,” she added.
The recent slaughter of innocents at a Christian day school in Nashville, Tennessee – a Christian day school of all places – should have galvanized a sweeping, rising tidal wave of angry reaction from a multitude of Americans.
It did not.
Instead, the nation salved itself by holding vigils, putting the American flag at half staff, complaining about the availability of assault weapons (weapons of war), and with our politicians decrying gun use on one side, condoning gun ownership as a sacred right on the other.
The reaction was predictable.
As the funerals in Nashville began to take place for the dead over the weekend, the nation groveled back to its complicated and frustrating indifference to repeated mass murders at the hands of killers toting assault weapons.
Many of us would like to believe that by making the availability of assault weapons more difficult, or by conducting more detailed back ground checks, subsequent mass murders will be go a long way to being averted.
Those who call for our politicians to put a stop to this are Philistines worshiping golden statues.
The politicians don’t know the way. They are incapable of legislating away a uniquely American form of derangement.
The sickness causing mass murders is inbred. It is fed by movie, television and Internet violence. There is no antidote unless Americans take to the streets and show their unison as well as their anger.
Until we rise up and stamp out this monster, there will be no rest for the weary and no stop to the random gun violence plaguing the nation.
Mass protest that shakes the land is what is needed.
Anything short of that is just another sound bite on the 6 o’clock news for us older folks and an irrelevant story sweeping the Internet for a day or two for younger Americans.
Until we act collectively as a nation with a sense of outrage, the mass murders will continue to feed the sense of growing despair most Americans share these days with a nation that has lost its way.
Six dead at a Christian school in Tennessee and all we can do is make perfunctory complaints.
We should all be ashamed of ourselves for not doing more to express our outrage.