by JanieM
Report from my neighborhood, nineteen days later –
Flags are still flying at half-staff in Maine. I see them everywhere as I drive around the countryside, and I try not to cry. Twice a week I drive through the town where Robert Card shot his last victim – himself; it's not hard to imagine that he, like so many people, had to struggle with mental illness in a harsh, uncaring culture that would rather worship billionaires than take care of the ill and unlucky among us.
Similarly with every news article about the massacre, its antecedents, and its aftermath. I still cry. I don’t know when this will stop, and it makes me wonder how the families and friends of the victims of an event like this ever … I won’t say get over it, because I don’t see how they can … but at least pick up their lives and start moving forward again.
News articles are full of blather. Are there enough mental health resources? Did the police, or the army, or social services, screw up the handling of Card in the months before the shootings? Is Maine’s “yellow flag” law flawed? (Duh.) Was the manhunt mishandled?
On and on and on. It’s like we (the collective American “we”) have built a huge Rube Goldberg machine to avoid having to deal with the one part of this mess that's relatively straightforward, if not easily solvable, human nature being what it is. That part is the fact that this country allows private citizens to own weapons of mass murder, which apparently no one can stop them from taking to schools, bowling alleys, and places of worship to gun people down by the dozen.
I have a friend who works with a lot of gun owners, who, to a man (yes) say that they don’t care how many kindergartners are murdered, they will never give up their guns, or support any tighter restrictions on the private ownership of weapons of war.
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