"We're not gonna fix it."
— Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.)
No one is coming to save us.
They aren't going to do anything. They have told us as much. Have some thoughts and prayers, they say. Show some respect for the families who surely wouldn't want us to politicize their tragedy, they say.
Believe us, we're sad, they say. Believe us, we're concerned. Believe us, if there was anything we could do ... let's give the teachers guns!
But they're not going to do anything. Tim Burchett isn't going to do anything. French Hill isn't going to do anything. Tom Cotton and John Boozman are for sure not going to do anything. Hapless Joe Biden isn't going to do anything either. Don't you understand it's not their problem?
They got nothing. It's a mean world, and bad people are going to do bad things. Soft targets are going to suffer. Suck it up, buttercup.
All we can do is bury our dead and wait for the next disaffected nihilist to lock and load and glory-blaze their way out of this valle lacrimarum. Because you certainly can solve all your problems with a gun. People do it every day.
We're the ones that get stuck with the check. With all the little corpses.
They can't do anything. Not because the Constitution means anything to them. The Constitution is just something that sometimes provides convenient cover. They can't do anything because they are cowards, afraid of losing their position and their place and the money that naturally accrues to people of visibility and power in a late capitalist society.
They can't do anything because they don't have to do anything, because we're not going to hold them accountable for the actions of a few desperate and damaged people who legally acquired the means to murder at a safe remove little children and grandmas and daddies and teachers and other expendables.
We're not going to vote them out, because we haven't voted them out. We've listened to them deflect and preach and shake their heads and wag their fingers and bemoan the drag queens and the first-person shooter games and the Hollywood elites and the pointy-headed academics with their studies and numbers and the rest of the so-called civilized world where things like this happen because they show us up as the violent crazy outliers that we are.
They can't do anything about it because we are the People of the Gun, and murder is our birthright, and the slaughter of innocents is just the cost of living "free."
They can't do anything because it would be wrong. Because God allows evil after all and so to interfere with the progress of evil is to get above our raisin'.
They can't do anything because a person could kill another person with a knife or a hammer or even with a tightly rolled movie poster like I once saw one Korean actor do to another in a Kim Ki-duk movie.
They can't do anything because guns don't kill people, they just deliver a projectile to a target, or maybe past a target to an unintended secondary receiver, at upwards of 800 miles an hour.
If there's killing to be done it's the bullet that does the killing, and being an insentient wad of lead, it does so without remorse or glee or even the notion that it's doing anything at all. So it's the bullet that's responsible, but you can't do anything to a bullet, except maybe lament it.
They can't do anything because it would be disgraceful to politicize the conversation about gun violence in this country (the way I'm doing now) and disrespectful to the victims of the mentally ill people who directed their legally purchased bullets to do the killing.
They can't do anything because the people who fetishize weapons vote and would not stand for any further restrictions on how they get their jollies or pay one red cent for liability insurance on their smokin' hot arsenals that gleam so blue and pretty and holy.
They can't do anything because the AR-15 is the modern American musket that ought to be in every patriot's living room just in case the government gets the idea that it shouldn't be there.
They can't do anything because guns are cool and only nerds believe we ought to be careful with dangerous tools designed to poke holes in things three football fields away.
They can't do anything because real Americans like gun porn. They like cos-playing as warrior saints, good people with guns sheepdogging the rest of us sheep. The gun case is as wholesome as the cracker barrel.
And if the tree of liberty needs to be refreshed with the blood of patriots now and then, well, remember a gun is just a tool designed to make the blood flow freer. Lookee here at this picture of an AMT Hardballer Longslide .45 with a top-mounted helium-neon laser sight like the one used by Arnie in "The Terminator."
They can't do anything because there are already more guns than puppies in this country and it's useless to try to do difficult things.
They can't do anything because they don't get paid enough to put up with the whining of the sheepdogs who obviously need 100-round magazines to protect the rest of us sheeple.
They can't do anything because the Second Amendment is holy scripture delivered to Thomas Jefferson by Jesus H. Christ himself who told Tom that by "well-regulated Militia" he meant any jackleg wannabe who thought Josh Brolin looked cool with that foregripped Daniel Defense M4A1 in "Sicario: Day of the Soldado."
They can't do anything because they aren't morally compelled to do anything by their easily distracted and gullible constituents, who exist to be frightened and lied to. Because they are tough enough to weather the bad optics of murdered kids.
Because they know they can ride it out, that the outrage will subside as it always does, and we will go back to our Netflix and our denial and our free-floating anxiety and leave them to their phony-baloney jobs attending to the wishes and needs of their corporate clients as they continue to transfer wealth from working Americans to what Paul Fussell called the "top out-of-sights."
They can't do anything because they don't want to hurt the feelings of their good friends and patrons in the National Rifle Association, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, U.S. Concealed Carry Association, the National Association for Gun Rights, the International Safari Club, Gun Owners of America, the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys.
They can't do anything because they're cowards and moral cretins. They're not gonna fix it. They're not gonna try.
pmartin@adgnewsroom.com