Can anything stop America’s savage gun epidemic? By Mark Morford [View all]

[madokie]

Guns are America’s greatest shame. A numb, unquestioned fetish for ultra-violence combined with a warped conviction that gun ownership somehow equals freedom, or safety, or that it represents a desirable, even honorable form of God-sanctioned patriotism (it is none of those) – this is our greatest sickness.

I’m not saying anything new. You have but to witness, once again, the numbing wave of moral desolation and powerlessness that sweeps over the land as we’re confronted, day in and day out, with evermore murderous, devastating headlines too savage, too inhuman to contemplate – roomfuls of dead schoolchildren, rows of massacred churchgoers, butchered holiday partygoers, dead moviegoers and bloodied college students, countless women (wives and girlfriends and mothers) shot to death by countless wrathful, contorted males.

Still, we panic. Still we conflate safety with violence, peace with paranoia. America enjoyed record gun sales on this past Black Friday; the FBI recorded the single highest number of newly registered firearms, more than 185,000, since records have been kept. There will soon be a 24-hour home shopping TV channel, Gun TV, dedicated solely to direct sales of firearms to Americans. In the days following the massacre of schoolchildren at Sandy Hook Elementary, sales of bullets in America skyrocketed. The fire is raging, and everyone is buying more gasoline.

Meanwhile, the facts keep ripping us apart, numbing us to the core: 2015 has seen more mass shootings (defined, unofficially, as four or more people shot in any kind of scenario) than we’ve had calendar days. Not good enough? How about this: More people have been killed by guns in America (nearly 1.4 million) than all our wars since 1776, combined

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The rest: http://blog.sfgate.com/morford/2015/12/04/can-anything-stop-americas-savage-gun-epidemic/