My pastor prayed from the pulpit to end the scourge of automatic weapons: How long, oh Lord: How long? She looked stricken. So are we.
How long? Maybe a long time, maybe not. But as I told her after the service: Morality will have absolutely nothing to do with the end of automatic weapons. If it had even a whisper of an effect, we'd still have that ban.
But the Republican Party took it away. They took it away because the National Rifle Association, in conjunction with gun manufacturers, demanded that the profiteering in automatic weapons must continue. They screamed about the Second Amendment--a white elephant argument if there ever was one--and managed to get lucky in the timing of the naming of Supreme Court justices so that they got what they wanted: An individual mandate--for weapons.
A Democratic-controlled Congress and White House passed an automatic weapons ban in 1994. It certainly didn't end shootings. School assaults and deaths continued, including the infamous Columbine tragedy, which might have jolted the murder machine into high gear with copycat-itis. But to say that nothing has changed since Republicans voted the ban out during the next decade is to divert with irresponsibility. Think about the mass murders that have taken place just during this decade: places like Sandy Hook and San Bernadino and Orlando and Parkview and Charleston and now, in half a day, El Paso and Dayton. 269 this year alone.
But it was an NPR follow-up story that got my attention. It said that customers from Ciudad Juarez, just over the border, aren't shopping in El Paso nearly as much as they were before the shooting. A spokesperson for the business community claimed that that phenomenon was temporary, that business would pick up again soon. After all, it's only been a week. Things will calm down.
I wonder. Fear paralyzes. It creates a world of the mind that, once established, takes a similar jolt to eliminate. The shooter freely admitted that he wanted to gun down Mexicans, and that he did. Would you think twice if you thought that your shopping place or mall would be ambushed?
Is someone whistling past that graveyard, too? Never mind a possibly new recession: The onrushing, incessant, white supremacist mass murders may bring on less buying, more fear--and more ghost towns. If the business of America is business, will white supremacist violence run America into the ground?
Pretty soon, there will be too many of these attacks happening too close to each other, either by time or by location, to continue to brush them off as one-and-dones. There is a war brewing beneath the surface here. Its willful denial, if not advocacy, by 45, in addition to his horribly polarizing rhetoric which if it doesn't directly encourage such attacks certainly doesn't do what a normal, empathetic person in the White House should be doing--which is to condemn it in words and tone that sound and actually are genuine and heartfelt (which he can't do in a phony, scripted speech and is pathetic, infuriating and quite revelatory to watch him try)--leaves it to grow and threaten far more perceptibly than in the past.
The white nationalists are emboldened by the president's cluelessness, willful or not. He has never taken back his insistence that both sides of the 2017 neo-Nazi showdown in Charlottesville had good people. He can't say he's ever been wrong, either, or ever had a bad idea. To these twisted back-benchers, that matters a great deal. That is tacit permission, whether he wants to admit it or not.
So there's no reason to believe that these attacks will have any kind of respite. They will be unpredictable in place and time, but highly predictable in essence. The gradual, chilling effect of sudden demise will begin to seep into the American consciousness. Once it gets there, very little can pry it loose. It would go much deeper than the temporary halt to daily life that 9/11 caused. Yes, powder did get into some envelopes and a few flights were threatened, but we got past all that. It left residue, though, that re-emerged in the form of the re-direction of fear that never completely fell away.
That residue will gradually assert itself in terms of whether or not people will go freely and willingly into places in which they can purchase things--the coming-and-going of daily commerce. Yes, online shopping has a greater and greater hold on us now, but it's the subsidiary business that stands to suffer: The restaurants and parking facilities, for instance, that are there to serve those doing something besides the basics of what they've ventured out in public for. When people refuse to go out, those businesses dry up.
It will be those people of business who will cry out to Republicans, who hear no other voices other than that of themselves if something happens to them personally. It's the loss of money, fairly earned, and the freedom that is pretentiously being strangled, that will make Republicans face the reality of what automatic weapons are doing to the country at large: Isolating people from each other, making them afraid to venture out beyond their jobs and traditional connections.
But the complete effect of that loss will have to be connected with the dots of those who Republicans represent: either rural, small businesses that are in fact being squeezed out quite naturally anyhow, or the very rich who have direct connections to Republican offices and staffers. News reports will make little difference, since they certainly haven't to this point.
That will take a while, of course, unless a recession hits. If that happens, there will be an anger that will make the present expression seem quite timid. Scapegoats will be sought. Weapons may be wielded.
It will be only then that it will occur to Republicans that the empire of weaponry that they have sponsored has backfired on them. Relatives of theirs will get in the way. They will call home, shaken to the core, if not hit by gunfire themselves. That's the two-by-four to the head that it will take.
Then they will cry morality. They will call again for the death penalty. But the death penalty has already been administered--through policies that make it far easier to randomly eliminate human beings from this earth: for being Mexican (El Paso), for being gay (Orlando), for being Jewish (Pittsburgh), for being Sikh (Oak Creek, WI). Note to American mosques: Get some security. Get a lot of it. Hurry the hell up.
For now, we must keep rolling the dice and hope it doesn't come up snake-eyes. I cannot apologize for the cynicism of that, not if it reflects the truth of the matter. But neither can I look around, breathe easy, and say to myself: Well, it can't possibly happen here. The odds can't get worse. We're going to be okay. Democracy will be okay. The USA will be okay.
Not if all the signs point the other way. Not if permission has been granted to think twisted things and act upon them. Not if the agents of depraved destruction have been given the ultimate devices to carry them out.
We approach the ledge of civility now. If we step off that ledge, we will fall fast and fatally. Automatic weapons are nudging us toward that ledge. We will either arm ourselves to the teeth or bring ourselves back from it.
The sheer millions of automatic weapons that exist in this country already suggest the former, but the average American still considers it an excessive practice. Some of those owning them, though, are revealing their true purposes: to reinforce the racist mentality of white supremacy. If that grows, as long as owning one is legal, what else to do but protect oneself from the onslaught and get one? Nobody's going to take sadistic 20-something white men and retrain their minds after they didn't and wouldn't listen to their teachers or parents; no school exists for that purpose. They now run free, leaning over their laptops, waiting for their all-encompassing fixation to be released by someone's urging. They await the signal. They lack only organization.
Maybe it won't come to that. But it has to be the Republicans who will yield. The Democrats are already there. They aren't connected at the hip to the NRA, though. That it is low on funding is currently irrelevant to Republicans; their followers keep using gun lobby loyalty as a beacon to guide their votes. But it's the money of business that will, if anything, call them home. They can't run away from an economy that's fading, because then they will fade.
The Republicans are fond of sending out dog whistles. The ones they'll be getting from failing, shuttered businesses will be the ones to which they will flock. Meanwhile, go shopping but stay alert.
Be well. Be careful. I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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