We don’t blame the guns. We blame the shitty culture that equates gun ownership with masculinity and virtue; which tells boys that real men express their emotions through violence; which casts asking for help as unmanly; and which casts fear as equivalent to respect. We blame the shitty laws which make guns easier to buy than decongestant medication; the industry lobbyists who spend millions of dollars to dissuade those elected to represent us from enacting our overwhelmingly popular desire for better regulation of the availability of guns; the advertising which makes guns into fashion items; the fiction which portrays use of guns as a trivial matter, rather than a decision to kill another human. We blame the disingenuous assertion that our desire for better regulation is equivalent to a desire for confiscation; the unremitting calls to wait after every single massacre as the drumbeat of death becomes background noise; the constant focus on finding excuses for the person who made a decision to kill other people; the transparently wrong-headed propaganda claiming that we can do nothing but buy our own guns.
We don’t blame the guns. We blame the attitude that someone bent on murder will find a way to murder, so it’s pointless to put any obstacles between them and the tools for maximally efficient murder.
