"This isn't a guns situation" — said President Trump — even though unremitting massacres of the American kind do not happen anywhere else

© 2017 Peter Free

 

07 November 2017

 

 

"It's not the guns, fool — it's the disproportionate number of crazies in the United States!"

 

After 26 people were shot to death in a Texas church — in the latest in a long string of similar US massacres — our extraordinarily insightful President announced that:

 

 

This isn’t a guns situation. This is a mental health problem at the highest level. It’s a very, very sad event.

 

© 2017 Rebecca Shapiro, Trump Says Deadly Texas Shooting Isn’t A Guns Issue, It’s A Mental Health Problem, Huffington Post (06 N0vember 2017)

 

 

Self-evidently true?

 

Because for sure, everywhere else in the world exactly the same thing happens.

 

Doesn't it?

 

 

The moral? — exceptionalism at a gallop

 

The Orange Pufferoo and the Second Amendment's band of happy extremists perfectly represent the United States' reality-denying exceptionality.

 

Trying to justify the essentially unsupervised right to bear arms is not the problem. But let's (at least) cowboy up and admit the accompanying sacrifice of herds of innocents to our gun lust.

 

I'll make the winning argument for y'all:

 

 

Ritual sacrifice is a long-established human tradition.

 

What could be more wholesomely "us" than honoring that history — which we are admittedly not educated or thoughtful enough to recall — by inadvertently but enthusiastically repeating it?