Guns ruin everything.
There’s no nice, nuanced thing to say about the shooting Wednesday at the end of the Chiefs’ Super Bowl celebration in Kansas City.
No “on-one-hand-on-the-other-hand” equivocating about the death and injury and stupidity that happened because there are too many damned guns in the hands of too many damned idiots in this country.
No, it’s simple. Guns ruin everything.
Everything.
They make it impossible to send your kids to school without a little bit of fear.
They make it impossible to worship with your neighbors in the complete and confident belief your church is a sanctuary from the violence outside.
And they make it impossible to attend a parade — to celebrate a great triumph with thousands of people in your community — without worrying that some nut will choose a mass gathering as a time to enact their most sociopathic tendencies.
God help us.
There has been a remarkable amount of reporting in recent years about the epidemic of loneliness that is sweeping the country.
The U.S. surgeon general has made it a priority.
We’re making ourselves ill with isolation, preferring the company of screens and pets to the possibility of interacting with real people.
Americans, an article at The Atlantic told us just this week, have “suddenly stopped hanging out.” “
This young century, Americans have collectively submitted to a national experiment to deprive ourselves of camaraderie in the world of flesh and steel, choosing instead to grow (and grow and grow) the time we spend by ourselves,” the writer Derek Thompson observed.
Why? Well, there are lots of reasons.
The pandemic got us out of the habit of associating with one another. There are too many distractions available on our phones. We don’t go to church as often as we used to. All that is true.
Let me submit the likelihood of another factor: The not-zero chance of mass violence breaking out at any large gathering puts a real damper on our ability to be with each other. To live and laugh and love and celebrate life’s joys as a community. To even trust each other.
A friend of mine once told me she always made sure that her kids were enrolled in different schools, even though they weren’t so far apart in age.
Why? Because she didn’t want to risk losing multiple children in one horrific, bloody incident. Her efforts struck me at the time as an overreaction.
