Mass Shootings

I don’t even know what to say anymore honestly.

Mass shootings are a tragedy in one sense. It’s a tragedy that doesn’t even need to happen. The real tragedy is that we, as a society, refuse to do anything at all to prevent future shootings. It’s sinful. It’s popular to blame mental illness on these shootings, but I’m wondering who that mental illness might apply to honestly — maybe the whole of society that sees horror and refuses to do something about it. But, am I just doing the same thing by blaming mental illness for our problems, as if those with mental illness are a convenient scapegoat? Forgive me. I’m just trying to make sense of something that makes no sense at all.

While mass shootings are a tragedy, they are also not a tragedy at all. They are a consequence. They are the price we are apparently willing to pay. For what? So that white men can carry and use a gun on anyone they want to freely without fear of losing their own lives in the process. That’s not an exaggeration. It’s not spin. It’s not left-wing rhetoric, or whatever else you want to throw at me to dismiss reality. Just look at the stats — https://www.statista.com/statistics/476456/mass-shootings-in-the-us-by-shooter-s-race/. Between 1982 and May 2022, 68% of the shooters have been white men — making them far and away the leading cause of mass shootings. This isn’t recent. It’s been going on for decades. This disgusts me. And that’s not counting the people who perpetuated lynchings either — another form of mass terrorism targeting people of color.