Such a dark day. I feel a bit guilty even lamenting the passing of Tom Petty when there are 58 dead in Las Vegas. It was unexpected, he was only in his mid 60s, just a couple years older than me, but many of the dead were young, really young, with their whole lives ahead of them.
All we can do is mourn. We could, of course, try to prevent it ever happening again, but that’s not likely to happen in America. One person on my Facebook page said “Please don’t make this into a political event.” I suppose she was being well-intentioned. Give people time to mourn without arguing about guns. But I don’t agree.
Now is exactly the time to have this argument about guns. If we banned automatic weapons, and required psychological tests for anyone wanting to buy a gun (and if you want to buy ten, that right there is a sign that maybe you’re a couple of tacos short of a platter), then it would almost certainly reduce the number of this kind of killings. I say almost certainly because it worked in Australia. It works in most developed countries. America is not really any different.
But, that’s one of the problems with the USA. In fact, it’s one of the biggest ones. We just refuse to learn from the example of others. Everybody’s got universal health care, and you can see that it works. America says no. Germany, and Sweden, have almost reduced their carbon footprint to zero, but America keeps pushing for more oil pipelines rather than putting up solar panels and windmills. A couple of states have had huge success with legal marijuana, but are the others learning? Not so much.
It’s just plain pig-headedness and, especially on the issue of guns, it’s costing lives.
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