There's been something nagging at me all along in this affair, and I think I might have finally put my finger on it. Murders are constantly happening all around us. Heck, this one incident saw not only Congresswoman Giffords shot, but over 20 other people as well, many of whom died. But the Judge who died gets maybe a couple line mention from time to time, James Eric Fuller gets mentioned only because a week later he starts publicly threatening another politician with death.. but for the most part, they're barely scenery. They're as potted plants or curtains on fake windows on the stage that is the media extravaganza of The Assassination of a Politician.
Forget the domestic squabbles that end in the death of a mother or father, forget the store clerk bleeding to death on the floor behind his counter, forget the innocent bystander shot in a drive-by that wasn't even aimed at him. Those are all just numbers that we sigh about, and then dismiss. But ONE politician, and the first in 30 years (since Ronald Reagan in '81), is shot and the ENTIRE NATIONAL NEWS CYCLE MUST STOP and do nothing but drill and rehash and soul search. Suddenly we're jostled into panic mode and must re-evaluate our laws, our culture, our outlook on life because of one (attempted) murder, and not the successful ~
600,000 others that occurred during that 30 years.
It seems to me that half a million plebs getting murdered doesn't equal the furor brought by the attack on one patrician, or really, even the
threat of an attack on one. The whole point of this 200-someodd year old experiment in self-government we live in here is that we deny that anybody is better than anybody else,
particularly those we deign to (temporarily) put in charge! Do we really believe anymore that "all men are created equal?" Did we ever really?
I'm not trying to diminish or dismiss the sadness of the tragedy of this crime. I'm wondering where the furor was against the previous senseless murder, or the one before that - you know, the ones whose victims were not politicians or celebrities - the de facto elite/royal class we as a culture have seemed to foist up above us despite our professed better judgement. 15,241 people were murdered in 2009, and it's not a story, it's a statistic. Not a cause for alarm or contemplation or changing of our ways. One politician is attacked by a mentally deranged killer, a lunatic for whom rules, laws, and social conventions have no meaning... and all of a sudden we're expected to re-examine and change our rules, laws and social conventions. No governmental policy could have prevented this outcome short of a police state that even Orwell would believe impossible. He was a maniac. There have always been maniacs, and there will continue to be maniacs. People who kill not for any higher cause or understandable reason or even just a fit of anger gone out of control - people who kill because they want to kill. People who kill because they like it. People who kill because they are sociopaths who think the only negative aspect of killing someone can be mitigated if they avoid capture. Restricting our first or second amendment rights here will not grant consciences to sociopaths nor lucidity to psychopaths, much less calm the manic.
I'll end with a quote I found, surprisingly enough to me, in a
Huffington Post Article (which is in itself a good read) -
"We may badly want to do something, but we will be better off in the end if we hug our jerking knees and find our cool. The ordinary operation of the criminal-justice system is enough for now. If you've got to do something, why not tell a pundit or politician yammering on about background checks or forced institutionalisation to please shut up, since it's just too soon for reason to prevail." - Will Wilkerson.
