‘With Second Amendment rights advocates refusing to act in the face of yet another round of killings, who needs Al-Qaeda to kill innocent Americans?’
AND so it came to pass that there was another mass shooting in the US of A. This time in Allen, in the great state of Texas, where everything is big and the right to bear arms is a well-protected right.
The shooting happened in, of all places, an outlet mall, resulting in the death of nine people, including the shooter who was felled by the police. Mass shootings are getting to be a weekly event in the United States now but this is the first time, I think, that it happened in an outlet mall.
I am particularly disturbed by this because I love going to outlet malls in the US. As do many other Filipinos who vacation in America.
So, any one of the eight who died at the hands of the gunman could have been me.
America is full of nutcases.
I own a handgun. I never thought I’d ever apply for a permit to possess and carry a firearm but at this late stage of my life I did. Why I did so I attribute to a sense of uncertainty about the peace and order situation in the city these days, but frankly I don’t really feel that. I feel as safe/unsafe in the streets of Manila (or Laguna) today as I did yesterday or two years ago or maybe even ten. I just wanted to have a handgun, and I also hope that I also want to be able to determine when I leave the earth on my own terms.
But I own a gun as a privilege and not because I think it’s a right. Which is in stark contrast with what a considerable segment of US society feels — they who will defend to the death their “right to bear arms” as enshrined in the Bill of Rights crafted while Americans were fighting a colonial power.
And for this segment, the right to bear arms seems to have almost no limit — the arms they feel they have a right to bear are of the type so powerful that they could start a revolution in many of the smallest countries of the world.
And bear arms they do, whenever and wherever they feel like it. Whether it’s driving down Main Street, or walking into a school, a mall or an outlet mall to spray innocent people with lead, or even while storming the US Capitol to try to prevent the proclamation of a duly-elected President.
But the saddest consequence of an unbridled right is the countless tombstones all over the United States bearing the names not of enemies of the State but of innocent civilians, many of them minors, killed by a bullet from a gunner proud of his Second Amendment right.
Every time a killing happens the media descend on the faceted community; bereaved parents ask, “When will this all stop?”; liberals call for tighter gun laws while conservatives say people kill, not guns; and then time passes and everything calms down until someone goes on a rampage and kills a new set of victims.
America has become a shooting gallery.
With Second Amendment rights advocates refusing to act in the face of yet another round of killings, who needs Al-Qaeda to kill innocent Americans?
