Will the Las Vegas shooting finally spur a serious discussion about guns? Nope.
It’s time to have a serious talk about “spoon control.”
On Monday morning I was engaged in a spirited discussion with a few friends on Facebook when one of them trotted out the old guns-as-spoons analogy, writing: “You can’t blame the spoon for making you fat, and you can’t blame the guns for this.”
“This,” of course, being Sunday night’s horrific shooting in Las Vegas. Wait, or maybe it was a “tragic” shooting this time. Or perhaps this one was “senseless.” Possibly even an “unspeakable terror.”
Because while crazed gunmen don’t seem to be running out of a ready supply of ammunition anytime soon, the rest of us are rapidly exhausting all adjectives to describe what happens when people with more firepower than sanity do what was once considered the unthinkable.
It happened again on Sunday night. A gunman opened fire from an upper floor of a Las Vegas hotel, killing — as of Monday afternoon — 59 people and injuring more than 500 others at a country music festival.
Facebook friends have been posting their reactions since the news broke. And aside from those posts offering sincere condolences to the victims and their families, or invective directed at the cowardly perpetrator, mostly what I’m seeing falls into two categories:
- Liberal friends who insist it’s time we “do something” about guns.
- Conservative friends who insist there’s nothing we can — or even should — do about guns.
Here’s the thing: There aren’t many groups that haven’t been directly touched by these mass shootings. Guns and their unhinged operators have shot at groups of college students, homosexuals, military personnel, Congresspersons, Texans, fast-food junkies, postal workers, immigrants, high school students, moviegoers, stockbrokers, factory workers, lawyers, mall shoppers, Christian churchgoers, Buddhist monks, nursing home residents, small children.
And now, country music fans.
The fight over the Second Amendment right to bear arms has long been our very own Middle East quagmire. We talk and talk and talk about finding a reasonable solution, a lasting peace that both sides can agree to, but in the end nothing changes. And people, good people, continue to die.
Fortunately for us as a nation, our wise lawmakers have a solution. It’s the “Hearing Protection Act” currently making its way through Congress. The legislation would eliminate restrictions — enacted with the National Firearms Act of 1934 — on silencers and treat them as ordinary firearms.
Because, you know, if we aren’t going to try to protect people from flying bullets, the least we can do is protect the shooter’s hearing from the potentially damaging sound of the gunfire.
How many more Vegases — how many more Sandy Hooks, how many more Orlandos, how many more Virginia Techs — will it take before we admit we have a genuine gun problem in this country and do something about it?
In our Monday morning Facebook discussion about the Vegas shooting, a friend who worked at the Standard-Examiner decades ago pretty much stuck the landing: “If nothing happened after 20 first-graders were shot in the head, can you expect anything after 50 adults at a concert are killed by sniper?”
I suppose not. And therein lies the real tragedy. Because if the brutal murders of almost two dozen 6- and 7-year-olds couldn’t jolt us into doing something about guns five years ago, nothing can.
It seems to me that gun control is a lot like bladder control. Nobody really wants to talk about it, and nobody likes to admit it’s a problem — least of all the regular users of the product in question. Hence, my conservative Facebook friend’s insistence that you can’t blame Vegas on guns any more than you can blame your weight problem on the spoon you keep dipping into that quart of Ben & Jerry’s.
But the truth is, I don’t blame the spoon for making me fat.
I do, however, blame us as a nation for our unwillingness to reasonably regulate spoons that not only allow me to get fat, but make it possible for me — in a single spoonful — to send 59 people to an instant, early grave and give more than 500 people diabetes against their will.
That’s the kind of “spoon control” we probably ought to start talking about.
Contact Mark Saal at 801-625-4272 or msaal@standard.net. Follow him on Twitter at @Saalman. Friend him on Facebook at facebook.com/MarkSaal.
Editor’s note: This column was updated Tuesday morning to reflect the Las Vegas shooting’s updated death toll.