By David K. Shipler
The
United States of America is now without any sacred places. Churches, mosques, temples,
and synagogues are not sacred. Worshippers have been shot to death in Iowa,
Texas,
California,
Pennsylvania,
South
Carolina, Tennessee,
Kansas, Colorado, New
York, Ohio,
Georgia,
Wisconsin, and
elsewhere. Schools are not sacred. Children have been shot at 27
schools so far in 2022. Hospitals are not sacred. This year and last, in North
Carolina, Oklahoma,
Ohio,
Pennsylvania,
New
York, Illinois,
and Minnesota,
patients and staff at hospitals and clinics have been targeted. There is no
sanctuary.
The vulnerable
spaces are not only physical. They are also conceptual. They are areas of ideas
and practice where democracy’s shared beliefs used to be protected by moral
barriers—bulwarks that are now eroding. High levels of authority and influence
openly corrupt the reverence for honest elections, the deference to the rule of
law, the integrity of facts and truth. The society reels under a shroud of
menace. There is a sense of disorder, instability.
No
wonder Americans rush to buy guns whenever a mass shooting makes the country
recoil. People have grown afraid of one another. A great retreat from common
ground is underway, a pulling back into individual sovereignty, where the gun is
a tool and a talisman. Far from the fields and forests of the responsible hunter
or the shooting range of the careful sportsman, the gunman who harbors fear or
hatred buys a firearm to kill human beings, as many as fast as possible. Whether
to defend his home and family, or to take revenge, or to serve a demented
cause, he wields his weapon in a wilderness of distrust.
And so the gun is a symptom of a breakdown in America. The symptom could be treated, obviously; guns could be restricted in availability and capability. That is a task readily accomplished if citizens elected people who valued human life over political life. But even if that miracle occurred, the underlying society would not be healed sufficiently to obviate the gun as an object of desire.
