MAY 23, MONDAY

UNSHOCKED

Why are we shocked when a gunman enters a school and kills 14 children and four others? We live in a country that is awash in guns, we live in a country where personal freedom comes first, we live in a country that entertains a wide range of conspiracy theories, a country so polarized and so that we all are threatened by almost everything.

It doesn’t seem to matter whether we keep tight control on guns or whether we put emphasis on identifying psychotic people. All sides are right. Guns don’t kill people, people do and we protect the freedom of people to commit to every kind of nuttiness and paranoia under the sun.

Why don’t we admit that there is really nothing we can do to stop the carnage, that it is simply the price paid for holding tight to basic American values? It is painful to have 14 innocent children shot, but we’ll get over it in a day or two. Part of living in America is the risk of getting shot in a mass killing or by someone robbing your house or by someone blinded by road rage. If we have guns everywhere, guns whose only purpose is to shoot someone in defence or fury or by accident, and we protect the freedom to be paranoid, then people are going to shoot people. It is as simple as that. It is nothing to be shocked about.

Better to think of it like we now think about Covid 19, to calculate that our chances of not getting shot are much greater than of getting shot and then let the subject drop. These kids chances of getting shot were minuscule, although the chances of ten random kids getting shot each day is very high. We accept the risk of hurricanes and wildfires and drowning and Covid 19, why not accept the risk of children getting shot in school and then not obsess? The chance of a child I know getting shot is so low that I can dismiss it.

I can’t see any other way out. We are not going to change our cultural values, our defence of freedom, which we all agree is a good thing. So when it happens, which seems almost daily, we can register a brief shock and maybe mouth a few platitudes, but since there is nothing we can do we may as well drop the subject and concentrate on the weather or the stock market. And, of course, that is what we do do. There really isn’t a problem after all.