The man being interviewed on CBC’s “As It Happens” show Tuesday night was having trouble speaking, choking up every few sentences.
“If he’d had a knife, not a gun, it would have been a completely different experience. I wouldn’t have run out the door. I would’ve found other large males, strong enough to assault someone with a knife…. I can maybe take a chance against a knife attacker but not someone with a rifle, not from the other side of the room.”
Then, he said, he waited outside. He “wanted to know it was over.” Finally, with his car snarled among all the emergency vehicles, he walked home.
“It took so long – two and one-half hours, but that was good. I needed the time.”
And he kept apologizing, as if he had something to apologize for, as if he should have single-handedly felled the gunman, or ferried innocents to safety on his back – nonsense, of course, but very human, very sad.
As we all know depressingly well, such interviews – like the horrifying outburst of violence that caused it – are getting entirely too common in our country. The slaughter in a Boulder, Colorado, supermarket is the latest – and I write this a bit tentatively, because I’m writing on Thursday, and it won’t be published until Sunday. God only knows, if indeed He does, when the next spasm of gun violence will erupt.
Before last Tuesday’s Colorado slaughter, which saw 10 innocent people murdered, there was another mass shooting in Atlanta a week earlier. It ended with only – only! – eight victims.
Interestingly, that was also the day the Boulder assailant bought his lethal weapon. Is there a coincidence? Who knows? Does it matter?
The important thing is that one more deeply disturbed and angry man – and these murderous people are almost always male – was able to lay his hands relatively easily on a terrifyingly lethal weapon – a thing designed to kill large numbers of people quickly and nearly effortlessly, even if it was technically termed a “pistol.”
A gun like that has no other real purpose than to kill human beings, no matter what apologists for firearms manufacturers and their ilk say.
And last week the gun was turned, mercilessly, on perfectly ordinary people doing nothing more menacing than selling or shopping for groceries, as millions of us do each day.
In this case, the venue was a King Soopers market, so named because when a Mr. King founded the South Carolina chain in 1947, he was looking for a catchy name, and his teenage son told him that “sooper” was an exclamation beloved by the then-popular comic book character Archie.
It lost any comic meaning last week, when food shopping, like church-going – remember the nine worshipers slaughtered in a Charleston, South Carolina, church in 2015? – has become a high-risk habit in our gun-happy culture. That church shooting, by the way, had the dubious distinction of adding race to the classic American gunman-runs-amuck equation.
And being a child doesn’t take anyone out of the line of fire. We will never forget – at least I won’t, and I hope other Americans won’t – the soul-shattering day in 2012 when a deranged young man with a gun savagely slaughtered 20 first-graders and six of their protectors at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and our then-president, Barack Obama, a man of almost preternatural self-control, wept openly.
If that didn’t change things – and it certainly didn’t – nothing will, as mass killers have been demonstrating ever since.
So we will once again go into what by now are rote routines. The country will grieve, and its political leaders will assume their long-practiced stances.
Democrats – at least the majority of them – will begin pledging, as they always do, to try to strengthen our insanely lax gun laws to try to keep the most lethal weapons out of the hands of the mentally ill and the violently angry among us. Their quest will fail, as it always does.
Republicans are personified by the likes of Texas’s Ted Cruz – his very presence in the Senate illustrates how profoundly the standards of what was once dubbed the “Grand Old Party” have degenerated – who calls even the most modest attempts to tighten existing gun laws “ridiculous theater.”
And they will continue their reflexive fealty as attack dogs for the NRA which, despite a series of scandals in recent times, still carries the banner of powerful and well-financed gun manufacturers who have been wildly successful in their attempts to keep any serious attempts at sane gun laws off the books.
The periodic slaughters will go on, and we will automatically deplore them and wait for the furor to die down. And the rest of what we like to think of as the civilized world will continue to stare at us, aghast at our folly.
In short, nothing will happen. We are beyond redemption.
(Monitor columnist Katy Burns lives in Bow.)