BY VERN TURNER

After yet another mindless slaughter by gun the thoughts and prayers comfort the living, but do nothing to change the entrenched American culture of fear, prejudice, ignorance and, worst of all, the attendant hatred that connects these dots of our own apocalypse.

Wade Michael Page showed us another side of ourselves by killing six innocent people.

Those still clinging to sanity say our “leaders” do not respond to these situations. They’re wrong. Our “leaders” do respond. They take more cash and get deeper into the blackmail game played by the NRA and the gun manufacturers.

In this country it is political suicide to have the NRA against you if you are in elected office and expect to return there. They have their own “hit list” of politicians who oppose them to keep them quiet, or cop to the pitifully weak platitudes about the gun-human continuum.

The misinterpretation of the 2nd Amendment is a sorry excuse to justify the possession and ownership of high end, high volume killing machines designed specifically to kill other humans.

Real statistics prompt other questions: We kill more people by gun in this country on both a per capita basis and an actual number count than all the other “civilized” nations combined.

Why? We are supposed to be the land of the free and the home of the brave, aren’t we? So, what are we so afraid of? Why do we have thousands of hate groups, many of which base their philosophy on those teachings of the Prince of Peace himself, Jesus Christ? The icon of tolerance, the champion of the poor and the downtrodden is being used as a tool to express extreme hate and prejudice against anyone or any group that isn’t like the haters. Is this a reversion to the most primitive form of tribalism? Has the DNA in these hateful creatures reverted to that form like some bad science fiction?

Maybe this has always been part of American culture. Even the earliest colonists tried to subjugate the original Americans with guns. Legend has it that we “won” the West by annexing lands not belonging to us. We didn’t win anything. We committed genocide.

We took land based on Euro-American ideals of ownership and property and killed the Native Americans who wanted to share it.

So, guns against anything not “us” has always been a cultural imperative in United States.

These facts added to American citizens owning over 300 million guns makes it inevitable that the Wade Michael Pages of this country will eventually find the time, the means and the mental state to once again express that blind, stupefying hatred in a bloodbath of the innocent.

We seem not to be able to control the violent minority who either loses its mind on occasion, or plans with due diligence to kill for the sake of killing. The easy availability of multi-shot, high load magazines makes it ever so much easier to kill many at a time, thus slaking the thirst of madness or just plain hate in a very short time; instant gratification applies to killers, too.

– Vern Turner is a regular contributor to The Oklahoma Observer. He lives in Marble Falls, TX, where he writes a regular column for the River Cities Daily Tribune. He is the author of three books – A Worm in the Apple: The Inside Story of Public Schools, The Voters Guide to National Salvation and Killing the Dream: America’s Flirtation With Third World Status – all available through Amazon.