The eCrozier

Vester Flannagan stood on a balcony at the Bridgewater Plaza shopping center near Roanoke, Virginia and adjusted his smart phone camera. He then walked toward Alison Parker, a local TV reporter doing a live interview, filming himself as if he were part of video game. Flannagan aimed both his gun and camera and murdered Ms. Parker and her cameraman, Adam Ward, and severely wounded the person being interviewed. I have not and will not watch this video. I’ve only heard it described in writing. But millions of people have watched it. Flanagan put his own version online through Twitter and Facebook. He apparently did not have that many “followers” or “friends,” so that means people thoughtlessly assisted in the distribution of his demented video.

Dr. Adam Lankford, a criminal justice professor at the University of Alabama, presented a paper this week to the annual conference of the American Sociological Association. His presentation showed a strong correlation between the availability of guns and the frequency of gun massacres. He postulates that America’s high rate of public mass shootings is connected with the number of guns circulating in the country. “A nation’s civilian firearm ownership rate is the strongest predictor of its number of public mass shooters,” he explained. Apparently, we are at the top of a very shameful category: public mass shootings. That should be a shocking piece of information.

But truth be told, we’re not shocked by this any more. We’ve lost that particular capacity sometime over the last few years. Stories such as these are now regular parts of our news cycle. We hear or read about the latest one, shake our head, and pour our morning coffee. In addition to what happened near Roanoke, last month a police officer near Houston was brutally executed while pumping gas into his patrol car; and, in June, a sick young man slaughtered 9 people in a church in Charleston. These three are just recent examples. You know there are many, many more. You’ve read or heard about them, as have I. We just have to hear the name “Sandy Hook” or “Aurora” and our minds go right to those horrific murders. But, sadly, we’re no longer shocked. We just sigh and say: “that’s just the way it is.”

We have made a collective decision, rational or not, faithful or not, that all these murders are just the price we must pay so we can continue to have all these guns circulating so freely in our country. Can there be any other explanation for why we have done nothing after witnessing all these murders? Our inaction speaks volumes. Our inaction says that however much we deplore these murders, they are acceptable losses of human life if it would mean any restriction to our free access to guns (and not just any guns, but guns specifically manufactured, not for sport, but for killing our fellow humans). I’ve actually heard purportedly rational people say that such murders are the price we must pay for the current Supreme Court’s interpretation of the 2nd Amendment. The rationality of that eludes me.

But we need to regain a sense of shock for what we’re becoming, for what we now find acceptable, for what is becoming a new normal in our common life.  
+Scott