It’s perversely ironic.
I’ve only just returned from Japan, statistically the safest country on the planet, a country where I can roam around anywhere at anytime and not feel a hint of danger; I can leave stuff in a rental car in broad daylight and not have the slightest worry someone would break the window and steal it. Within the span of a week since coming home to the States, there’s already been three major mass shootings: one during the annual Gilroy Garlic Festival; another one in El Paso where a dude opened fire inside a Walmart store, and not even 24 hours after that, a gunman shot up a bar in Dayton, Ohio.
All devastatingly tragic, but sadly, merely the price of doing business living in America.
The correlation between the amount of guns and the amount of gun deaths is factually evident. Firearms are heavily outlawed in Japan, and therefore the country suffers from insignificantly few gun-related crimes. After Australia banned guns, the numbers of deaths from firearms decreased exponentially. Yet due to our second amendment and various lobbying forces, there is absolutely no hope of massively decreasing the number of firearms here in the United States (short of a political miracle), even though we know for sure countless precious lives will be saved.
How exceptional is the country that our children get to perform active shooter drills, and to attend any event of significance, we need to go through security akin to checkpoints at an airport. And that every year, like clockwork, there’s bound to be a smattering of mass shootings, and all the victims will ever get for their deaths is ceaseless streams of thoughts and prayers. Someone on twitter said it best a few years ago, that when we as a collective accepted that it’s okay to gun down babies (Sandy Hook), the fight for gun control was already dead and over.
America is a great country, and it’s given me every single opportunity and items material that otherwise not possible had we not emigrated, but it’s a country where gun deaths are a part of the deal. What’s left for us to contemplate is whether or not the deal continues to be worth it.
All I want is just some peace and quiet.