Orlando: Just Another Massacre, As Sure As the Sun Will Rise

Seacoast New Hampshire

When I was growing up, there was no Monday Night Football. In fact, most stores  in my home town closed at noon on Saturday, and all stores were closed all day Sunday. That was normal then.  Stores were closed Sunday, but the Redskins played Sundays and Monday morning you talked about the dreadful the team was.

There were certain things you could count on, like the seasons:   Summer came and schools closed, and community swimming pools opened.  These were things you could count on as part of American life.

Every spring, you could count on the Extravaganza show at Bethesda Chevy Chase High School to showcase local talent and people would talk about it into the summer. 

Small town America, lots of guns tucked away

Now, you can count on the monthly massacre.  

Until San Bernadino, it was always a male with a gun.  That one time a woman got involved, but as a rule, it's still  a male hater/shooter. 

Some times there's a reason given, like the guys who shoot up abortion clinics or guys who murder doctors who are connected to Planned Parenthood. 

Or maybe it's  radical Islam at Boston and Orlando, although you have the distinct impression that was just an excuse to elevate psychopathic rage into a cause. Some, like Sandy Hook or Columbine (remember Columbine?) or Aurora, it was just some white guy with a gun.  Might be a white guy killing Black church goers as in Charleston.  

As Chris Rock has noted, random mass murder does not often get connected to Black men.  Black guy will steal your purse, Rock says.  Someone opens fire on a playground: White guy. Asians, rarely, like that guy at Virginia Tech. Remember Virginia Tech?  

But mostly it's a white guy thing. That federal building in Oklahoma City--you knew that would turn out to be a white guy. Not a Black guy. Not a woman. A white guy. Man with a gun or a bomb.  Impersonal murderer. 

I can't remember all the massacres any more. Just another guy with a gun shooting people who can't shoot back, feeling good about himself, briefly.

Holly, the gorilla, Bronx Zoo

In Europe, they have soccer hooliganism. In America, we have mass shootings. 

It's who we are now.  

Wasn't always that way. Remember when those two thugs shot the Clutters in their home in Kansas and Truman Capote went out there and wrote "In Cold Blood?"  In 1950's America, cold blooded killing was still considered freakish. 

Then came Vietnam and American boys massacred Vietnamese villagers, most famously at Mai Lai, and the mother of one of the soldiers said, "I gave you my son, a good boy, and you made him a murderer."  But that was more comprehensible, how that happened.  Then came Kent State, where American boys shot down students in cold blood. James Michner explained all that in his book. 

Now we've progressed to inexplicable murder. 

But it's just part of American life now. The massacre du jour. 

Dust bowl mother: Didn't have to worry about deranged shooter

As always, they get the Senators on TV, calling for gun laws and the Republicans droning on about how guns don't kill people.  Nothing changing there.

It's a big country.  Car safety has improved. Fewer highway deaths.  

We'll know mayhem and mass murder have really achieved status as the new normal when they stop making the lead news item,  when it's: "Oh, yeah, and thirty kindergartners were shot to death on a playground in Spokane today. In other news..."