The Bronze Medal

home  |  July 31st, 2012

Life goes on, as the saying goes. Two squirrels chase each other among the tombstones in a small graveyard as I drive back from the dump, and a caller on a talk show lectures his radio listeners that if the members of the audience in that movie theater in Colorado had been properly armed, one of them could have taken down the shooter after he first started firing, implying that they could have then all gone back to watching the Batman movie. Crazy as he sounded, he wasn’t alone. In the days to come, numerous politicians and newspaper columnists took turns insulting our intelligence. They either claimed that the frequency of mass killings in United Sates has absolutely nothing to do with our lax gun laws, or that more firearms in public places would make us all safer in a similar situation.

No matter where one stands on the Second Amendment and guns issue, the inability of many Americans—including our president, his Republican challenger, and the majority of our lawmakers—to admit that assault rifles capable of firing fifty to sixty rounds a minute have no other purpose but to mow down as many people as one can, is a staggering display of cowardice. “Folks love a gun for what it can do,” Barry Hannah, the late Mississippi novelist, used to say. He was right. Thou Shall Kill, the assault rifle whispers to its owner.

— Charles Simic

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