America has been rocked by yet another mass shooting, this time inside the heart of the nation's capital, within a highly secure military facility. Aaron Alexis, a former Navy reservist who was being employed as a civilian contractor, entered the Washington Navy Yard with a shotgun recently purchased in neighboring Virginia. He used the weapon, along with others acquired along the way, to wage a campaign of murder that would end with twelve fatalities and numerous injuries.
Alexis apparently suffered from documented mental health issues, including a tip from Rhode Island police to their Navy counterparts that Alexis reported "hearing voices" and that unseen assailants were using a microwave device to send vibrations into his body. Despite this, and past incidents involving firearms, Alexis was allowed to keep his security clearance. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel admits that there were red flags ignored in the Alexis case, and has ordered a review of military procedures regarding security clearances.
There is no indication that Congress will move on so-called gun control legislation, despite the president's urging; there have been more than a dozen shootings involving four or more fatalities, the FBI's standard for a mass shooting, since he took office. Even legislation requiring background checks, which is polling extraordinarily high among the American people, cannot get traction in this legislative environment. It is not clear how effective such legislation would be in stopping this type of violence even if it could be made law.
So we are left with a renewal of the cycle of the left calling for gun reform, the right hoisting the second amendment up like a Spartan shield, and the blood spilling in the streets, schools, churches and workplaces of the nation.
The scars from having the children and teachers of Sandy Hook taken from us have not even had a chance to harden - we are still sore from grief, numb from horror, shocked by evil.
This is the truest terrorism, is it not? The sure knowledge, planted like a darkling seed in the deep soil of your heart, that there is no place of safety, anywhere. There is no time that your children and wife can't be slaughtered like animals, for no discernible reason.
This is the truth of America, and anyone telling you differently is selling something or running for office. "It's not just America, people kill each other everywhere" says the peanut gallery.
"Yes, Peanut. That is true. But Americans have a gift and a flair for killing, and it is not slowed a step when turned against other Americans. Look at the Civil War - bloodiest damned scrap this country has ever been in, and we were fighting ourselves."
True story.
Where does this bloodthirstiness come from? Why do we raise a fist when in the past we would have raised a voice? Why do we raise a gun when we would have raised a fist? Why kill so many, so wantonly, with such a vicious remorselessness that even the youngest among us are not exempt?
Just, why? Our politicians, law enforcement personnel, mental health professionals and assorted clergy all do their best to answer that question, yet obviously they come up woefully short, the lot of them. These people killing us are us...our brothers, husbands and sons. Where are we losing our boys? They watch the same movies, play the same games, tell the same jokes...yet...some of them kill. Why?
If we can find an answer to that...an answer to the rage that bubbles beneath the surface of so many in these 50 states...an answer to a cultural fascination with violence that is older than the nation itself...an answer to the paranoiac distrust that Americans feel for each other...the isolation...the dissolution...the growing sense of inevitability that this is simply the way it is here now...the way our children and their children will have to live...if...if only...
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned"
-W.B. Yeats
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