Price of freedom--again

Once again the nation is collectively in mourning, stupefied by a mindless act of handgun violence, and once again the national hand-wringing begins: "How could this have happened?" and "how can it be prevented from happening again?"

The bitter truth is we know precisely how this happened--America's murderously liberal gun laws and ineffectual mental health infrastructure essentially ensure that it will happen--and we know that after Second Amendment absolutists once again thwart any meaningful reform of America's gun laws, this horrible event will certainly happen again, dreadfully replicated in an Amish schoolhouse, Colorado high school, or Virginia public university to be named later.

But President Bush says he wants to be part of the conversation this rampage requires, so let the fraudulent dialogue begin--again.

This ritual is a familiar if futile exercise in the wake of the semi-annual bloodbaths which haunt American life. After a gory parade of massacres at places like Virginia Tech and Columbine, it would seem reasonable to expect that any sane society would sit down for a serious reappraisal of its gun laws. Not so, the United States, its armies of gun casualties stand it alone among Western and other industrialized societies.

While our firearm killers and their victims offer a multiethnic snapshot of modern America, gun violence tracked globally does not similarly offer a cross cultural profile. It is essentially unknown in all other societies which are not engulfed in civil war or cross-border conflict. What is the difference between this most recent perpetrator of mass murder in the U.S. and say a deranged, disturbed person similarly bent in say South Korea? Could it be access to a vast reservoir of relatively inexpensive and increasingly powerful small arms in the form of easily concealed handguns and military-grade assault weapons?

When gun carnage inspires outcries for more rational gun policy, one that might drain that pool of some 200 million guns at play in the United States, prohibit the sale of military grade hardware to lunatics, terrorists, and, yes, even those who would use them to hunt rabbits, or at the very least require gun owners and manufacturers to be taxed at a rate that comes closer to covering the mayhem their "hobby" costs society, why do the gun-controllers lose and the second amendment absolutists always win? Mother Jones reports that gun "enthusiast" lobbies make political contributions at a rate 33 times that of gun controllers. They get what they pay for. Essentially, the U.S. has the most rational gun control laws that money can by.

We continue to treat guns and gun violence as an abstract philosophical dispute the absolutists purport it to be rather than the national health crisis it is. While those of us who live in urban areas stalked by handgun violence or those of us who have lost a loved one to an accidental firearm discharge, random attack, or gun-powered domestic breakdown understand the real human toll of our national gun fetish, the second amendment absolutists look upon the horrendous annual casualty roll and even astonishing outbursts of Virgina Tech-level carnage as an acceptable "price of freedom."

Why does it seem that someone else is always paying the "price of freedom" on behalf of those who commend it so?