A friend of mine worked in the US as a school teacher for a few years, in the Boston area. He came home right around the time of another few mass shootings - though, depending on your definition, mass shootings have been common for a long, long time now - and I asked him what he thought about it, from being over there. And he said, if I can be excused some paraphrasing, "People here don't understand it. There is a huge chunk of the American population, in all four corners, who believe that literally the only thing between them and a totalitarian dictatorship is their personal firearms. And any attempt to reduce the amount of guns in the country was tantamount to trying to establish a fascist police state." Meanwhile my uncle, who has lived in New Hampshire for decades, is a perfectly reasonable man, but insists that the only thing that lets him sleep soundly at night is the loaded handgun in his bedside drawer. "You have to keep your family safe". From what? Home intruders with their own guns, apparently.
When you have that kind of mentality among enough people, incidents like Dallas, that nightclub shooting, Sandy Hook, they become an irritant to be tolerated in service of the greater good of resisting tyranny. It's not like Australia which so famously reduced gun ownership. An obsession with needing guns to be safe - from the government as well as criminals - is so inherent in American politics, law and culture, that what we are witnessing now is the new normal.
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