I get my news from the newspaper — the old-fashioned paper kind — so I didn’t read about yesterday’s horrible tragedy in Connecticut until this morning. When I did, I felt an overwhelming sense of horror. Of all possible acts of insanity, surely none can compare with the deliberate murder of children.
There have always been people who become psychotic, and alas, there always will be. Yet in earlier times, it was not so easy for a psychotic person, no matter how far gone, to kill so many people so quickly. But now we have extraordinarily efficient guns, and we make them very easy to get — including the Bushmaster semi-automatic rifle that the shooter actually used to kill all those children yesterday, according to the coroner’s report.
This combat rifle, first used by American troops in the Vietnam war, can fire up to six bullets a second. It was designed to be able to do one specific thing well: Kill large numbers of humans, quickly and efficiently.
Why is such a gun even legally available for purchase by civilians? Why do we Americans, as a society, have such a fascination with owning weapons specifically designed to kill other people wholesale?
What is wrong with us?