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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n
What is wrong with us?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 … Continue reading “What is wrong with us?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10519"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10519"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10519\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10521,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10519\/revisions\/10521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}