There is growing support for once again banning assault rifles, for making high capacity ammunition illegal and for expanding background checks to gun shows and the Internet--all of which the White House announced that President Obama supports.
There is also a great deal of skepticism that any of this will get through the U.S. Congress. Others say this is the moment of opportunity and it won't last long.
But one thing may be happening: Americans are waking up to the fact that things have gone very far wrong, while they mostly weren't paying attention. Sales of assault weapons and 30-round clips have soared, guns (including these) are allowed in more places than they were in the Old West, much of this driven by greed--for the money to be made by the sale of more expensive and lethal weaponry.
The gun lobby has no boundaries, even successfully censoring information gathered by the federal government on gun violence--the public is kept in the dark by congressional fiat. The gun lobby has also successfully restricted federal research into gun violence, and presumably non-federal as well. It won't do for citizens to see who pays the price for these weapons, or that the assault weapon ban and other bans in the past have actually worked to reduce the number of these weapons and the violence associated with them.
It's difficult to know how surprising all this is for much of the public, since a meaningful dialogue on gun violence has been missing in America for a generation, while guns have become easier to fire, faster in firing more bullets, and generally more lethal.
The tag I use for posts like this is "land of guns," which comes from a line of a poem written after Bobby Kennedy was gunned down in 1968, while his wife was pregnant. I think the poem was mine but frankly I don't remember. There was some gun legislation after that, not enough, as LBJ said, principally because of the power even then of the NRA. The blizzard of assassinations joined the violence of Vietnam and police tactics against demonstrators etc. led to an impassioned discussion on a whole range of matters that was described as the culture of violence. Maybe it was too impassioned, but the total lack of it hasn't resulted in more rational laws and boundaries.
Today gun culture is ingrained further in popular culture. We all see this. Guns are linked to manhood in gun ads, without irony. There is hardly a hero in an American movie or TV show who isn't blasting away with a gun. The big cultural advance is that sexy women are shown blowing people away with the same aplomb.
What we do not all see is how much this translates into reality, into an actual gun culture that worships and fetishizes firearms. For all their actual or pretend technical knowledge, that doesn't make the people involved in gun culture any more realistic. Like everyone else in America, they see their heroes dodge bullets and only protect the good people and blow away the bad. Like too many scenes in too many movies and TV shows that depict heroes walking away from explosions that in real life would have splintered them, they believe in the immortality--and maybe even morality--of the hand with the gun.
The slaughter of children is unspeakable, impossible to dwell on for long, for anyone. But for some active or passive captives of the gun culture who never even imagined the possibility, it is a sudden awakening from a deep delusional dream.
Of course there are many immune to even this. They are out there right now buying up the same assault rifle with the same clips before they're banned. There are the officious idiots calling for the arming of teachers. But at least for the moment their voices are not the ones speaking most clearly.
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