Las Vegas (and Puerto Rico)

It may seem unfortunate that I chose last night to post the adage below under the title of Today's News, when today's major news story would be a mass shooting in Las Vegas, where guns and gun shows are big business.

 But without demeaning the pain and suffering involved in this horrific event, the adage suggests both the evanescence of the surrounding situation, and in a different way, the depressingly repetitive nature of the event taken as a whole, within the current context.

If the United States survives as a civilized nation for another century, it will have universal healthcare and effective gun control.  As both ideas or ideals and as ongoing policies with bureaucracies and rules to carry them out, these are features of civilized nations now.  They are so important to the needs of civilization going forward that the US cannot continue as an exception over the long run.

But the short term is something else, and a number of essays point out the numbing ritual of political response.  Several (for example, here) also point out that because the shooter is apparently a white guy (with a huge and sophisticated arsenal in a hotel room), it will become a story of a crazed individual, but if it had been someone of a different type, it would be a rallying cry for repression.

James Fallows essay at the Atlantic--Two Dark American Truths From Las Vegas-- covers both aspects: "The first is that America will not stop these shootings. They will go on. We all know that, which makes the immediate wave of grief even worse."  

He notes examples of other countries that have enacted gun control after mass shootings, and have stopped them or at least made them less frequent and deadly."No other society allows the massacres to keep happening. Everyone around the world knows this about the United States. It is the worst aspect of the American national identity."

He points out that the perpetrators of mass killings in America are almost always white men, but what if this one was not?  That's the other dark truth:

"If they had Arab-sounding names, this would be a new episode of jihad. How often has Donald Trump invoked “San Bernardino” in his speeches, as shorthand for the terrorist threat in our heartland?
If they were Mexican, they would demonstrate the perils of immigration, and that Mexico is “not sending its best people.”
If they had been illegal immigrants, they’d dramatize the need to crack down harder, right now.
And if they had been black, I shudder to imagine the consequences."

Further, I point out another set of victims: the people of Puerto Rico and other islands devastated by Hurricane Maria.  With this story diverting the necessary attention to fuel a sense of urgency, their needs are likely to be ignored.  Thirst and hunger are just as deadly as guns.