Guns and bruises

Even as the horrific list of gun massacres and school shootings goes on accruing more menacing tally, the National Rifle Association, America’s premier gun lobby, seems unperturbed. While families and friends of the seven killed in the latest shooting incident at a college town in southern California, Santa Barbara County, mourn the dead, as those wounded in the tragic event fight for their lives, the NRA doesn’t bat an eyelid and instead eggs on fellow Americans to take to the gun with a frenzy. The freewheeling manner in which rifles and pistols are sold in the US is presented as the quintessential manifestation of individual freedom, a sacrosanct American mantra, used and abused in myriad ways by the military-industrial complex. In fact, American gun massacres have by now a well established template, that of a young, sexually frustrated and mentally unstable psychopath, possibly from a socially marginalised community (including distruntled Asian student or a war veteran nursing unaddressed trauma) venting out his angst by randomly killing people. College campuses are easy targets because their relative seclusion allows intersubjective problems to remain unresolved and fester, which are then let out in a violent burst of explosive energy, taking down innocent lives in the process. Yet, instead of coming down heavily on the NRA and making guns harder to acquire, the US government prefers to sit on a ticking time bomb that seeks to ensure every American household has free access to extremely dangerous arms and ammunitions. Cowardly and careerist politicians bend over backwards to accommodate more heinous demands of the gun lobby even though outrage against the lack of legal barrier gathers nationwide force.