OK I will say this, to put Las Vegas and the firepower we all heard echo in a historical perspective:
As the automatic crack of a machine gun fire rang into my ears at a handful of rounds per second, I asked myself with little practical knowledge of American arms, if that was the
sound of one shooter. Then my heart sank lower seeing the numbers of how many of those thunder cracks, indeed hit innocent people from above.
Then I thought about 3 American massacres that changed the course of our history and I wondered if I could count the dead on only one hand. It was close.
Boston Massacre, 1770: 5
OK Corral, 1881: 3
Kent State, 1970: 3
Then I heard Mad Money‘s Jim Kramer talk on CNBC about how this wouldn’t change anything in this country, but in his head I knew he wanted to say that the stock in gun companies were are going to Red Hot and to sell high, which made me wonder if a better person than myself would puke right then and there.
Then I thought about how many battles that changed the course of Wars; charges, ambushes, retreats; are dwarfs next to these numbers. I refused to look into this further on the Library of Alexandria in my phone.
“Not now.”
We live in a violent country. We have a lot of guns. Even as crime has fallen nationally, American men are clearly competing to win a contest over a body count and are aware of previous numbers.
If we closed the borders for the next ten years, I believe we would be less safe, because the craziest ones have been here for generations.
“The purest products of America go crazy”
– opening lines of William Carlos Williams’ Spring and All (1923)
*you can’t close the borders and call this the USA for a myriad of reasons. But I often feel the safest around immigrants. Especially the poor ones that came here to escape what happened in Las Vegas.
**OK, OK Corral was not a massacre. It was a peaceful night in some corners of the pressure cookers of this Republic.
Now, back to my scheduled programming, listening to U.S. Senator Al Franken give me guarded hope and an education into the Democratic process with his latest book, Giant of The Senate.
– Musician and writer Davin Michael Stedman has many musical ventures and is one of the driving forces behind the Staxx Brothers. He is planning a tour of Nigeria for 2018.
