No, it is not too soon.
Today, and yesterday, and the last time, and the next time, are all the time to talk about why, alone of all the nations on earth, the United States has to wake up morning after morning to deal with news of yet another mass shooting.
Other nations have people with extreme political views. Other nations have lonely people with serious mental illnesses. Other nations have people who are poor, desperate, suicidal, bigoted, paranoid and angry.
But only the United States of America feels compelled to give those people the means to kill other people, often strangers, often in large numbers. Or, even more often, in comparatively small numbers — just three or four — so that they apparently fall beneath our notice.
The new standard, apparently, is 59. That’s how many people, as of this writing, are known to have been killed by a lone gunman from a 32rd-story perch in a Las Vegas hotel. Any number of people who fall before the next crazed gunman that is less than that may result in so many sad-faced shrugs.
It does not have to be this way. There are things we can do, personally, locally and nationally, to reduce the number of times a clear lunatic decides to go out with as much collateral damage as he (and it is almost always a he) can manage.
Yes, we should have better mental health care, available to everyone. Yes, we should use our families and our schools and our churches to instill more respect for human life.
But the clear difference between those cultures and ours is the irrational belief, drawn from a violent history and an often deliberate misreading of our Constitution, that there can be no serious effort made to keep these weapons of mass murder out of the hands of people who should not have them.
No single law, no particular enforcement method, will be all-powerful or foolproof. But the metaphor drawn Monday by New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik resonates. Gun safety laws and regulations are like mass vaccinations. They don’t work 100 percent of the time. People still get sick. But the difference between the few who slip through the cracks of a vaccination protocol and the epidemics we would see if there were no such public health efforts are huge.
And that’s the approach we should be taking. Gun safety, ownership and limitations are a public health issue. The sensible regulations we should have — more effectively limiting ownership of automatic and semi-automatic weapons, banning large-capacity ammo clips, imposing universal background checks — will not be 100 percent effective.
And we will never be able to count the number of people who are not shot, imagine the mass hysteria that will not happen, once we shake off the political influence of the National Rifle Association and their bought-and-paid-for lackeys in public office.
No, it’s not too soon. It is way, way too late.
