Guns Kill People

After every mass shooting the first question the media asks is "what possibly could have motivated someone to take so many innocent lives." Time and again we've had our curiosity answered with the killers' own words.

One hated all women because he couldn't find a girlfriend. Another said black people and immigrants were diluting their gene pool. A couple claimed jews controlled the media. A few others worried that muslims wanted to institute sharia law. One dressed up like the Joker, dyed his hair green and shot up a movie theater just because he wanted to watch the world burn.

And to all this I say — who fucking cares?

I don't care why a mass shooter goes on a killing spree. I only care about how they got a gun in the first place.

Our voyeuristic fascination with gunmen's motives s has driven the national conversation away from the obvious systemic issue. About 44,000 people die every year in America from gun violence. Their individual stories are irrelevant to the one common denominator: in every case someone had access to a gun and used it.

Marshall McLuhan declared in the 1960s that "The Medium is the Message" when he urged social scientists to stop focusing on the words that people say and instead focus their energies on the technologies they used to communicate their messages. He correctly theorized that the printing press changed the world a lot more than the Guttenberg bible ever could. The same goes for gun violence. The shooters are trying to communicate their own insane ideas. But it doesn't matter if they're radical leftists, militia members, racists, zionists, fundamentalist christians, conspiracy theorists or they fashioned themselves a comic book villian. The only relevant fact is that they opted to use bullets to communicate their ideas.

The only way to solve the school shooting problem is to remove the common denominator--the guns themselves. Anything else is a complete waste of time.

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