Uniquely vile

I find myself wondering why the NRA and its Republican allies believe that America is such a uniquely vile country, filled with such a huge number of evil and/or sick individuals.

Because if it's not the easy access to guns that allows the disturbed individuals like those who shot up places in Newtown, Clackamass, Pittsburgh, Miami, Tulsa, Brookfield, Oak Creek, Texas A&M, Minneapolis, Aurora, Seattle, Oakland, Cleveland, Norcross, Webster, and Frankston Township - four schools, two malls, two health spas, a theater, a temple, a Protestant church, a hospital, a funeral home, a soccer stadium, a house fire, and just random strangers on streets - to do their killing, if the guns have nothing to do with it, well, then we have to wonder why we have 15 mass shootings (and two others that were committed by more than one shooter and were probably "purely" criminal) in one year - one year - and other countries far more secular, or at least far less Christian, than we have so many fewer. Europe, for instance, hasn't had that many in the past twenty years.

If it's not the guns, then why is so overwhelmingly only Americans who do it? Is it something about us, that makes us so full of "genuine monsters — people so deranged, so evil, so possessed by voices and driven by demons that no sane person can possibly ever comprehend them"?

Maybe we should look into that.

(And anyway, all the armed cops in the world - and they were present at several of these incidents as well as others through the years - won't stop the children who shoot themselves with dad's/grandad's/uncle's loaded gun just lying around the house. But that is, I suppose, a different argument.)


(Note: this list at The Nation was published Dec 15 - too early to get this one or (sheesh) the very latest one)