Who we are now

The shocking thing, of course, is that none of us is shocked anymore. Seventeen kids and adults dead in a Florida high school, 17 kids and adults who are no longer around to laugh and love and live their lives, and what is that but just another day in America? What will it be next week or the week after or next month, when two or three or five or six more kids and adults leave for school and never come home?

Two or three or five or six?

Hell. That might not even make the lead on the news anymore.

This is, after all, who we are now. This is the America we apparently want, because we keep sending this America to Washington.

I am sorry. I know I should be writing about Mikaela Shiffrin today, or those crazy skeleton people bombing down a ribbon of ice headfirst, or LeBron and The New Christy Minstrels over there in Cleveland. But Sportsball World seems so far away today. It seems so incredibly tiny and insignificant and silly.

And I am tired of it. I am tired of it, and of much else.

I am tired of living in a country where mass shootings have become banal happenstance, the barbaric new normal in a bloody and barbaric nation. I am tired of living in a country obsessed with calibration, a country that has warped a certain constitutional amendment so out of round that lawmakers now push legislation to ensure even the mentally ill can arm themselves like the 82nd Airborne.

I am tired of those same lawmakers telling me this is not the time to talk about that, not the time to talk about maybe making it even a smidgen harder for angry people to take out their anger with military-grade weaponry and a satchel full of clips. I am tired of them saying this because so many of them believe there's never a time to talk about it.

Seventeen kids and adults dead, 30 incidents in which three or more people were shot in a year barely six weeks old, and what are you going to do? Write your senator or congressman? What the hell for? So he or she can spit back the NRA bullet points he or she has learned so well?

And he or she has. The gun lobby has stuffed their war chests with cash to ensure it.

But, hey. At least they'll send along their condolences. They're great at condolences.

I am tired of their condolences. I am tired of their specious arguments, that more laws won't stop what happened in blah-blah-blah. Probably they're right, because technically no law ever stops anyone from doing anything if his intent is strong enough. Yet we still pass laws, because that's what civilized nations do.

Look. I grew up in a house full of guns. My father was a member of the NRA until he figured out it was serving the gun industry and not hunters and sport shooters. And so I have no intrinsic problem with firearms, or the ownership thereof. I have no beef with the friends and family members I have who are avid outdoorsmen and hunters, because they are rational, responsible people and conscientious stewards of the land. What they kill, they put on the dinner table.

This is the way it should be in America. It's the way it used to be, before the country lost its mind on the subject of guns. I want that America back. I want an America back where there aren't people getting shot in multiple numbers every couple of weeks, and where the gun lobby and its Washington lackeys don't say "if so-and-so had only had a gun" -- as if packing heat should just be the normal thing if we want to be safe in America.

Car keys, wallet, Glock 9. Yep, we're ready to go to Wal-Mart.

I'm sorry, but that's insane. It's not how I want to live. And it's not how people in other countries -- civilized countries -- live.

Remember a few weeks ago, when Our Only Available President complained about America having to be a beacon of hope for a bunch of brown and black people in "shithole" countries?

Well. I have a question for you, Mr. President, if you're done sending out your condolences.

Shithole countries?

What the hell do you think 30 multiple-victim shootings in 45 days makes us?