Turn on your TV anytime in the last two weeks, and there they were again, kids in camo helmets with peace signs and subversive little messages ("War is hell") markered onto them. Half a century has come and gone since they were humping it through the bush, but Ken Burns and Lynn Novick took you right back there, took you back to a crazy time in America when delusion and duplicity and death in all its forms ruled.
"The Vietnam War" was a tour de force from America's master documentarian, 18 hours that made time sideslip. Suddenly it was all real, again. Occasionally it was too real, as when the kids humping it through the bush got caught in an ambush. Then there would be chaos and shouting and the morbidly cheery sound of automatic weapons fire, pop-pop-pop-pop.
It was the sound Vietnam made in 1967, '68, '69, '70.
Now it's the sound Las Vegas makes in 2017, right here in the good old USA.
I don't know what you can say about 59 dead and 500 injured the other night, except that it is madness unbound and a human tragedy of unfathomable proportions. This is not about the Second Amendment anymore, stretched all out of round these days by zealots. It is not about more background checks, or about craven politicians who offer the usual thoughts-and-prayers charade while they finger tattered copies of their NRA bullet points.
This is not even about simple murder anymore.
No, this is about hearing the same pop-pop-pop-pop in the middle of a country music concert that you heard all week watching "The Vietnam War." It's about a crazy white guy in a high place (not, ahem, a Muslim or a Syrian refugee, Mr. President) committing the terror homegrown this time. It's about chaos and shouting and, yes, the same sounds produced by the same type of small-arms fire, achieving the same results.
Fifty-nine dead and 500 injured, you see, means we have come to a place in America where gun crime figures have become full-on combat casualty figures. The metrics of what happened on an American street on a normal American night rival the metrics of America's last combat operation in Iraq (Operation New Dawn). Fifty-nine dead and 500 injured in the former; 73 dead and 295 wounded in the latter.
And the dismaying thing about all of that is none of it should shock us anymore.
The harsh truth is what happened in Vegas has happened before -- Charlie Whitman in the Texas Tower was the first killer in a high place, 51 years ago -- and it will happen again, because this is who we have decided we want to be as a country. We vote for it. We make excuses for it. We become wild-eyed hysterics whenever someone even mildly suggests we might want to try to slow it down a bit.
Obama's comin' to take your guns. Remember?
Look. I grew up around firearms, grew up in a family of hunters and target shooters. My dad had a reproduction 1774 Charleville musket hanging over our fireplace. He had a service carbine in his bedroom closet, and several handguns. He had a pair of matching cap-and-ball Kentucky horse pistols that now rest on a shelf in my closet.
I believe in the Second Amendment.
But I also believe that at some point, and I don't know when, a certain segment of the country lost its collective mind over it. When I was growing up, the right to bear arms meant you had a hunting rifle or two and maybe a handgun, or maybe, yes, a service carbine in your closet. It didn't mean you armed yourself like the 82nd Airborne. It didn't mean you felt it necessary to sling an AK-47 on your back when you went off to buy a gallon of milk, or had military-grade small arms stashed all over a hotel in Las Vegas, the way the shooter did the other night.
And it for sure didn't mean you thought someone was coming to take your guns just because they suggested a few background checks. Background checks are about a little inconvenience, not about depriving you of your inalienable rights as an American. Get a grip, people.
It's true a few background checks probably won't stop what happened in Vegas. On the other hand, we're never gonna hear about the shootings that didn't happen because someone couldn't pass a background check. And it's absolutely stone certain that making it easier instead of harder for the crazies to slaughter our friends and loved ones won't slow that slaughter.
There has to be some sort of balance, in other words. There has to be a way to get back to a place where exercising your Second Amendment rights means, yes, you own a hunting rifle or two, and where common sense rules instead of hysteria.
Until that time, expect more Las Vegases.
And do you know how much I hate writing that?
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