President Barack Obama visibly wept during a gun control speech earlier this year. His tears made news but his inability after more than seven years as president to introduce meaningful limitations on the rights of American citizens to bear high-powered weapons should make more news.
His tears were for the children killed at Sandy Hook elementary school in Dec. 2012. The time for crying about mass murders in the United States should be long past. Orlando should be met with outrage, not words of consolation and action, not further analysis.
Obama had barely settled into the Oval Office when 13 people were shot to death at an immigration centre in New York state in April 2009. Later that same year, an army psychiatrist killed 13 people at a military base in Texas. In 2013, another man killed 12 people at the Navy Yard in Washington D.C. Last year, a couple shot and killed 14 people in California.
Nobody wants to take shotguns away from hunters, to take historic firearms away from collectors or even to take handguns away from Americans wanting to protect themselves in their homes. Yet restricting civilian access to an assault rifle specifically designed for trained soldiers to kill multiple combatants quickly is simply too much to bear for the United States, its president and its people.
With each Virginia Tech and Sandy Hook and Orlando, the lie that is the land of the free and the home of the brave is further exposed. America and Americans have lived in fear since long before 1776, when they were frightened of the frontier and the savage people who lived beyond their villages, scared of both their British overlords and their black slaves, terrified of witchcraft.
Today, the frontier and the savages are outside of America's borders so that's where a wall should keep them, insists a presidential candidate masterfully exploiting an apprehensive populace to fuel his schemes to seize power. A brave people do not need a wall to protect themselves from the rest of the world, nor the services of a fast-talking salesman offering fraudulent protection.
Fortitude built on a foundation of fear and paranoia is just one of the tragic contradictions distorting American life.
While the United States insists it is a country of Main Streets, Obama did nothing in 2009 when given the opportunity to strip the 21st century robber barons of Wall Street of their power to expand their wealth at the expense of the suckers who believe in a fair marketplace.
While America boasts some of the best schools and educators in the world, many of its citizens are disdainful of higher education and anyone who has one.
While Americans brag of their history, they know so little of it. How else to explain why large segments of the country continue to celebrate being on the losing side of a civil war fought over slavery or why the Confederate flag still flies over numerous states.
Americans demand good-paying manufacturing jobs to stay at home but insist on buying from (and working for) low-cost retailers who stock their shelves with consumer goods cheaply produced in a Third World sweatshop.
Their ignorance of the rest of the world and their disdain of all those not fortunate enough to be Americans is matched only by their prevailing trepidation of both.
Yet they terrify each other even more.
They are frightened of their democratically elected governments taking their land, their money and their guns, poisoning their minds with education and providing health care to its poorest citizens.
They are alarmed by their priests (pedophiles), their teachers (God created the world in six days, not six billion years), their doctors (vaccines will make my kid autistic), their married neighbours (gay) and even their own children (addicted to pot, video games and porn).
Regardless of political affiliation, they place no trust in the law and in the men and women whose job it is to uphold it, whether on the streets, at the courts or in the legislatures.
As a country, they seek solace from their fears in the power of their bombs to rid the world of their enemies, real or imagined. As a people, too many too often turn to the cold finality of a gun to righteously rid the world of sinners with the most sinful act.
Orlando is the result.
Like always, a president mourns and a country mourns with him.
Like always, nothing changes.
Like always, the next time is one day closer.
-- Managing editor Neil Godbout
