A liberal snowflake takes a look at gun culture from the inside.Three days after the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history, I fired a handgun for the first time.
Because I am alive in the 21st century, the subject of guns is frequently on my mind. Specific details stick in the mind and retain their capacity to shock—the crowd being mowed down through broken windows in the Las Vegas hotel, the killer in the Texas church shooting babies at point-blank range, the man who crawled across the floor at Pulse nightclub to stuff his bandanna in another man’s gunshot wound while the shooter continued to fire, the six little kids hiding in the closet at Sandy Hook who decided to make a run for it only to be slaughtered moments after they opened the door. But as a phenomenon, gun murders are becoming distressingly familiar.
According to a running tally maintained by the New York Times, 555 incidents have qualified as mass shootings in the 511 days that elapsed between Orlando (June 12, 2016) and Sutherland Springs (November 5, 2017). The last time I looked at the Gun Violence Archive, 13,581 people had been killed and 27,700 wounded in gun-related violence in the United States so far this year, but those numbers will be higher by the time you read this.
