Sandy Hook: How Far We Have Not Come

(Editor’s note: Mr. Valania’s article was first published on 8 January 2013 by The Huffington Post.)

By Phawker‘s Jonathan Valania – It is a sad testament to the depth of our national indifference that it took the massacre of 20 six year olds in their first grade classroom to finally trigger a united and sustained public outcry for an end to the madness. After 62 mass murders and counting since 1982, we have, it would appear, finally reached the tipping point.

On this we can all agree: Never again.

In fairness, this complacency was not entirely our own fault, it was, by and large, fostered and fomented by the National Rifle Association, which runs interference and messaging for the corporations that mass produce elegant machines of precision-engineered lethality. The NRA is paid handsomely to ensure that gun makers are never held accountable for the bloodbaths that result whenever their product is used as intended. The NRA are, according to inside-the-Beltway conventional wisdom, a fearsome lot, Vader-esque masters of the dark arts of fear, intimidation and paranoia. And that’s just with its allies.

With all apologies to Leonard Cohen, the NRA has seen the future, baby, and it is murder.

The NRA is almost wizardly in its harnessing of the spellbinding power of mass media to obfuscate the obvious. In the wake of every one of those 62 mass murders, the NRA successfully convinced us to ignore the literally smoking guns at the center of all this carnage. Last month’s farcical press conference was no exception.

Pay no attention to that armor-plated guy with the M-16 methodically wasting the audience at a Batman movie. Gun laws can’t stop that kind of thing. Shit happens, get over it.

Read the rest of this great article here.