A new shooting raises the old problems
So now we have another mass shooting in Maine. As always after these horrific incidents, people seem to need an answer to the question, Why?
Some people want to see a personal connection between victim and perpetrator. Others are satisfied with “mental health problems.” Others fix responsibility on the Republican party, which can’t seem to get enough super-powered weapons coursing through our society.
These are all attempts to get to the bottom of the question, Who is responsible?
The surprising answer to Who is responsible?
This demand for fixing responsibility has a big problem. Our notions of responsibility are far too narrow. We are looking for a delimited author of the act, an individual or a group that we can section off from ourselves and prevent from acting the same way again.
But that is not the way responsibility really works. There is a much wider range of influences that act upon the person or persons who actually commit the act.
The real answer to the question Who is responsible? is something that not enough people consider. The real answer is that we all are responsible—and this includes decent Americans who cannot bear the pain and tragedy of all this murder as well as the callous and indecent Americans who insist on playing with military-style weapons like they were toys.
Three levels of responsibility
There are three levels of responsibility for these horrendous murders.
First, there is the responsibility of the perpetrators. They are the ones who actually pull the trigger, so they are the proximate cause of the deaths.
Second, there is the responsibility of the weapons-providers. This responsibility lies with Republicans and their plutocrat backers. They are the prior cause of the deaths because they put high-powered weapons in the hands of the perpetrators. Whatever their reasons—for instance, the puerile high they get from blowing things up with such weapons or the delusion that they could “protect themselves” from the tyrannical deep state knocking down their doors or the profits they make from manufacturing—they refuse to stop perpetrators from blowing away innocents.
And third, there is the responsibility of decent Americans who are horrified by these needless massacres but will not use their overwhelming power to do the one thing that could put a stop to the whole chain of responsibility. So far, we decent Americans have not stopped Republicans from perverting democracy so much that we, the majority, cannot get what we want—namely, effective and rational gun control. (Both Pew and Gallup polls since 2010 have always shown a majority in favor of stricter gun laws. In the past five years, as mass shootings have increased, the majority has grown to 63-65%.)
If we think that only the shooter is responsible, or if we think that only Republicans are responsible, then our notion of responsibility is too narrow. We must widen the circle of responsibility to include ourselves. And we must realize that we are duty bound to stop Republicans, for it is they who make it possible for the perpetrators to pull the trigger.
Meeting our responsibility
We must see our responsibility, step up to it, and fundamentally change the conditions in our nation by sweeping Republicans out of office at every level in every state. We are the majority. We can do it.
So why don’t we? Why doesn't Decent America simply pour out to the polls and strip the Republican party of its death-grip on America?
Because too many of us don’t see our responsibility vividly. We blame Republicans rightly, but we don’t feel that their blame, fear, hatred, and love of violence demands that we stop them.
A Zen story
A Zen story relates to this inability to see what we must do clearly enough to feel the pressure to do it. A disciple goes to the master and asks, “Master, when should I stop eating meat?” The master replies, “As soon as you can.”
The point is that the disciple sees a need to stop eating meat. But he does not feel the pressure to do it or he would have done it already. Intellectual understanding is not enough. We must both understand and act on that understanding.
This is us. Decent Americans see that Republicans are the cause of America’s gun insanity. We see that their innate fear literally puts the weapons in the hands of the shooters. We see that they want weapons in everyone’s hands while refusing to take responsibility for the havoc their desire wreaks on society.
We see that Republicans don’t care about these mass shootings. We see their responsibility intellectually. We see that the only way to stop an effect is to eliminate its cause. But for some reason, not enough of us feel the pressure that our understanding should exert upon us. If we did, we would already have done it.
A saint tells us to stop them
In the Summa Theologiae, Thomas Aquinas unequivocally states that war is a sin. As such, decent people should not engage in it. Nevertheless, he says, when we see others engaging in this sin, when we see them about to kill innocents, when we see them unleashing their rage and hatred and behaving more bestially than beasts, we are more than justified in taking up arms to protect their victims. We can and should stop them from sinning against their fellow men.
Similarly, when decent Americans see Republicans putting assault weapons in the hands of mass-murderers, we can and should stop them from sinning against their fellow men. We must both understand and act on our understanding.
We can still do it. We have one more chance to overwhelm the polls in 2024 and reduce Republicans to powerlessness, to leave them gnashing their teeth in defeat, to return them to the permanent minority they occupied during America’s greatest expansion of rights and opportunities in the mid-twentieth century.
Stopping Republicans is generally good for America
Acting on our understanding, by the way, would also stop Republicans from doing other sorts of damage to the American people. If we effectively cut them off from power, we can restore a woman’s right to control her body, enact effective immigration laws, reverse income inequality, prevent voter suppression, and stop the many other ways that Republicans sin against their fellow men out of their innate fear, hatred, and violence.
However, if we merely understand but do not do, if we fail to cut off Republicans at the knees in 2024, then they will stop us from stopping them. If they are left with any power at all after next year’s elections, they will pervert the laws so much that it will be impossible remove them through non-violent elections. They will force us to initiate civil war against them when we finally feel the urgency of stopping them.
And we would be as responsible for that as we are for American’s gun insanity. Because we understood that Republicans should be stopped, but we did not act to stop them.
We must feel the urgency now or regret it later
I, for one, do not want to feel the guilt that will come from realizing my responsibility after its too late.
I, for one, choose to act democratically in every way I can to stop Republicans now, before they force me to take up arms against them. I choose to feel the pressure to do what my understanding demands of me.
I encourage all decent Americans to make this choice along with me.Let’s put ourselves out of the Republicans’ misery.
And then we can go about rebuilding the world they have wrecked. Our decency will make the world far better than anything their fear and hatred can ever imagine.
Let’s just do it.