Robert Parry: America: A Nation of Wildebeest?

Whenever some deranged gunman, armed with an assault rifle or some other combat weapon, slaughters young Americans, at a college or a high school or a mall or, now, a movie theater, I think of those documentaries showing Wildebeest on their on their migrations through crocodile infested rivers. In their frightened eyes, you can see that the herd knows that each crocodile will pick off an individual Wildebeest, flip it in the air, break its back, and then drag it away to be devoured. But the herd still crashes through the river, presumably with the understanding that most of them will survive. The Wildebeest may even be emotionally numbed to the fate of the unlucky ones. In a wy, that is what Americans have become. As we send our children off to school or off to a party or off to the movies, we know instinctively that some of them may die at the hands of some troubled person who has obtained a powerful weapon and has decided to avenge some slight by murdering strangers. Sometimes, the dead are in large numbers, like at Aurora, Colorado, multiplex theater, but usually it's just one or two at a time. We just hope it's not our kids. We weep over the tragedy of strangers, but our secret thought is: Thank goodness it wasn't my son or daughter. We are like the Wildebeest continuing the migration hoping that at the next river it won't be our turn. At such moments, it's also typical for news media pundits to wave their fingers at politicians for not having the "courage" to stop this mayhem by standing up to the ruthless National Rifle Association and its gun obsessed fringe, but the harder truth is that the problem is not with America's politicians, it's with American voters.