Nothing will change

[BainsBane]

And the reason is because property is more valuable than life in American culture. We watched small children murdered in Sandyhook, and despite great effort by the Obama administration, the most modest legislation failed.

Voters across the political spectrum give politicians a pass for standing with the gun lobby over American lives. They defend immunity for gun corporations and in the process place profit and property over human life. We see liberals and conservatives alike insisting that their right to own, stockpile, and even use guns against other human beings is sacrosanct. We see the proliferation of genocidal stand your ground laws. We see efforts by the NRA to ensure that no locality is allowed to keep their population safe and that paranoid white men should be able to carry guns on their person and use then against people of color when ever they feel frightened. We see the gun lobby working to ensure domestic batterers have access to guns to kill women. What all of these immoral positions have in common is that they are based on the underlying value that property matters more than life. They also reflect the racism that is at the very foundation of American society and structures which life and which speech is deemed valuable.

A speech in the wake of Sandyhook applauded by Second Amendment activists proclaimed: "My rights Trump your dead." It gets at the core of the value system underling US gun policy.
The right being championed over the deaths of tiny children is property, deadly property that is explicitly championed as mattering more than life, even of the most innocent and fragile.

Mass shootings continue and grow ever more deadly for the same reasons Puerto Ricans are dying. This IS America. This is the culture Americans choose when they vote for politicians who oppose gun control, when they make excuses for those politicians, and when they place their own accumulation of property over the lives of citizens. We are the shooters. We pull the trigger every time we make excuses, every time we vote without prioritizing gun control. And no one accepts responsibility because because life simply doesn't matter enough.