This is what I think about after each mass shooting.

It's not just the killed. I worry that Americans have lapsed into a subliminal coping reaction that magically assumes all of the "wounded" in these shootings are raced to a hospital, have an emergency surgery, recoup in an ICU for a week, maybe a month, then somehow magically metamorphisize back into exactly the person they were before the shooting, like some Second Amendment Indestructable American Transformer.

That's NOT what happens after you are shot (possibly repeatedly) with a high velocity weapon. Many of these victims face massive, permanent damage to internal organs, bones, joints, etc. requiring multiple surgeries over time to correct or mitigate and months of searing pain in physical therapy to regain a FRACTION of their former capabilities. And these victims will spend the rest of their lives replaying what they witnessed in their head with a level of detail IMAX films can only dream of.

As everyone in the world except Americans figured out years / decades ago, there is nothing about this mayhem that is remotely required or inevitable in modern life. America is the ONLY industrialized nation on the planet that still faces this problem. Mass shootings aren't the cost of a free society with gun rights. Mass shootings are the cost of a collective psychosis among a subset of Americans who have perfected ways to terrorize politicians into blocking any actions to limit the availability of automatic weapons. The same bloc of politicians who also block any meaningful re-invention of a failed healthcare system that generates higher health COSTS than any peer country, produces lower health QUALITY across multiple measures and provides virtually no long term care for mental health issues.

If the 2017 shooting in Las Vegas that killed 60 people and wounded 413 wasn't enough to shock America into action, I'd rather not contemplate the scale of the act that WOULD finally jolt America out of this gun loving, delusional hellscape we currently occupy.


WTH