By David Himmel

I’m exhausted. I’m exhausted from living at the intersection of Rage and Sadness and not being able to do anything about it.

Mass shootings occur more frequently than I have to fill my car with gas. More frequently than most married couples have sex. More frequently than they should.

“But, David, you can do something about it!” my more hopeful and idiotic family members, friends, and acquaintances will say. Can I? Like what? Vote? Run for office? The system is a farce. The only rights we’ll have left is to be shot to death in public. Or worse, watch others we love be shot to death in public.

Yes, mass shootings are part of the mental health crisis facing America. Only sickos shoot up parades and grocery stores and churches and schools and parks and… But only sickos think mental illness is the only factor.

Making weapons designed to destroy human bodies as quickly as possible impossible to get through legal means would make a difference. Some sicko gets on the roof of a building at a parade with a bolt-action or small magazine rifle and I gurantee you, the deathtoll will drop. So, too, will the number of injured. If horrible things like murder are going to happen, it’s in our best interest to protect ourselves from that risk.

We wear seatbelts in cars with airbags to keep us safe in car crashes. Air travel has its safety protocols to reduce the risk of terrorism or crashes. We put life preserves and sunscreen on our kids to help prevent drowning and skin cancer. Food poisoning still happens, but the FDA does its best to keep it to a minimum. We have a lot of regulations—local, state, and federal—in place to help prevent the possibility of bad shit happening. But not so much when it comes to weapons.

And, yeah, it is a problem with sickos. Sickos and sickos alone are responsible for mass shootings. But the sickos are not just the shooters. The sickos are every elected official at every level of government who refuses to take effective action against reducing the risk of mass murders and mass injuries from gun violence occurring every week. The sickos are also the electorate who vote for those who refuse to do anything effective. Yeah, these people are the exact same as the shooters.

They lack the deductive reasoning to see how making assault weapons illegal will help reduce the horror. They lack the ability to empathize with the victims and the communities immediately impacted by the horrors. Their brains are unable to look at human lives and see value. They cannot process the concept of goodwill and kindness. They are sociopaths. All of them. The shooters, the elected officials, the voters. They are the sickos.

And if the elected officials aren’t sickos, they’re feckless barnacles clinging to the power that comes with their office. Which is why I ask you, what good have the Democrats done? How have they really fought for protecting the People? They fear rocking the boat because they might be out of a job that pays way too well and offers an excellent seat to the shit show that is legislation and budgeting that reduces access to quality or any mental healthcare, reduces education, rolls back voting rights and rights to privacy.

What should they do? What can we do?

A friend of mine told me today, “When I took my 200-hour yoga teacher training, we all had to get liability insurance, because we could potentially hurt someone and they could sue. How is it that a low-level stretch is more dangerous than an assault weapon? Make these lunatics pay for insurance when they buy a gun and then make the insurance companies pay when they murder people.”

She’s right. If assault weapons and gun violence aren’t a threat, then back that up with your money. Because that’s the only language we speak in this country. Elected officials do everything they can to make money so they can stay in power to make more money. Insurance companies do everything they can to not have to spend money.

We need to create accountability. Of course, we know that, right? And yet, there is none. And there won’t be. Because the sickos are running the shooting range and they’re fucking demented.  

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I’m starting to hear more about people I know who knew victims. Won't be long before every one of us knows a victim of this kind of crap. And ain't that America...

Process of elimination is happening. Like the circus or a shitty Chris Pratt film, a mass shooting is coming to a community near you. And yet, each time it strikes we say, “How could it happen here!?” as if here is any more special than anywhere else. We’re all governed by the same assclowns. We’re all susceptible to be in the right place at the wrong time when a sicko pulls the trigger. And we’re all listening when elected officials say, “Now is the time for real change” before nothing new happens. Or, at best, we get that cute, hardly anything writing home about gun legislation Congress barely agreed to recently.

The inaction after Sandy Hook convinced me there’s nothing this country is going to do about assault weapons and mass shootings. And that terrible certainty has been proven over and over again for the last ten years.

It’s all so horrifying and I’m flirting with extreme nihilism at best.

I'm living at the intersection of Rage and Sadness. And it's exhausting. Nihilism seems the only traffic light out of this. Although, there is Fear. Because Fear is no longer for the weak... it seems best used by the sensible. Perhaps this is nihilistic, but fear is all we have left.