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- Gun-violence in schools is a symptom, not a cause; while addressing the fact that assault rifles are ridiculously easy to purchase is a noble cause — we are not spending enough time discussing the fact that it has become completely normal and widespread for young men to want to purchase assault rifles in order to murder their teachers and peers. We’re not just dealing with a policy problem — we’re dealing with a spiritual virus, of unknown origins.
- There’s something to be said for the senators who urge us to pray — prayer speaks more to the heart of darkness than policy proposals.
- Now, of course, Republicans are comically callow, feckless, fuckheads when it comes to guns; as they are about everything — but once in awhile, their religious irrationalism produces accidental, and therefore, ironic, truth.
- The epidemic of the ‘active shooter’ is an emergence: it is not all a sudden phenomenon; it has only become noticeable suddenly. It has been replicating itself in the blood stream of American life for several centuries.
- Dostoyevsky, from The Brothers Karamazov: “I think the devil doesn’t exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.”
- Dostoyevsky, from Demons: “In sinning, each man sins against all, and each man is at least partly guilty for another’s sin. There is no isolated sin.”
- We live in a society where the dead do not matter; where they are buried, quickly mourned — then forgotten. Americas many…
