Mass Shooting Insurance: Why Lafayette Signals The Deep Changes That Are Coming

Sadly, there has been another mass shooting, this time?in Lafayette, Louisiana. Multiple lives have been lost, and multiple people have been injured. I haven’t even gotten the images from last week’s mass shooting out of my mind. Or the month before that. Like the increasing storms from global warming, the increasing intolerance in America is inevitably leading to even more incidents of crazed (usually white) gunmen, taking innocent lives. Do I need to think about getting mass shooting insurance? When I think about the future, I think, much like global warming, the atmosphere in America has become too inundated with the political toxicities that we’ve leaked over decades. Will the storm season of mass shootings ever end?

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Courtesy Mother Jones
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Courtesy Mother Jones

The gun industry and the NRA have created such a frenzied state of paranoia among predominantly white, middle-aged men in America that I often wonder what the end purpose will be? What exactly do they hope to do when they plan on fighting the supposed “tyrannical” government they oppose? We don’t know many details about Lafayette. I’m certainly not going to make any assumptions. I can tell you what my gut tells me. I can tell you what the majority of Americans are probably thinking before any more details are released. I can also tell you by next week, we will have forgotten his name. He’ll be another Dylann Roof. Another James Holmes. Another Adam Lanza, and America will not have learned its lesson once again.

We continue to fail in creating common sense gun laws because we always let the gun industry and the NRA frame the dialogue. It’s always “they want to take away our guns.” or “we already have gun laws that aren’t enforced.” I guess then, when we apply that line of logic to other political issues we might as well have a free-for-all. A Libertarian dream. I know one thing. I don’t like having to think that I need more insurance policies for my future. I think Americans can come up with a workable solution to reduce these catastrophes. But, just like global warming, if the climate deniers continue to be allowed to frame the dialogue, we’ll spend all of our time trying to determine what is real. When there are daily nightmares in our society like Lafayette, sometimes figuring out what is real is difficult. That doesn’t mean that we can’t start with the facts. The fact is that there are too many damned shootings in this country. There are too many innocent lives lost. Nowhere in the Constitution does it say that the amendments we have must?cost innocent lives. When a terrorist tries to bomb a plane, we implement measures to ensure the safety of innocent lives in the future. So I ask you America, what are we going to do to ensure the safety of innocent lives in the future with regard to mass shootings?