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Today in America we face a storm that’s been growing for a long time, the desensitizing of the American citizen. Now this isn’t about gun control or animal rights, I’m not pushing Veteran issues or Millennial disrespect. I’m talking about each and every one of us, as Americans, and what we’re being faced with in our nation today. In today’s world of technology we receive information so fast and process it all as concrete law. Usually the first meme we see about an event will directly reflect our opinion on it before we even check the facts to figure out if it’s true or not for ourselves.
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Memorial weekend started off for most people like it did any other year. Wake up Saturday, make some coffee, check the news, Facebook, maybe start texting your buddies about barbecue plans for the weekend. But the three day weekend held quite a firestorm for the country to witness, not everyone would get to enjoy the grilled bacon burgers and ribs. Let’s start with the stories nobody cares about, in city of Chicago Illinois.
Chicago is well known for it’s crime, in spite of the city having some of the strongest gun control laws in the United States of America by the end of Saturday, May 28th 2016, there were approximately forty-four United States citizens shot, with four fatal shootings. By the end of the weekend nearly seventy people were injured by illegal firearms and a reported half dozen dead. “How can that be?” you ask, well let me explain.
Backtrack about twenty to thirty years or so and you’ll find shootings involving full automatic rifles, this is what started the gun control issue and eventually led to the banning of automatic rifles from the public. Now cities like Chicago are left with the criminals and cops being armed, and law abiding citizens left out in the middle. Making harmful things illegal only takes it away from the people willing to follow the law to begin with. Even if they did manage to get every single firearm from the public criminals would resort to weapons like blades and bats. It wouldn’t stop the crimes, just change the criteria. Our next story starts in Henderson Kentucky…
Henderson Kentucky is a smaller town, with twenty-nine-thousand people and only seventeen square miles. You’d need almost twenty-eight Hendersons to make up New York City in land, and three-hundred to match it in population. Henderson is a quiet, riverside town that host one of the largest bluegrass festivals in the country, Bluegrass in the Park FOlklife Festival is an annual tradition dating back almost one-hundred years. Not a place where you’d expect to find a big story right? Well you won’t. The choices of one man over the weekend to drive his car through a memorial should have had the nation stand up with an angry fist to the heavens, but it didn’t.
The good citizens of Henderson Kentucky took the time to meticulously set up five-thousand crosses in the town’s Central Park, each bearing the name of a Henderson resident, that gave their life in service to their country. The whole memorial costs the town around one-hundred dollars per cross. Anthony Burrus decided that his town meant nothing to him, and ran over one-hundred-sixty of them with his 1979 Ford Thunderbird that he later abandoned down the road at a McDonald’s with pieces of the memorial still stuck in his tires. This total disregard for others and lack of respect should have enraged the masses, but the story has only been shared by a few hundred-thousand.
Many more memorials all across our once great nation were vandalized and looted over the weekend. This rash attacks of blatant disrespect should have the full attention of the media, but it doesn’t. The ninety-thousand gallons of oil that was spilled in the gulf by Shell last month should have blown up with rage, but it didn’t. The fact that we lose a big percent of our veterans to suicide should make us, as Americans, bleed with sorrowful fury, but it doesn’t. By seeing everything so fast and having access to everything our nation has grown accustomed to the horrors of our world. We’ve been focused on how we should use bathrooms and who’s getting today’s gender swap.
Up until Harambe was killed because of the stupidity of a neglectful mother, our nation was distracted on bathrooms, for the love of all that is good, bathrooms? Seriously people? I understand the uproar about the loss of an endangered animal, but bathrooms? Personally, I always go with my son into the bathroom. Not because of what people trying to be the opposite gender may do, but because as a parent it is my job. If that mother had done her job, her son would have never fallen in, Harambe would never have been shot, and he’d be playing with the toys from his seventeenth birthday the day before.
I’m glad to see the general public get outraged by something that is actually a just cause to be upset, but watching people try to make it a race or gun issue? I’ve actually seen posts about the “white kid coming into the black man’s home, so the black man got shot.” or all the people claiming that the zoo should have tranquilized him, it’s people like this that make me fear for the future of our once great nation. Drugging an animal that large would have dramatically decreased the (obviously not caucasian) child’s chances of survival, he could have torn the child to pieces, fallen on the child and crushed or drowned him, or any number of likely outcomes that darting a Gorilla that weighs over four-hundred pounds. I’m very glad that Harambe didn’t rip him in half, but now people are preaching gun control because of it? The overall intelligence of our nation is deeply concerning.
What do you think? Was the shooting of Harambe justified? Will anti-gunners ever smarten up? Why is our nation in such a bad place that spray painting memorials is an okay thing to do? Why are we always focused on the wrong events?
Brandon Wright is a writer for Cold Dead Hands 2nd Amendment Advocacy. An avid outdoorsman, he spends most weekends hiking with his friends and family enjoying the nature and forests of the northeastern United States.
