Leaving flags at half-past for pertuity won't solve gun violence, but it may be a reminder that as a people this country just won't learn from its mistakes

 

I noticed today that the flags in front of the William Kenzo Nakamura United States Court House in Seattle were still at half-mast:

 

This court houses one of the appeals courts for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. I wondered who Nakamura was, the court house only being named after him in 2001, before which it was simply the United States Court House. He wasn’t a respected officer of the judicial branch, but a simple private in the U.S. Army who was awarded the Medal of Honor during World War II. I’m sure that there are many other Seattle natives who won the medal, and others who had notable judicial careers, so I think it was safe to assume that this naming was done for sociopolitical reasons; thus the reason for the half-masting was in honor of the Asian victims in the Monterey Park mass shooting, which was in keeping with the usual hypocrisies of "inclusion."

Now, I encountered a comment from someone calling himself “stumptownblogger” who suggests that we should “just leave the flags at half-mast…this country is in big trouble.” I certainly see a "point" in this: I mean, why is this particularly mass shooting more “noteworthy” than any other? The subsequent mass shooting at Half Moon Bay, also perpetrated by an Asian man, was more likely an actual hate crime against another group.

While it is true that the Monterey Park shooting was the worst in numbers in a single event, it still paled in the totality of victims in 44 mass shooting events this year through the 24^th, 86 deaths and 265 total victims, using Wiki’s criteria of four or more victims during a single event. But as high as that number seems, it pales in comparison to other months; July seems to be a “popular” month to get the “itch” to start shooting: in 2021, July led the year with 84 mass shootings according to Wiki’s count, and it was the same in 2022, with 100 mass shooting incidents. Both 2021 and 2022 averaged 2 mass shootings per day, according to Wiki’s criteria, which begin tracking them in 2018. What is indicated, however, is that this month is already the second worst for mass shootings for total deaths since 2018 with a week to go.

So given that the Monterey Park tragedy wasn’t unusual, that begs the question of why in the overall scheme of things are we not simply leaving flags at half-mast for all the victims of this country’s insane insistence that owning guns is a “right” and not a “privilege.” Only people who need guns should have them, but in this country it is “normal” for someone to just go to a gun shop, buy a weapon and start shooting someone, or multiple people on a whim or grudge. Second Amendment fanatics tell us everyone should be armed to “defend” themselves, but the ease in which someone can be killed by a gun seems to contradict that assertion; remember how Indiana Jones just shrugged and shot that guy with his fancy scimitar sword play.

Not that homicides would disappear without gun ownership; in the UK, which bans most people from owning guns, the most common instruments to commit homicide are knives. But since people can defend themselves against knife attacks, or are more likely to survive them, it is thus little wonder why the UK has only a quarter of the homicide rate of the U.S. despite being a similarly polyglot society with the same social problems.

But no matter. As with all mass shootings, the Monterey Park incident will be forgotten like all the rest, and most people will still think some important person died recently to explain the half-mast in front of the court house. It is a bit of a joke, in fact, since “mourning” people in this way won’t bring them back, and people in this country don’t want to do what is needed to prevent another mass shooting from occurring, probably tomorrow. We might keep the flags at half-mast in perpetuity, and people still won’t care why they are such, not really at all; but it may just serve as a reminder than as a country we are destined not to learn from our mistakes, especially those on a certain side of the political spectrum.