Imagine

 Reading the news is often an exercise in despair. Today is no different. While the pandemic remains the number one policy concern, only 99 people died of it yesterday, roughly the same number killed by guns. We are moving heaven and earth - rightly - to address the pandemic. We are doing nothing to address guns.

America's gun sickness kills us in four ways.

- It leads to the mass shootings that capture headlines. These random, horrific killing sprees focus our attention, but do not represent the bulk of firearms deaths: just the most American of them.

- The intimate deaths wrought by suicide. A mental health crisis need not be fatal. With a gun in the house, it could be.

- The deaths wrought by criminals. Whether a domestic abuser who reaches for the gun or a criminal robbing a convenience store, this is an area that American access to guns makes larger than it should be.

- Finally, the epidemic of police shootings - and not just of African Americans - is tied to the fear among police of the population that they ostensibly serve. Some of this fear is absolutely rooted in racist ideas about Black strength and savagery. 

It is also based on so-called "Warrior Training" that a lot of police undergo. Frankly, I would fire every cop who went to one of those seminars. The basic idea is that every interaction between police and the public is potentially deadly, so police should be ready to use deadly force at any moment. The officer who shot Duante Wright had attended one of those seminars; her readiness to use force, any force, over a misdemeanor warrant makes sense if you think every person you interact with could be hiding a lethal weapon. That intersects with racism and you get the steady stream of police killings.

But American police kill a ton of White people, too. Warrior Training is popular, because Americans ARE armed to the teeth. And those who are most aggrieved or ill are the most likely to stockpile weaponry.

Imagine an America that had safely and sanely regulated guns in 1968 and then kept those regulations in place, even adding to them as needed.

The GOP/NRA Axis of Evil is a death cult. That can't be said enough.