When 27 people were murdered - most of them children - at Sandy Hook elementary, the United States seemed ready to take a good look at itself and declare, for once and all, that military grade automatic weapons should not be in the hands of the mentally ill, and that the best way to guarantee that was by restricting the sale of automatic weapons, increasing background checks, etc...
94% of Americans polled supported gun reform in 2013, but the bill failed to pass. We can save the question of whether or not this still counts as a democracy when a bill supported by an overwhelming majority of Americans fails to make it through congress for another time.
The prevailing wisdom is that this is just another rotation of the wheel. There will be the standard outpouring of grief, then outrage, followed by a long silence and no change.
Probably. But maybe not. Maybe this time is different. Because it plays on attitude even more American than complacency: bigotry.
It would be very nice if we could, once again, explain the statistics to these people - the fact that the person most likely to be killed by a gun is its owner, or that hardly any of them have the tactical awareness to use a weapon effectively in a high stress situation. But by now we should have learned that the high road is helpless. If not, may I remind you who the presumptive Republican nominee for president is?
Its not enough to expect unreasonable people to listen to reason. The thrust of change has to be to be co-opted by their baked-in prejudice.
In which case, we might have hit the jackpot - not that a mass murder like this is ever anything but a tragedy - but we're in luck that this time it was comitted by a member of a feared minority group (that is, feared by the sort of person who thinks citizens will need AK-47s to defend themselves against a tyrannical government in the near future).
Make no mistake. If the tragedy at Orlando hadn't happened, another would still be coming around the bend. It would (will) be awful. Liberals will throw up their hands in frustration, the NRA will stress the need to arm citizens, and nothing will change.
That's if the shooter is white, of course. The NRA, and Joe the Plumber aren't afraid enough of white people for any of our previous mass shootings to provoke major change, even if they should be*. But they are afraid of ISIS, and - more broadly - Muslims in general.
Now that the anti-gun movement can be framed as anti-minority, it might gain more traction. If you find that hard to believe, imagine a large group of urban blacks shows up to an NRA rally, pointing out that the vast majority of Americans prosecuted for gun possession are black, and that the few remaining restrictions are merely institutionalised racism. Those same, mostly white folks would backpedal so hard - stressing that restrictions are good and keep us safe, because we need to know who is buying this arsenal - and how dare you for mentioning racism, ever.
Now that the anti-gun movement can dovetail with anti-Muslim sentiment. We are fools if we pretend that that bigotry doesn't exist, or that it can be reasoned with - once again, recall the presumptive Republican nominee - it might be the only way to get through to the sort of person who thinks average citizens have a right to automatic weapons. Instead of keeping military grade arsenal away from Americans, we'll be keeping them from terrorists! The fact that every mass shooter - regardless of his skin color - has proven to be above these peoples' grasp.
Finally - for all the wrong reasons - gun control in America just got a boost.
*Have you ever noticed that we are always informed that a white shooter is "mentally ill", whereas with minorities that information is presumed to be redundant?
