I was first aware of the shootings in San Bernardino on Thursday when I was exercising at the gym. A few months from now, will I remember where I was when I first heard the news? Just like how I don’t remember where I was when I first heard about Newtown. About Chattanooga. About Colorado Springs. Can you remember? After the incidents in those places as well as Aurora, Charleston, Roseburg, and Isla Vista (among many, many others) just within the last three years, why am I not constantly terrified for my life when I go to the gym, to school, to church, or to the movies? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a tragedy is defined as any “event causing great suffering, destruction, and distress,” and implying something unusual in its occurrence, distressing even to the people not directly involved. At this point, mass shootings have become normalized, and the fear has dissolved to dangerously low levels.

I was asked to give a different opinion than other, more conservative contributions to the Odyssey. I consider myself a centrist, which is to say I think most people are, by nature, selfish and cruel, and what religion they use to justify their actions, helpful or harmful, is a product of circumstance. People can be benevolent and decent, but it requires a good upbringing and/or a lot of luck. So unlike more extreme conservatives, I don’t believe one’s race is a cause of destructive behavior, and unlike more extreme liberals, I don’t think everyone’s a precious angel that’s simply a victim of circumstance. This article simply contains some of my rambling thoughts. I’m a filmmaker, not a political scientist, so bear in mind that everything written here is by a guy who has nothing better to do with his time than watch Chaplin movies and babble on about the genius of Tarantino’s accidental post-modernism.

Anyway, in my view, a lot of people have been criticizing the fact that we, the United States, have “done nothing” in the last few years to stop our citizens from killing each other. This misses the point. The American government has been doing nothing for a long time, but when the victims aren’t minorities (Charleston being a notable exception), suddenly liberals start to panic, despite the fact they’re the supposed arbiters of equality. Where were they when the Aguilar brothers (not white) were shot and killed on November 23 in East Los Angeles, California? Where were they when Pete Cordero (also not white) was shot and killed on November 22 in Highland Park in Los Angeles, California? Where were they when Aaron Harts (also not white) was shot and killed on November 18 in Green Meadows in Los Angeles, California? The fact conservatives don’t panic either says something about how poorly we treat each other across the entire political spectrum.

So there’s the racial aspect behind why the gun debate is so convoluted. Furthermore, as someone who grew up in western North Carolina, I’m confident guns will never be successfully controlled in the United States. Although I’ve never touched a gun, let alone fired one, I know plenty who have, and some really don’t want to lose them. There’s an inter-generational reinforcement that fetishizes the pistol and respects it as a work of art. Personally, I find guns incredibly stupid; after all, they have no other utility besides murdering other living beings. The primary defense of guns, arguing that only the mentally ill use guns for murdering, has about the same level of absurdity as trying to defend that only the mentally ill use chairs for sitting. Killing is a gun’s function. While pro-gun lobbyists certainly shouldn’t be ignored as to why gun legislation continues to be so pathetic, they’re small potatoes compared to the ingrained gun culture of the United States. I confess I don’t understand it, but I’m not so naïve as to think that can be eliminated within my lifetime.

And unless guns are completely banned from every American civilian, any measure to “reduce” them is just a band-aid on a gaping wound. People complain that a lot of the mass shootings were committed by legally obtained weapons, which I know is terrible. But in 2009 and 2010, Los Angeles, one of the "richest" (on paper) cities on Earth, had 1,149 gun-related deaths. Realistically, how many of those were carried by registered handguns? I doubt very many.

Accepting the premise that guns will never be removed from the United States, what can we (read: legislators) do? One proposed solution is ethnic cleansing. I’m sure many Republicans were relieved when they heard the San Bernardino perpetrators had names that ended in “k” and that the FBI is investigating the shootings as a terrorist attack. But if terrorism is any act of violence carried out for political means, why wasn’t the racially-motivated Charleston shooting widely considered an act of terrorism? The answer, of course, is that the shooter was mentally ill. For people as anti-Islam as the extremists in the Republican party, you’d think more would be ready to decry all Muslims as mentally ill. But of course, that serves against their best interests. You have to spend money to rehabilitate the insane.

My point is that anti-Muslim sentiment will reach even greater heights after this event, and in a few centuries from now, Americans and Europeans will be viewed as horrific as the anti-Semites during the Holocaust. Much like “Jews,” the term “Muslim” can be used (to borrow a Louis C.K. bit) both as the politically correct term as well as the derogatory term, based on its emphasis. It is disturbing that one can easily tell what side of the political aisle you’re on based on how you say the word “Muslim.”

A lot of this is pushed by the media and can easily convince the feeble-minded. My dad, a working-class white man with a GED, who’s pro-gay marriage and a strong supporter of civil rights for African Americans has been watching Fox News a lot again recently, and it’s noticeably changed him for the worst, a kind of hate-filled, unpleasant brute. From what he’s saying, I deduce Fox News must be teaching its viewers that every other Muslim is a suicide bomber. He’s not a stupid man, and it only goes to show that truly anyone can be manipulated into believing vitriolic and spiteful propaganda.

I want to conclude with why a pro-gun argument, self-defense, is illogical. The University of Wisconsin published a study in which subjects were given shocks by "attackers," and the subjects were given the opportunity to deliver a certain number of shocks back. If the number of shocks “in revenge” increased, it was evidence that they were more aggressive toward their attackers. In some of these tests, a gun was placed in the room. In these situations, the number of shocks was at its maximum, thereby demonstrating that the mere sight of a weapon increases aggression. This study was published in 1967.

In the 48 years since, events like the San Bernardino shooting are not tragic; worse, they are commonplace.