Six corpses. A domestic dispute in Iowa. And the British government, ever the officious neighbour, offers its ‘condolences’.
One might say it is a gesture as empty as the chambers of a revolver after the trigger has been pulled. America’s gun crisis is not a crisis; it is a haemorrhage, and the British response is a sticking plaster over a shotgun wound. To speak of ‘thoughts and prayers’ or even diplomatic sympathies is to indulge in a ritual of moral posturing while the real problem – a culture of fetishised weaponry and constitutional idolatry – remains untouched.
The Fall of Rome came from within, not from barbarians at the gate. America’s internal barbarism is the Colt and the AR-15, and its senators are the new Nero, fiddling while Iowa burns. The UK’s sorrow is sincere, but it is also a diversion from our own complicity in the global arms trade.
We sell the parts; we buy the films; we glorify the violence. Until we confront the intellectual decadence that allows mass shootings to become a statistical norm, every expression of sympathy is a lie. We should be angry, not sad.
We should be ashamed, not respectable. But above all, we should be honest: America has a disease, and the rest of the West is in denial about carrying the same virus.
