Hello new visitors. It’s quite possible you’ve found this site because of the Newsweek article. If you haven’t already read it, I recently wrote about 10 Cities/10 Years for Newsweek’s “My Turn” feature, which is a space for people to share their unique life experiences. In the article, I discuss the details of the project, what I learned about myself through doing it, and what I learned about America in general.
It was an honor to write for the feature and I’m quite pleased how the article came out. You can read it here:
City living is a great way to be reminded that America is uniquely complex, that there are millions of Republicans in “blue” America and millions of Democrats in “red” America. One of the silliest notions I’ve ever heard is that there is a “Real America.” According to many politicians, because I grew up in a town of less than 80,000 people, I’m from “Real America.” This concept, that “Real America” exists in the heartlands of the country, outside of our main metropolises, led me to wonder: What does that make the over 15 million Americans I lived among, in big cities, from 2005 to 2015?
After Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, I heard frequently about the “liberal bubble,” but that never fit with the country I experienced. In the cities I lived in—many considered liberal strongholds—I met all kinds of people whose views fit more neatly in the “conservative” box. There was the transgender woman in New York who adamantly defended the U.S. government’s use of torture on terrorism suspects after 9/11. There was the co-worker in Nashville who assumed, because I am an atheist, that I “sacrificed” children—her interpretation of abortion. For that matter, there were all the residents of so-called liberal cities who went to church every Sunday. I encountered all types of political and religious views over my 10 years; rarely did they fit in an easy category.
If you’d like more background on what exactly the 10 Cities project was (and continues to be), there’s always the About section. If you want to read some stories from the road, you can check out “The Book” section (scroll down and start with the Prologue). You can also check out other Press coverage. Or just take a look around the site; you may stumble across something I’ve totally forgotten I wrote.
Whether you’re a regular reader of this site, someone who used to be a regular reader and is just checking in, or someone who came across 10 Cities/10 Years because of the Newsweek article, I’d love to hear your thoughts: on the article, on the project, on life, on the 1962 Chicago Cubs, whatever. Leave a comment, show some love.
Cheers from Madrid,
L
P.S. Anyone who is interested in keeping up with my ongoing adventures, including my life in Spain and future publications, can add your email address over on the righthand side.
P.P.S. If you live in Madrid or are going to be in the city in mid-October, I’ll be doing a talk about the project and my writing at The Secret Kingdoms, a recently opened English-language bookstore in Barrios de las Letras. Get tickets here.
I have now lived in Madrid for half the length of my 10 Cities project. I’ve been here for longer than any of the other 12 cities I’ve called home other than Lawrence, Kansas, my first home.
At the end of my fifth summer in Madrid, quite possibly the hottest summer of my life, I’m inevitably thinking back on the the half-decade I’ve lived in Spain. Boy, a lot has happened. I’ve made friends, lost friends, traveled to half a dozen new countries, taken thousands of photos, finished writing two novels, gotten COVID-19, seen multiple friends have babies… Oh, and, of course, I met (and pareja-ed) Helen. DWOML.
Meanwhile, back “home”, so much has happened since I left the United States – at least two plagues and one coup – yet, here, time can sometimes feel at a standstill. Some months crawl by. I suppose that’s inevitable after having lived my life on a strict yearly schedule for a decade. Any year in which I don’t completely upend my entire existence is going to feel a bit more drawn out.
Which is, of course, intentional.
Slow Down Idiot
On September 1, 2015, the day 10 Cities/10 Years was officially completed, I went to an NYC tattoo parlor to get my final project-related tattoo: “Idiot, Slow Down.” Taken from the Radiohead song, “The Tourist,” the tattoo is a reminder to myself to stay still and not let an innate restlessness rob me of what’s right in front of me.
(It’s also frequently a phrase of great consternation to store clerks who see it peaking from my shirt and wonder who I’m calling an idiot.)
Since I’ve been in Madrid, I’ve gotten only one new tattoo, a Spanish translation of lyrics from “Coxcomb Red” by Songs: Ohia. During a dark, post-project period, this song found me and helped keep me going long enough to travel to Spain and figure out a new path. These lyrics caught my attention immediately:
You said every road is a good road Between the next road and your last road
Like so many of my previous tattoos, those words (in Spanish: “Cada camino es un buen camio”) can change meaning based on context. I love the original idea conveyed in the song itself – which, in tone and melody, suggests a kind of bitter finiteness to living – but also, out of the context of the song, the words take on additional significance. There is no inherent right way to live, just so long as you stay on the road.
So, what makes a road “good”? The travel itself.
Will I get more tattoos here in Madrid? Almost certainly. Just don’t know what yet.
Living in Madrid
When I first arrived, I lived near Ventas in what is technically Barrio Salamanca with an assortment of American roommates, all of whom have now returned to the States for a variety of reasons. Six months into my life here, I went on my first date with Helen and we’ve been together ever since. I moved into her Malasaña flat, then, some months later, we moved to our current home.
I’ve now lived in Madrid’s Puerta del Angel barrio longer than I’ve lived in any home since my parents divorced and sold the family home. I was 17 when my mother and I moved into a small loft apartment for my senior year of high school. Since then, the longest I’d inhabited any dwelling before my current one was 2 years (a fact that can complicate matters when I have to verify my identity with banks).
Life in Madrid is relatively easy, for various reasons. The main one, though, is it’s cheaper than basically any other comparable city, certainly more so than all the US cities I lived in, other than perhaps New Orleans. I live comfortably without making work my end-all, be-all of existence. I realize I’m fortunate in that, and my circumstances are not all people’s circumstances. But, also, I spent my 20s eschewing anything resembling a career and I had plenty of people telling me I was going to regret that financial instability.
Now I have socialist healthcare, can travel to beautiful countries for a few hundred bucks, and work (mostly) when I want. I think I did okay.
There are aspects of Madrid (and Spain) that aren’t perfect – for one, there isn’t a word for “customer service” in Spanish. But that’s the constant give and take of life, knowing that there is no such thing as paradise, no utopia. You determine the things that matter most to you and hopefully you can place yourself in a situation where the good outweighs the bad.
I made countless choices in life to get to where I am, and the main reason I can be satisfied with where I am in life is because I made those choices. They weren’t made for me. There are plenty of roads I bypassed on my way to Madrid (often, the “right” roads), but the detours I took had some amazing scenery.
What’s Next?
I don’t know. I’m here now. I’ve slowed down. I still travelfairlyfrequently, albeit as a tourist, not as a new resident. I’ve found a home, I’ve found a life with Helen. Beyond that, the future is unwritten, just as it was when I finally completed 10 Cities/10 Years and didn’t have a new destination in mind. However, unlike September 2015, when the sudden completion of a decade-long project left me feeling listless and lost, I feel content, no longer restless.
I’m not naïve. Problems can (and do) still crop up, both personal ones and ones beyond my control. The daily nuisances of life never end. Moving to Madrid didn’t suddenly make life a cakewalk (far from it in many situations). Life will always be a road, potholes and all; that’d be true no matter where I lived.
If you’re feeling lost and aimless, would I recommend dropping everything and moving to a foreign country? Not necessarily. Your circumstances may not allow it. All I can say is, if you’re not dead, you haven’t reached your final destination yet.
Helen and I have talked about the possibility of living other places at some point, but there’s no rush. If the opportunity to take another road presents itself to us, we may take it. But, right now, the road we’re on is pretty damn good.
This last Saturday, Helen and I, along with her parents, headed to the third night of Las Fiestas Virgen de la Paloma, one of Madrid’s most popular local festivals and essentially the biggest party of August.
My first experience of the Fiestas de la Paloma was back in 2018, when Helen and I accidentally stumbled upon it not realizing what weekend it was. The festival, from August 11 to August 15, builds to one of Spain’s main national holidays, the Assumption of Mary (or Assumption Day). Being a majority Catholic country, celebrations of Mary (Marian feast days) take a central role in Spanish society, even if day-to-day religious practice is majorly on the wane. They usually involve parades, religious plays, and Mass.
While Saint Isidro is officially the patron saint of Madrid, the Virgin de la Paloma (Virgin of the Dove) occupies a similar, albeit unofficial role for Madrileños (citizens of Madrid). As such, the Paloma festivals are essential the city’s biggest block party and not-quite-end-of-summer celebration.
The festivities takes place in Barrio de La Latina, among Madrid’s most active and developed neighborhoods (it makes my own Puerta del Angel look positively sleepy). Situated around Plaza de la Paja, the festival stretches past the Royal Basilica of Saint Francis the Great and to the Church of the Virgen de la Paloma. At that second church, there is a famous image of the Virgin Mary over its altar, from which the church and the festivals derive their name.
Real Basílica de San Francisco el Grande
While La Paloma is ostensibly Catholic, the parties themselves aren’t particularly religious. Mostly, they’re an excuse for locals and visitors to drink beer, eat various grilled meats (lots of roasted full pigs on display), try their hand at carnival games, and watch traditional music and dance performances, like the El Chotis, a Madrileño folk dance that’s origins go back to Polka. At night, there are also concerts on a mainstage to show off various local performers, from flamenco to rock.
A fair warning to anyone planning future visits to any Spanish festivals: If you want to eat, show up early. Spain is a country of exact timings, and the only thing more rigid than dinnertime (22:00) is lunchtime (14:00). If you go for dinner at the standard time, expect to wait in line for 30 minutes, easy. On the plus side, if you’re even 10 minutes early, your wait will be cut in half.
(This is a general rule for eating in Madrid any day of the year. If you don’t have a reservation and want to get a table for lunch, show up at 13:45 and you’ll be all good.)
The Return of the Festivals of the Virgin of Paloma
In 2020, las Fiestas de la Paloma were canceled due to COVID-19. Still reeling from the ongoing pandemic, 2021 brought the return of the festivals, but in a very restricted manner. There were strict capacity limits for most of the events, even outdoors.
So, seeing the bustling, mostly unmasked crowds at the festival this year really drove it home: Madrid, and probably Spain in general, has officially entered the post-COVID era. That’s not to say COVID is gone (it never will be), or even that people should stop caring about COVID (I’d expect at least a mini-surge in winter). But people definitely have stopped caring.
To be fair, at 86% of the population, Spain does have one of the highest vaccination rates in Europe (and the world). Though the country was pummeled by the first few rounds of COVID, life in Spain has mostly felt like it’s been back to “normal” for a while now. But this weekend at La Paloma was the first time it was so in my face.
We were among the unmasked cohorts; there were maybe a handful of attendees wearing masks. In Madrid, mascaras are only required on public transportation and in pharmacies. Perhaps that’s a mistake; maybe the long-term effects of COVID will prove masking should’ve been a permanent part of our lives. But, hey, no one ever accused humanity of being farsighted.
(I realize for many Americans, the idea that any COVID precautions would still be in effect sounds insane.)
For now, at least, it really does feel like we’ve truly entered the post-COVID era. Not an era where COVID doesn’t exist, but an era where the hospitals aren’t overwhelmed, vaccines are readily available, and serious cases are few and far between. Famous last words? Guess we’ll see.
Fiestas de la Paloma 2022
If the last 2 years has reinforced anything, it’s that we live in uncertain times. It’s a frequent topic of conversation, the fact that lifestyles that were once taken for granted are no longer the norm. It’s not just the pandemic. The Great Recession and its ripple effects, the rapid technological advancements, the widening global reach of culture, all of it has wildly reshaped what it means to live, even just from a generation ago.
So, it’s interesting to walk through something like the Fiestas de la Paloma and see the vestiges of the past still holding on. The elderly chotis dancers were doing their part, performing their routines in classical attire. And there were younger people helping out, too, like the 20-something-year-old girls wearing manila shawls and traditional dresses.
The purpose of the various Spanish festivals is to continually reinforce the ever-fraying threads that connect the past and the present. Many Madrileños will return to La Paloma year after year, growing up with it from childhood to adulthood to parenthood, bringing their own offspring to an event that makes some concessions to the changing world but largely remains the same. They’ll come because it doesn’t change.
Likewise, posts like this by writers like me are meant to be evergreen, something that aims for the first page of search results when someone googles “Fiestas de la Paloma Madrid”. A good travel blog (which 10 Cities/10 Years is categorically not) is always looking for that perennial hit post, and that means writing about these kinds of static cultural events.
But, how static is it, really? The festivals themselves are relatively new, having grown out of the religious processions surrounding Assumption Day; the Paloma Festivals only started at the end of the 20th century. So, while it’s now a mainstay of Madrid culture, it’s a relative baby in terms of Spanish tradition. What will La Paloma look like in the future; in the unknowable 2023, and the unimaginable 2053?
Spain is a country that is notoriously slow to embrace change, but it feels like all of us are being carried on an unstoppable wave to a foreign future (and not just because sea levels are rising). So, will I be returning to the Fiestas de la Paloma in 30 years, or will we have all evacuated the city to escape the fire-breathing lava monsters that rise up out of the heat-scorched Earth? It’s really anyone’s guess.
Flying scud (play) – See a man about a dog – Flying Squid?
Any idea what that means? I sure as hell don’t have a clue, and I wrote it. Some time in 2010; I was living in Chicago, but that doesn’t help. My best guess is it’s something that flittered through my mind in one of those half-waking moments at 3 in the morning. Or maybe I was drunk. Or, worse, sober.
More than a decade on, I think it’s safe to say that nothing will ever come of that tossed off attempt at (anti-)clever wordplay; just word salad. Some six cities and even more apartments later; at least a dozen different jobs and a few dozen different writing gigs since; roughly three completed novels and 500 blog posts on, it’s safe to say I’m never going to figure out what the fuck Flying Squid was supposed to mean.
Folders of Nothing
That one not-quite-a-sentence is the only thing in a Word file I found in a folder titled “One Week” (a subfolder in my “My Writing” folder); in that folder there’s a “One Week” file that contains 2,000 words about a guy named Scott working at a bookstore. Maybe it was going to be a short story, more likely it was the sputtering start of a novel that never went anywhere. More than a few of my discarded stories and novels involved guys working at a bookstore, something I’m intimately familiar with. They say, “Write what you know;” but, god, that shit’s boring. I like writing what I don’t know.
Which is why this “My Writing” folder houses a platoon of half-considered attempts at novels and short stories that died before they even had the chance to become ponderous nonsense.
There’s “Bosworth,” from 2011 and 2012 (my time in Seattle), which, at 4,500 words (and an outline) was one of my more drawn out abortions. It was my attempt at some sort of Bukowski pastiche, a novel about an acerbic drunk who befriends a total square and is a non-stop fount of biting one-liners. Turns out, I was not a non-stop fount.
There’s something from 2007 (I was in Costa Mesa) entitled “Ellis Island and the Gay Messiah,” which isn’t even 500 words, but I love the title (admittedly, it’s stolen from a Rufus Wainwright song).
There’s something called “Sanctum,” which is probably the most fully realized of my long-dead novel attempts, including six different character descriptions. That was also in Seattle, though the idea began years before that; I made an attempt at starting it up again the next year while I was living in New Orleans, to no avail. Maybe I’ll get back to that one day.
There’s even my half-assed attempt at a TV show pilot, simply called Sojourner, about an atheist woman who gets in a relationship with a Christian man. That one, which has its own soundtrack, started while I was in Brooklyn, but I quickly realized TV writing isn’t for me.
Those are a just a few of the writing projects I’ve begun and abandoned, and that doesn’t even include the short stories and character sketches that didn’t make it past a few paragraphs (the less said about the poems the better).
Even with that graveyard of novel ideas, I still have two new ideas I’m developing and two novels I’ve completed writing since the beginning of the COVID-19 lockdowns. One of those, I recently realized while looking through old files, I initially thought up back in 2010, but didn’t start writing as a novel until 2014 when I was freshly arrived in Brooklyn. And then, of course, there’s Yahweh’s Children, the one novel I’ve finished and self-published (oh, excuse me, I’m supposed to call it “indie published” now).
Around the time I got sick of editing, re-editing, and re-re-editing Yahweh’s Children, and finally just threw it up online, I told myself I would never write another novel again. But, goddamn it, the words keep coming and if I don’t write them down, they keep me up at night. A girl named Effie stole many a night’s sleep from me until I wrote her story.
Will either of the two novels I’ve finished writing in the last two years ever see the light of day? I don’t know. If not, they’d join the first three novels I wrote between the ages of 18 and 23 that will all but certainly never be read. But I hated those novels and I mostly like these ones; I’d sure like to see them find an audience one day. They’re good, if I do say so myself, and, frankly, if I do say so myself, that’s saying something because I loathe most everything I write.
And then there are those two other novel ideas – one a relatively new, Vonnegut-inspired satire, the other an old story inspired by my youth in the church that comes back to me every few years – that I suppose I’ll eventually feel obligated to start writing. I have long given up on the fantasy of being a world-renowned novelist (I know too much about the industry to believe that), but I still find a weird pleasure in the process. Masochistic, of course.
In the meantime, I’ll keep churning out nonsense here and elsewhere, because as aware as I am that this is just screaming into the void, I can’t stop. I’d never get any sleep again if I did.
Madrid is being gentrified. That isn’t news. It’s been happening in many of the city center’s most popular neighborhoods – Malasaña, Lavapiés, La Latina – for years. It’s also a process that has been rippling through most of Europe’s capital cities for quite some time now. If anything, Madrid has been a bit slow to the trend, considering it’s still far more affordable overall than most other European capitals.
Every couple months, though, a new article appears to bemoan the gentrification occurring in my barrio: Puerta del Angel. This phenomenon is such a focus of breathless conversation that the barrio even has a nickname: Bruclin, as in, Brooklyn, the trendy neighborhood on the other side of the river from the main part of the city (and the OG gentrification model).
This week, it’s 20 Minutos decrying Puerta del Angel’s gentrification (a new enough concept that the Spanish word for it is simply gentrificación), with the headline lamenting that living alone in PDA is nearly inviable. A once working-class barrio has become just another expensive, trendy neighborhood.
Living in Puerta del Angel, Madrid
I moved to Puerta del Angel with my pareja, Helen, over three years ago when she bought a flat between the two main metro stops of the barrio. We had a couple friends that already lived here before us, and since then a few more have either bought or rented places here. Even in the relatively short time we’ve lived in the barrio, there have been changes aplenty. Overall, though, no one would mistake the still mostly working-class, family-filled PDA for Malasaña (or Brooklyn’s Williamsburg).
Probably the most visible change is the transformation of the Mercado Tirso del Molina, a century-old local indoor market that has gotten the full Madrid Redux treatment. Still a place to buy fresh produce and meat, most of the stalls in the market are now stylishly unsophisticated restaurants. There’s a pizza spot, a taco spot, a vegan spot, and, yes, even a few Spanish restaurants (if you’re craving paella).
The transformation of the market started well before we arrived, but the last few years has definitely seen an acceleration, in part because of the pandemic. When being indoors became a risk, the city gave special permission to businesses that didn’t have terrace seating to create spaces in the street. With one of the calles running alongside the market now pedestrianized, the area is one of the main gathering places in the barrio (getting a weekend seat on the terrace is nearly impossible).
The mercado’s growth has spurred other development. A slightly overpriced café opened up across the street a few months ago, and a new restaurant (by the same owners as the café) opened on the opposite side of the market a couple weeks ago. Those same owners also opened a decent pizza place a bit west of the market. And then there have been a host of other bars, cafés, and restaurants popping up throughout the barrio.
When we first moved here three and a half years ago, we struggled to find open bars after 10 pm on a weeknight. Now, there’s an abundance of them, especially along Paseo de Extremadura, the main thoroughfare that runs west from the Manzanares River and serves as the northern border of the barrio (on the other side of the paseo is Casa de Campo and Lago, one of Madrid’s best parks and outdoor dining areas).
All in all, a great barrio to live in.
The Ills of Gentrification
So, yes, there is every sign that Madrid’s Puerta del Angel is gentrifying. As I’ve written about before, I find the conversation around gentrification confounding. Far too often, it seems to be a way to complain about certain people moving into a neighborhood (often white people complaining about other white people). I get it, hipsters (or whatever the term is now) are annoying. But people need to live somewhere. Does moving to a cheaper neighborhood because you can better afford the rent mean you’re a gentrifier?
An article in El Confidencial last year seemed to blame guys “with beards and skinny jeans” for the gentrification, which is just totally backwards. It’s one thing to find a home in a barrio. It’s quite another to intentionally buy up property for the purpose of jacking up the price and reselling it. And here enters the villains of Puerta del Angel.
I appreciate that 20 Minutos pointed to the true cause of gentrification: the real estate companies that vacuum up every available structure, causing rents to skyrocket and pricing out both residents and local businesses. It’s happening all over the world right now. In Puerta del Angel, that malevolent force has taken the form of a management company called Madlyn (to be fair, El Confidencial also mentioned Madlyn; both articles said they contacted Madlyn for comment to no avail).
Madlyn is buying up barrio property left and right, converting former bars and eateries into cookie cutter apartments and coworking spaces (and Madlyn offices). Simultaneously, real estate offices have been popping up like mushrooms over the last couple years (I suspect they’re all a front for one conglomerate), taking over vacated fruit shops and clothing stores. Property is big business in the barrio. They’d argue they’re just filling a need, but every time I see a new estate agent office, I get thirsty for a Molotov Cocktail.
Look, I have a beard. My pant legs are pretty narrow. I write for a living. I am a white dude who speaks English in a Spanish-speaking country. I am everything that signifies gentrification. But as with most things, by the time the outward signs of gentrification are apparent, the underlying causes are already deeply entrenched.
These articles about the gentrificaciónde Puerta del Angel always include an interview with a local who has lived in the neighborhood all their life and is weary of the changes. Understandably, of course, but change is inevitable. People relocating is inevitable. I’d hate to live in a world where that wasn’t an option (10 Cities is, above all else, a celebration of relocation).
And you know what? Gentrification may, in fact, be inevitable. I don’t really know.
What I do know is, Puerta del Angel is a charming barrio, both because of the recently opened, trend-hopping bars and restaurants, and for the older establishments serving 2€ beers and wines and pouring whiskey like it’s water. A relatively newer establishment like Quinta del Sordo can exist next to the neighborhood locals and the old man hangouts. We make an effort to patronize both.
And, in 10 years, I’ll lament that all the good bars I used to love have been replaced by hipster lounges that play the music too loud. Can’t wait.
(This post fleshes out this thread of mine from Twitter.)
On July 3rd, as Americans were in the middle of their Independence Day weekend celebrations*, there was a shooting at a mall in Copenhagen, Denmark. Three people were killed, many more injured, and the 22-year-old shooter was taken into custody. Of course, it’s likely you didn’t hear much about this shooting because of the even deadlier mass shooting that occurred on July 4th in Illinois.
For most Americans, if they heard about the Copenhagen mall shooting at all, it was possibly because they read about Harry Styles canceling his concert, which was supposed to take place that night near the mall.
It is possible, though, if you lurk in certain parts of the internet, that you’ve seen this shooting (and a similar shooting in Oslo, Norway a couple weeks ago) upheld as proof that gun control doesn’t work. The refrain (almost celebratory) is, “See, even in Denmark, the country with some of the strictest gun laws in the world, mass shootings still happen.”
So, I have to say something.
In the wake of the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas in May, the US government managed to pass some gun control(-related) laws. Most of us who want stricter gun control in the US, even those who celebrated their passage, will admit these regulations are insufficient. They’re a step in the right direction, but unlikely to do much to staunch the bleeding. Something is better than nothing, so I’m glad the law was signed by President Biden. But more is needed.
Let’s look at Denmark.
Two shootings in Copenhagen, Denmark
I’ve only been to Copenhagen once, on a long layover in 2016. I had 6 hours to walk the city, which is basically all I did. I did have lunch in a college/hipster-y part of town. As I ate at a high top table in the bar area, the bartender and I talked gun control.
The year before, Copenhagen had had one of the worst shootings in its modern history. A man killed 2 people and wounded 5 cops. The bartender (who spoke flawless English, naturally) explained that pretty much everyone in the country agreed on their gun laws. He said that people in Denmark didn’t understand the US’s obsession with guns (a sentiment I’ve heard often since then from people in other countries). For the Danes, a shooting happened and they were thankful they had strong gun control. They’d have accepted even stricter laws.
No, the laws didn’t stop the 2015 Copenhagen shooting, nor Sunday’s shooting (3 dead, more wounded). But it was 7+ years between 2015 and this shooting. This recent mall shooting is the worst Denmark has had since 2015. It’s absolutely a tragedy; one America has every few days (often not even making national news).
Gun control is not an impenetrable wall, but it is a wall. It works to lessen a flood. Many on the Right (and dishearteningly on the Left these days too) will point to this Copenhagen shooting as proof that gun control doesn’t work. But two shootings in seven years proves it does.
These skeptics will say America’s much larger population explains the disparity, but the stats show differently: 12 in every 100,000 Americans are killed by guns, compared to 1 in every 100,000 Danes. Looking at the European Union broadly, it’s not even close. (You can check for yourself.) Guns don’t kill people. People with easy access to and a bizarre fetishization of guns kill people.
The Law of the Land
So much of the opposition to any kind of gun control is predicated on this utterly ridiculous standard that if a single law can’t stop every shooting, it’s pointless. This is the base argument of every gun nut who opposes gun control, and it is, plainly, stupid. Seatbelt laws don’t stop every crash or every car death, but statistics clearly show they have saved lives. That’s the whole point.
The purpose of gun laws – the purpose of any law – is not to make the world perfect but to broadly improve the outcomes of the citizens of the world. This tragedy in Copenhagen isn’t lessened because Denmark has gun control laws (though perhaps it was less severe than it otherwise would have been; we can’t know). But there are certainly less tragedies in Denmark like it because of them.
When is America going to figure that out? How many children need to die – or live in constant fear – in their classrooms before the US takes substantive action? How many regular people going about their lives have to be slaughtered before we stop giving credence to the death cult known as the NRA? I’m not a policy expert. I don’t know what mix of gun laws, mental health policies, and social programs will have the biggest impact. But almost any laws would be better than the status quo. Again, the most recent law, while welcome, isn’t enough.
(Maybe we could start by banning the AR-15? And, yes, I know that the AR stands for ArmaLite rife. I’ve even fired one.)
Sadly, as with so many other issues lately, I’m afraid there is no number of deaths and tragedies that can get America to act like a sane nation. It feels, increasingly, like a nation on the brink.
There is no quick fix for those who have been directly affected by a mass shooting, whether in Copenhagen or the US. But, perhaps, with time, there will be a general sense of peace for Danes knowing such a tragedy is blessedly uncommon. Will America ever know that peace?
~~~
*I wrote most of this post on the morning of the 4th before the mass shooting at an Independence Day parade in Highland Park, a Chicago suburb. With at least 6 dead, it was a grim reminder that even when other countries have the rare mass shooting, there will always be one in America soon after to overshadow it. America’s gun culture is unsustainable.
10 Cities/10 Years 