I had planned to post a different blog this weekend, but will defer to react to the comments by the Tennessee congressman the networks aired after the Nashville school tragedy.  His assertion that there is nothing Congress can do to help alleviate this recurring national nightmare was by itself outrageous. “If there is nothing you are willing to try, then why the hell are you here?” But that question was not asked. After the guy muttered about mental health and Evil, he was cited statistics about the per capita gun death rate in the United States compared with that in other similar democracies.  Rather than trying to rationalize the data, he retorted, “We have freedom.”

That is where the conversation was allowed to hang when the snippet shown ended. So that is where this blog begins.

I spent two months the past two winters living in France, enjoyed many long vacations in Ireland, and visited the UK and Canada multiple times. I never noticed any restrictions on my freedom in any of these countries. On the contrary physicians in those places do not have their medical judgement superseded by the authority of the state. They are not intent om banning books from schools and libraries. They are not putting undue restraints on women’s reproductive choices, and they are not isolating our most vulnerable children with their rhetoric. All of these restrictive policies are occurring in the congressman’s Tennessee.

So that brings us back to mental illness and Evil.  If this is to account for our order of magnitude gun death rate over that of our European allies, then despite our claimed abundance of freedom, we are far less content.

Are we just more Evil than everyone else? I don’t think so. Would a religious revival cut our gun death rate? Tennessee is not lacking for church attendance and tent revivals, yet its gun death rate is among the highest states in the nation.

That, Mr. Congressman, brings us back to guns and gun laws.