notes.husk.org/likes images.

1967 Mattel M-16 Marauder advertisement, found on the back of a 1967 issue of DC’s Flash. Via. More ads. On sale now.

And I remember my parents arguing with my brother and I over the fact that they wouldn’t allow us to play with toys ressembling weapons. Make your own games they said, build tree houses, invent board games, ride your bike until you are exhausted, and if you decide to play “cowboys vs indians”, use your hands for pistols. Soon we found distractions elsewhere, away from the Manichaean narrative of violence.

–

It has been a hard year. There was a high-school shooting in Ohio, a “Stand Your Ground” shooting in Florida, a college massacre in California, and, in Colorado, a shooting spree in a movie theatre. There were shootings in hospitals and shootings on the streets, shootings in temples and shootings in shopping malls. There were shootings in kitchens and shootings in back yards. This shooting, a shooting in an elementary school, is a last chapter in an American Book of Job: What have we more?

It has been a hard year, but it has not been an unusual year. A hundred thousand Americans are killed with guns every year; one in three Americans knows someone who has been shot. Here are some other numbers: In Washington, there are four hundred and thirty-five members of Congress and a hundred Senators. For two decades, Congress has been dismantling civil society one piece of legislation, another atrocity, at a time. Some vote this way, some vote that. Meanwhile, there are more guns—enough for every man, woman, and child—more easily bought, more easily hidden, shooting more bullets, faster than ever. Not long ago, a Senate bill that would have made it legal for armed citizens to carry concealed guns between states was defeated by just two votes. 

This is the United States in lockdown. On our knees.

Jill Lepore, Lockdown, for The New Yorker, December 2012.