Every time this happens, we are told it is complicated. Tragic. Unavoidable. And every time, the same people step forward with the same well-rehearsed lines, as if repetition might one day turn evasion into truth.
The United States has chosen to live in a society awash with guns. That choice was not accidental, and its consequences are not mysterious. When firearms are everywhere, fear becomes rational. Panic becomes understandable. Overreaction becomes lethal. Add an aggressive federal enforcement programme into that mix and you are not enforcing the law, you are loading dice.
What follows is entirely predictable. Officers assume they may be facing armed resistance. Civilians assume the same. Movements are misread. Intent is guessed. Seconds are compressed into slogans. Someone dies. Then the gun lobby arrives to insist that nothing about guns had anything to do with it.
Out come the platitudes. “Thoughts and prayers.” “A terrible tragedy.” “Now is not the time.” There is always a better time, which somehow never arrives. The weapon that turns confusion into a corpse is politely stepped around, like a body at a dinner party.
Instead, responsibility is scattered until it vanishes. Mental health. Training. Culture. Social media. Anything but the tool that makes every misjudgement final. The gun lobby does not argue that guns reduce harm. It simply insists, endlessly, that they are never the cause. It is an exercise in rhetorical laundering.
Compare this with Europe. Immigration enforcement can be ugly, contested, and politically charged. But it rarely ends in gunfire, because the baseline conditions are different. Fewer guns. Higher thresholds for lethal force. A presumption that de-escalation is possible because, most of the time, it is. The same policies do not produce the same body count because the environment does not prime everyone for death.
In the United States, that priming is built in. Guns turn enforcement into theatre, and theatre into bloodshed. When the state escalates, civilians react. When civilians react, officers fire. Then we are told that this is simply the price of freedom, as if freedom were a thing that required regular human sacrifice.
The most dishonest part is the inevitability claim. “Nothing could have been done.” That is only true if you refuse to do the one thing that would actually change the outcome. Reduce the guns. Lower the temperature. Remove the constant assumption that everyone is one twitch away from killing or being killed.
The gun lobby knows all this. The point of the platitudes is not to explain or to comfort. It is to stall. To drain outrage. To normalise the abnormal. Each killing is treated as an isolated storm, never as evidence of a climate. So when the next enforcement operation ends in another death, expect the same routine. Grave faces. Empty words. And a studied refusal to acknowledge that this was not fate, or tragedy, or complexity. It was policy, playing out exactly as designed.
It's worth noting that if the UK were to conduct superficially similar immigration operations to ICE, firearms would not form part of the default enforcement toolkit. UK Immigration Enforcement officers are not routinely armed, and immigration control is treated primarily as a civilian administrative function backed by criminal law, not as a paramilitary activity. Where a credible risk of serious violence exists, responsibility shifts to the police, and only a small number of specially authorised firearms officers would be deployed under strict command and oversight. That structural separation matters. It means routine enforcement is not conducted in an atmosphere where lethal force is assumed to be ever-present, sharply reducing the risk that confusion, panic or resistance turns fatal.
No comments:
Post a Comment