The Death-Spangled Banner: Modern America’s Sad Anthem

Another massacre of schoolchildren. Another outpouring of thoughts and prayers. Another round of doing absolutely nothing to stop the madness.

Nothing will change.

If the massacre of twenty small schoolchildren in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, in 2012 wasn’t enough to spur meaningful changes to America’s gun laws, then neither will the fresh murder yesterday of nineteen small schoolchildren in Uvalde, Texas.

The twin mass slaughters of children are but grim signposts along the never-ending and ever-widening highway of gun-inflicted carnage. Reports of mass-shootings in the United States have become so routine as to rival the daily reporting of weather.

Shooters murder groups of Americans more frequently than the sun rises each morning. One hundred and forty-five days into 2022 there have already been more than two hundred mass shootings — twenty-seven of them at schools.

Americans tell themselves every time they sing their national anthem that they live in the land of the free and the home of the brave. But what is free, what is brave about allowing your kids to be murdered in place while they’re learning to read and write? Or about allowing your fellow citizens…