Killers Among Us – Michael Morse

by Michael Morse, contributing writer, commentary

America has a problem. We have over 330,000,000 people from every country on earth living here, some native, most the offspring of refugees or transplants, and a lot of descendants of hostages. We take the people many other prosperous nations shun, offer asylum, work visas, ways to live undetected by immigration authorities, and provide basic means of survival, legally, or under the radar and not aggressively pursued.

We have more guns in circulation than people. So far, I haven’t needed one to survive, but it’s nice to know that should the need arise I can get one fairly quickly without too much trouble. Legally. For now.

The chance that all of our people will live together in peace and productivity is nil. Even among the stable people there is far more envy than gratitude in our society, people with less shamelessly demanding more, and people with more, conveniently forgetting how fortunate they are. Acceptance, diversity and equity is forced upon us, and we pretend to go along, in public anyway, and say the right things, make the right choices on election day, and live our lives with the crushing weight of our own dishonesty on our backs. It is slowly eating away our innate compassion, this manufactured empathy based on inclusion, and leaving in its place unearned feelings of guilt and shame which manifests as rage.

We see things falling apart all around us while being told that everything is just fine. Narcissistic people capable of murder walk among us, cleverly disguised as part of us, and we wait for one of them to pull their triggers on the innocents – and it never takes long between deadly incidents, then we retreat into the comfortable arms of our tribe of choice and lash out at the other side, demanding, insulting, proving we are right by degrading, until the noise dies down, and we go on pretending, until another psychopath lets loose.

The number of potential murderers is staggering, some 2% of our population can be considered narcissistic, and a percentage of them are capable of murder. 100,000 people mingle among us who are capable of mass murder is a conservative estimate. They do not need assault rifles to kill.

We will never rid ourselves of the minority of people capable of killing the rest of us, nor will we eliminate guns from our society. Pontificating on either is empty of logic, reality and substance. “Assault weapons” account for 3% of all gun related murders in the United States, yet the demand to outlaw them is loud and relentless, and as empty as the magazines that once held the bullets fired by the lunatics hidden among us.

There is no solution to madness. It is up to us, the people subject to the actions of demented murderers and potential murderers to live our lives honestly and with purpose, and create as much harmony as possible with each other. Wars of words contribute to an environment already heavy with dissatisfaction and contempt for our fellow human beings.

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Michael Morse, [email protected], a monthly contributor is a retired Captain with the Providence Fire Department.

Michael Morse spent 23 years as a firefighter/EMT with the Providence Fire Department before retiring in 2013 as Captain, Rescue Co. 5. He is an author of several books, most offering fellow firefighter/EMTs and the general population alike a poignant glimpse into one person’s journey through life, work and hope for the future. He is a Warwick resident.