The right to collateral damages

Five or ten or twenty or more are shot down at a bar, or on a bus or in a drug rehab here in Mexico, we are expected to suck it up:   it’s a rational outcome. The cost of doing business with the world’s largest narcotics importer is a lot of “collateral damage”.

But when a mere dozen or so are gunned down in a theater in Colorado, there’s a scramble to find some “rationale” — anti-depressants, or economic/social pressures or political ties or … well… anything will do but the most obvious: it’s the cost of doing business in the world’s largest domestic arms bazaar.
From today’s Jornada (translation by Esther Klein Buddenhagen):

Events such as yesterday’s demonstrate […] the devastating effects of the anachronistic [lack of] regulation of arms and the destruction which prevails in the United States and which represents on a national scale the law of the jungle which the governments of Washington have sought to impose on the world.  The lack of ability or will on the part of the Obama administration to regulate and contain the sale of arms not only casts a pall periodically over the society of the US, but also affects other nations such as ours.  It reminds us of the massive quantity of contraband arms that traveled from the US to Mexico in Operation Fast and Furious: more evidence that the present US government has been defeated by the devastating inertia which prevails in politics, in the economy, and in the culture of this country which claims to be a champion of civilized behavior to the rest of the world, and which finds itself brought to a halt, instead, in a situation of backwardness marked by a systematic propensity to violence and barbarism.