Welcome to America

Harrison Hamm
5 min readJun 1, 2022
We have failed as a country.

I didn’t used to realize how absurd this country is. There are a lot of things that happen here that don’t happen in other places. Growing up, I thought it was normal.

But think about it: An ambulance ride will cost you $1,000. Police violence is frequent and unchecked. Taxes are exorbitantly low for the rich, creating a massive wealth gap. Most alarming of all is that any discontented, screwed-up white dude can buy a machine gun whenever he wants.

It’s the mass shootings that trouble me more than anything. If America can’t look itself in the mirror after some psychopath killed 21 people and 19 children in Uvalde, Texas, then America is too far gone. We have failed as a country, because there are clear and obvious policy solutions to the extremely troubling problem of people walking up to public places and gunning people down like it’s a war zone.

Those that have fought against reasonable gun laws deserve their own sliver of the responsibility for the horror that happened in that fourth-grade classroom. They are, and I can’t emphasize this enough, the problem.

I’ve come to believe that America has a higher share of idiots than the rest of the world. There is no other explanation for gun laws being so relaxed. It is somehow politically impossible to take weapons of mass destruction off the streets, even from the political party that has long positioned itself as the party of anti-crime and law and order. It is so impossibly easy to solve this problem of mass shootings. I know this because literally everyone else has done it. America is too enamored with violence and an invisible and convoluted concept of liberty to do anything about a problem that creates a new hell for a new group of people every week.

There is an unspoken sense among the people that force us to keep dealing with this that the “occasional” mass shooting is merely the price we pay to maintain liberty. After all, the second amendment supposedly guarantees everyone a gun. It is a selfish and irrational ideology.

Are you willing to accept 19 children being killed during school in order to keep owning your own semi-automatic rifle? You are fucked in the head if you sincerely think that.

Let’s also remember that the second amendment is an 18th-century concoction that allows for…