E.J. Dionne: Charleston and the politics of evasion

We Americans are exceptionally good at evasion when we want to be. Our skills in this sphere are particularly impressive on the matter of race and the subject of guns.

Nonsense, you say. Have we not been talking about race and racism for our entire history? Our conversations have been especially intense in recent years — about the response to President Obama as our first African American president, about sentencing reform and the over-incarceration of men of color and about the wave of highly publicized police shootings of African Americans.''

As for guns, don’t we have moments of national soul searching after every big tragedy involving firearms? The fact that we don’t act, it is said, reflects the politics of guns, not a failure to confront the issue.

(snip)
Are our politics so demented and our senators and house members so cowardly that they cannot even pass laws to keep guns out of the hands of the troubled and those with a history of violence? Apparently so.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/charleston-and-our-culture-of-evasion/2015/06/21/557107b0-16a7-11e5-9ddc-e3353542100c_story.html