Student shot at Maryland high school; suspect held (AP via Yahoo! News)
U.S. Soldiers Allegedly Plotted to Kill Obama, Overthrow the Government (truthdig.com)
Texas judge warns of ‘civil war’ if Obama re-elected (Globe and Mail)

Back before someone at the University of Toledo’s Medical Center threw a kidney intended for transplant in the trash (my alma mater, folks), the most recent time my neck of the woods had made national news was about two and a half years ago, when members of a local militia, the Hutaree, were arrested and charged with plotting to kill several police officers. According to news reports that came out at the time, Hutaree’s plan was to murder a police officer, then ambush that officer’s funeral and kill all the other officers that would be sure to attend, in the hopes that this would cause other militia groups to rise up and attack. Eventually the Hutaree members were acquitted on all charges relating to this plot, and earlier this month the members who were still being held on weapons-related charges were sentenced to time served and set free.

Less than a year before that came the assassination of abortion doctor George Tiller. I’d remembered all too well the rash of shootings at abortion clinics in the 1990s, but it seemed like none happened after George W. Bush was inaugurated as president. At the very least they weren’t happening as often as they did under the Clinton presidency, and less that five months after Barack Obama took office we had this very high-profile abortion-related assassination. It made me worry that we would see another wave of violence and killings at abortion clinics, but so far that hasn’t happened. What did happen, though, was the Republican candidate for Senate in Nevada the year after the Tiller assassination, Sharron Angle, warning of “Second Amendment remedies” should the election not “solve” voters’ “problems.”

Just days after our current Congress was sworn in, less than a year after Angle made her “Second Amendment remedies” remarks, Jared Lee Loughner shot nineteen people, six of them fatally, at a rally for Democratic Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona. That incident was hard enough to deal with in and of itself, but starting with the Colorado theatre shooting last month it seems like a week hasn’t gone by without some major episode of gun violence. While many, like the Colorado shooting, did not appear to have any political motives, the massacre at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin and the shooting of a guard at the Family Research Council’s offices in Washington D.C. both appear to have had overtly political reasoning. (We’ll never know for certain with the Wisconsin shooting because the shooter is dead, but his ties with white supremacist movements are eyebrow-raising to say the least.) Now there’s been another school shooting, and as a nation we can’t even react with the shock we feel we should react with because we’re all so burnt out from the previous shootings.

I don’t write much about gun issues, but suffice it to say that I think restrictions on gun ownership in this country should be far stricter than they currently are. Gun control is one of those issues like legalizing prostitution and/or marijuana, though, where it seems impossible to even start a national conversation on the topic. In the wake of the Colorado shooting, talking heads from all sides got on television and tried to quash even the possibility of talking about tighter gun laws before anyone else could utter a word. If nothing else, we were told, we had to be quiet long enough for the families of the victims, and for us as a nation, to mourn. Unfortunately, it seems like another national-level shooting takes place before the mourning period of the last one can end; I kept putting off this blog because I wanted to wait until we’d had a decent cooling-off period from all the shootings, but now it feels like that time isn’t going to come for a while.

There is so much anger out there in America right now that it is seriously scary. Times have been tough for a prolonged period, at least by modern standards; one wonders how modern-day, short attention span Americans would handle being transplanted into 1930s America and the long, slow recovery from the Great Depression. People are tired of waiting for solutions to their problems, and unless there’s a major political shift in the next two months it’s looking like we’re going to have a Congress as closely divided as it is now, and neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney will win a large enough share of the popular vote to claim any kind of mandate. The gridlock that has paralyzed our politics these past four years is only likely to continue, and now that Congressional Republicans have proven that causing gridlock can be an effective political tool (after the 1990s government shutdowns blew up in their faces), we may see even more of it after the election is over.

The worst part is that this rash of shootings is only fueling the same far-right talking heads who have been pushing this huge controversy around Operation Fast and Furious. Never mind the hypocrisy of Republicans demanding total transparency from the Obama Administration at the same time that they’re nominating a man to replace Obama who’s holding his tax returns closer to this chest than an Under Armour top; these are the same Congressional Republicans who, less than ten years ago, not only stonewalled the efforts of Democrats in Congress to hold hearings on whether or not we were lied into the Iraq War, but then turned around and opened Congressional hearings into Janet Jackson’s nipple. Because conservatives pushed this idea that Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder deliberately let guns fall into the wrong hands so the resulting violence would give them an excuse to take everyone’s guns, though (even after Fortune debunked the whole sordid mess), now a lot of people are scared that President Obama is going to use these shootings as an excuse to take their guns away from them, and that is definitely adding to all the anger out there.

This idea that the Hutaree had, that one small insurrection would trigger a cascade of armed rebellion, stuck with me. I remember discussing it with the students I was teaching that term — taking the Hutaree side because no one in class wanted to defend them — and we talked about that strategy and whether or not it was plausible. After all these shootings, and especially with all this talk of “Second Amendment remedies” and this judge in Texas invoking the words “civil war” in talking about the possible reaction of Obama’s opponents should he win in November, and learning of American soldiers plotting to kill the president, that strategy doesn’t seem as far-fetched as it once did. None of these shootings appear to be directly connected with one another, but remembering how closely those anthrax-filled letter followed the 09.11 attacks, you have to wonder how strong the indirect links might be.

Regardless of what happens on Election Day, the days and even the hours after the results come in appear likely to be as tense and anxious as any my generation has experienced. I don’t think we’ve gone over the edge as a culture yet, but if we don’t at least try to stop soon then we will go over that edge, and I don’t want to think about what could become of America if the mass insurrections the Hutaree dreamed of actually become reality. I don’t think it will happen, but all of the talk going on, and all of the anger being expressed from coast to coast, have gotten us to a point where worrying about the possibility is no longer paranoid thinking. If that isn’t enough to make people stop and rethink what they’re doing. and what it might lead to, there may be no saving us.