Bill Moyers: America 'turned violence into a profit center' and has 'fetish with guns'

Moyers began his video essay on the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre by reading the names of the children and adults murdered during the shooting that left almost 30 dead.

"They will never forget," he said of the family members of the deceased. "We mourn, move on, and too soon forget. And then it will happen again one day, and we'll scratch our heads and ask ourselves, 'Was the last time Newtown? Or Columbine? Was it Aurora, or that college in Virginia?' And once again we will mourn, move on, and too soon forget."

Moyers goes on to say that there are never indications that America seeks "redemption from its fetish with guns, its romance with the free market of violence."

"We make our peace with violence and make ourselves over in its image," he said before noting that a state senator in Missouri wants to require first-graders to be NRA members.

He cites a litany of other gun-related news from the past week: more proposed laws that would allow guns in the classroom, a child that recently brought a gun to school, and the skyrocketing sales of child body armor.

"America’s turned violence into a profit center," he argues before questioning the interpretation of the second amendment as meaning that "a sparsely-populated frontier nation in the 18th century really means tolerating a perpetual wild west here in the 21st century."

Moyers concludes by stating that we can take action and that gun violence is not inevitable. "Register all guns. License all gun owners. Require stringent background checks. Get tough on assault weapons of any kind. Crack down on high-capacity ammunition as the President has now proposed. And then, enforce the laws," he said.

"Yes, I know, determined killers will always find a way. But we can minimize the opportunities, and scale back the scope of destruction. Why do we accept the need for driver’s licenses? Or submit to the sometimes humiliating body scans at airports? Because it’s the law, and deep down we know we’re safer for the inconvenience of the law."

Watch the video, via billmoyers.com, below.