A Matter of Accountability
Inaction on Gun Violence Makes Us All Complicit
I’m not really sure what I can say at this point. We have four dead — two teachers and two students — at a Georgia high school. Law enforcement has arrested and charged a 14-year-old student from the school, says the Atlanta Journal Constitution, saying he “us(ed) an AR-platform-style weapon,” though not much else has been reported.
What can we say about this other than, as Vice President Kamala Harris said Wednesday, “It does not have to be this way.” It shouldn’t be this way and, in a sane world, it would not be this way.
We do not live in a sane world. We live in one where cliche rules, one in which these things happen over and over, where we disingenuously call them “inconceivable” or “intolerable” and then do nothing. We offer “thoughts and prayers” to the victims, as if that helps, as if this empty gesture exonerates our deliberate inaction.
And it is deliberate. There are dozens of potential reforms in the pipeline — running the gamut from background checks, to new insurance and safety regulations, to amending the constitution — but none has a chance at daylight in Congress. Republicans in both houses — abetted by a handful of rural Democrats — not only oppose new gun rules, but have no interest in allowing debate. The gun issue, for them, is a non-starter.
That means that even the most genuine promises made by Harris and other Democratic candidates will suffer the same fate as those made by President Obama after the Sandy Hook shooting. The bully pulpit of the White House remains important — anyone who thinks there is no difference between Harris and Donald Trump betrays either a naivety or a willful disregard for reality — but its effectiveness in the current climate will be limited.
If I sound fed up, I am. Guns kills thousands in the United States every year — 48,117 in 2022 alone, according to the Center for Gun Violence Solutions at the Johns Hopkins School of public Health — and the per capita death rate is exponentially higher than nearly every other developed country. Among large wealthy nations — with populations of at least 10 million — the United States not only ranks first in gun deaths per 1,000 residents, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington reports that the “age-adjusted firearm homicide rates in the US are 19 times greater than they are in France, and 77 times greater than in Germany. The US has 33 times the rate of firearm homicide seen in Australia.”
Still, we do nothing. Georgia law enforcement has charged the father of the 14-year-old alleged shooter with manslaughter, following the recent guilty verdicts in Michigan for the parents of a shooter there. Charging the parents is about accountability, they say, but what about accountability for the state of Georgia or other states that have been making access to guns easier?
In Georgia, as The New York Times reports, “lawmakers have steadily loosened gun laws in recent years, including with a 2022 measure that allows most residents to carry a firearm without a permit.” The state is not among those, for example, that penalizes failing to safely store a firearm.
Texas has similarly lax or nonexistent gun rules, and Florida’s rules are only nominally more restrictive.
Assigning responsibility to parents is something we can debate, but first we need to engage in an honest discussion of state and federal complicity in creating a culture in which guns ownership is the norm.
The issues, as Ekow N. Yankah, a professor of law and philosophy at the University of Michigan, told the Times, is the number of guns.
“You’re not going to solve these problems by prosecuting parents one-off by one-off,” he said. “It just seems like an unlikely way to deal with what is fundamentally a gun saturation problem.”
The PEW Research Center reports that four in 10 Americans live in a household with a gun. The Council on Foreign Relations found that there were 120.5 guns owned for every 100 people in the country — nearly four times the rate in Canada. The homicide rate in the United States — 4.12 homicides per 1,000 people — was eight times what it is in Canada. I don’t want to imply a direct link, but it is worth deeper study, even if Republicans have worked over the years to limit the ability of federal researchers and others to do the work.
In the meantime, these stories repeat themselves, the locations changing, and the body count rises. It has been 25 years since Columbine, 12 since Sandy Hook, six years since Parkland, two since Uvalde, and now three days since the Winder murders. Politicians already are moving on to other things. Nothing to see here, apparently. Just move along.