On Guns: Enough is Enough is Enough
We Have Chosen to Do Nothing and the Consequences Have Been Deadly
There is a list of several dozen schools being passed around the internet:
It is a list meant to represent the bulk of school shootings that have plagued this nation over the last 25 years. I can’t verify the list, but its presence and length should make clear that our political paralysis has deadly consequences.
The latest addition to the body count occurred in Uvalde, Texas, a small, mostly Latino town outside San Antonio. As the Associated Press reports, an 18-year-old gunman “massacred 19 children and two teachers” at an elementary school after he “legally bought two AR-style rifles” and “seemed to hint online that something was about to happen.”
Lt. Christopher Olivarez of the Texas Department of Public Safety told CNN (quoted by the AP) that the fourth-graders were murdered after the shooter “barricaded himself by locking the door and just started shooting children and teachers that were inside that classroom.” He then added: “It just shows you the complete evil of the shooter.”
Complete evil. It's a pithy phrase, bu tone that elides responsibility. The shooter, whose motive remains undiscovered, had a choice. He chose to buy the guns. He chose to bring them to Robb Elementary School. He chose to barricade himself in the classroom and open fire. He made these choices. Perhaps, the shooter was mentally ill. Perhaps, he was enthrall to an unidentified ideology. Perhaps, we will find out at some point.
The rightwing apologists are promoting a dubious gang theory, or accusing anyone who points to this and says "it's the guns" of trying to make the deaths of 21 -- 19 kids and two teachers -- political.
Screw them. It is political. Politics is about choice, about action. It means subjecting the world around us to questions, trying to answer the questions, and then acting. The causes might differ from shooting to shooting -- in Buffalo, it was White Supremacy and the Great Replacement Theory, as it was in Pittsburgh and several other massacres — while the Uvalde motive remains unknown.
But we cannot lose sight of the fact that there were choices involved — and not just choices made by the shooter. We, as a society, have chosen to do nothing about the proliferation of guns, both legal and illegal. We have chose to elect leaders who pound their chest and proclaim the “sacredness” of the second amendment, who view gun ownership as tantamount to citizenship and are willing to sacrifice others’ lives to this dogma. And we choose to glorify guns and violence in our television and movies, choose to culturally endorse the bogus “good guy with a gun” myth.
These are not the only choices we make. We choose to pretend that “hardening” schools — basically, turning them into prison-like edifices — will keep kids safe, that there will be no adverse effects, that treating young children in this way will not inure them to the violence or make them far more accepting of authoritarian structures, of arguments that we can give up freedoms in exchange for just a little safety.
We choose to spend out tax dollars on the military and police, and not on treating mental health and substance abuse. And we choose to target black and brown communities with our law enforcement strategies, choose to continue enforcing racist housing, policing, and other policies, And we choose, as a society, to ignore the legacy of White Supremacy and its continuing real world impact — in Buffalo, El Paso, Pittsburgh, Poway, Calif., and elsewhere.
These are our choices. Jean-Paul Sartre said we demonstrate our freedom by making choices, hard choices, and then living with the dread of having made them. Each choice we make, he says, we make not just for ourselves, but for the larger community. We choose for mankind when we choose. If he is right, then we are choosing to condemn the human race to violence, because we are choosing either to do nothing or to meet force with even greater force. It is an abdication of responsibility on all parts, an abdication attested to by thoughts and prayers, by memes like this:
We can pray, but it’s too late. The dead are dead. The families mourn, but offering our support in the form of innocuous prayer can make us feel good, can allow us to move on. We can’t keep moving on. Enough is enough.