It seems crazy just to type the words “elementary school shooting”. Any mass shooting event (yuck, what a horrible phrase) is an act of gross evil; one at an elementary school just seems beyond words, beyond comprehension. It comes just days after an apparently racially-motivated shooting in Buffalo, New York, where 10 people were killed.
Of course, this isn’t the first of these, far from it. There was the Sandy Hook shooting nearly 10 years ago, where 26 people were killed, 20 of them children. Here in the UK, we had the Dunblane massacre in 1996, where sixteen people died, fifteen of them children.
There’s a difference, though: after the Dunblane massacre, action was taken to ban private ownership of handguns of the sort that were used in the shooting. After Sandy Hook, nothing was done. Nothing. Dan Hodges had it right:
I get that there are huge cultural and social differences between how ownership of guns is seen in the UK vs how it’s seen in the US. I don’t want to get into “we’re better than you” arguments. Yet the simple fact is that massacres like Sandy Hook, like the one in Texas simply haven’t happened in the UK since Dunblane and the subsequent restrictions. Correlation isn’t causation, yet it’s hard not to see there’s a link here.
At the start of an edition of The Daily Show in 2015, after the shooting of nine black people in a church in Charleston, Jon Stewart spoke eloquently about the lack of any response to address the issues that led to the shooting, compared to the urgency and scale of the post-9/11 response. He was talking about this in the context of racism; yet it’s hard not to see something similar in terms of gun control measures.
On September 11 2001, nearly 3,000 people were killed as a result of the attacks on New York and Washington DC. It was a terrible, horrific act played out right in front of us on TV. The US launched the “War On Terror”, basically a carte blanche by the Bush administration to do, as Stewart puts it, “whatever it takes to keep Americans safe”. Two wars were launched; huge restrictions on freedom were introduced, some of which were alleged to be unconstitutional; people suspected of terrorism were held in Guantanamo Bay without trial; people were tortured; the US took it upon itself to fly drones over other countries in order to take out those it believed posed a threat.
Now, my point isn’t whether these specific actions were justified by what happened on 9/11 or not (if you want my personal view, then I was horrified by much of what went on under the banner of “protecting freedom”, both in the US and here in the UK; as much as anything, if you willingly take away rights and freedoms from people, you aren’t protecting freedom). My point is simply that after the shock and horror of the attacks, the US felt it had to act, and act quickly, to protect itself and take out those it believed to be a threat. And, in theory, this was to some extent understandable, even unarguable, even if the ways in which the Bush administration went about it were questionable at best.
Yet, according to the US Centers for Disease Prevention and Control, over 4,300 children were killed by guns in 2020, making guns the leading killer of US children that year (the year that covid-19 first reared its ugly head). That’s a death toll nearly 2 times that of 9/11. And those deaths – of children – are still being added to today, as we’ve seen. Surely deaths of children of that number should provoke an urgent response, right? Some measures to try and protect children and try and get the guns away from those who would hurt others would be in order, even if they didn’t go as far as the post-Dunblane restrictions here, right?
No. Apparently not. Indeed, for President Biden to even talk about gun control in the wake of this outrage was party-political and divisive:
The president of the United States, frail, confused, bitterly partisan, desecrating the memory of recently murdered children with tired talking points of the Democratic Party, dividing the country in a moment of deep pain rather than uniting. His voice rising, amplified only as he repeats the talking points he repeated for over 35 years in the United States Senate, partisan politics being the only thing that animates him. Unfit for leadership of this country.
Tucker Carlson
Yes, apparently it’s ‘politicising’ the issue to talk of gun control when a gun massacre has occurred. Senator Ted Cruz said similar here:
Add to that the usual “this isn’t the time to talk about gun control” responses, along with those who claim that the answer is to arm more people (read both here), and the difference with the 9/11 response is stark: “Whatever, I dunno, just don’t take our guns.”
But if the aftermath of a massacre isn’t the time to talk about it when is? Presumably never, as the issue will once again be kicked into the long grass, the can booted hard down the road, which presumably is the NRA and Republicans’ aim.
And yes, actually, this is about politics, because the issue is political: certain parties in America see the right to own, carry and use whichever guns they wish as being more important than other people’s right to, y’know, life – even when it’s the lives of young children that we’re talking about. It’s just as political to say “now is not the time” as it is to say, “we need to talk about gun crime while the issue is still at the forefront of our minds.”
Just imagine if someone had said that in the wake of 9/11: “now is not the time to discuss security and how to defeat terrorism”. They’d have been – rightly – pilloried, perhaps even accused of wanting the terrorists to succeed, especially in the “with us or against us” climate after those attacks. Yet the deaths of 4,300+ children a year, the aftermath of yet another horrific attack against children isn’t the right time? It just blows my mind, that people can look at events and statistics like these and just try and carry on with the status quo, or even introduce more guns into the equation. How does this not make you complicit in the ongoing atrocities?
I know gun controls won’t stop all these attacks; I know that even if you took every firearm away from every American gun owner, those who are most committed to carrying out these atrocities would find a way to do so. But to cite that as a reason for not doing anything is just admitting you don’t care about the problem. Because gun controls, making it harder for those people to get their hands on these death-devices, can surely only help.
Ultimately, I guess, it’s a simple equation: people’s lives (including children’s lives) vs guns. For too many of the powerful in America, it’s the guns that win. Every time.
Wandering Thoughts II - the Sequel 