Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
-William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”
Within the space of ten days (May 14 – May 24), the U.S. has suffered two mass shootings, the first in a Buffalo, NY grocery story (Tops) which served as a community gathering-hole and for which residents had lobbied for years, the second in an elementary school (Robb) in the small town of Uvalde, Texas (pop. 15,000).
A mass shooting is sometimes defined as one in which four or more people are shot (there are multiple definitions of “mass”), not including the shooter; by this standard, both Buffalo (13 shot, 10 killed) and Uvalde (17? shot/wounded, 21 killed) fit the definition and then some. But while outliers, they are hardly the first mass shootings to occur in the U.S. this year – to date, there have been 213 such incidents over the first 145 days of 2022 (to May 25), an average of about 1.47 per day. At this rate, the U.S. can anticipate +/- 537 mass shootings by December 31 – a low estimate, since gun violence normally rises during the summer months.
While mass shootings do not account for the majority of total U.S. gun deaths per year, because semi-automatics are the weapon of choice for those who kill in public and semi-public spaces, shootings by high-capacity semi-automatic weapons (e.g. the AR15 or an AR15-style weapon, nicknamed “America’s Rifle” by the NRA in 2016) on average kill six times more people per incident. These killings grab the headlines because so many people can be killed or wounded within just a few moments. The AR15 normally carries 30 rounds in its cartridge (although it can be modified to carry up to 100); all you have to do is pull the trigger once every second or so and if you’re a moderately good shot you can get off 100 rounds a minute.
It should come as no surprise that such incidents as that in Uvalde – or, going back a few years, those at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fl. (17 dead), Sandy Hook School in Newton, Ct (27 dead), or even Columbine in Littleton, CO (13 dead) – arouse the public’s grief and outrage. All these incidents, of course, involved children, some as young as six (Sandy Hook). (Major mass shootings in the past 15 years not aimed at children include those in Las Vegas [2017, 60 dead], Orlando, Fl [2016, 49 dead], and Virginia Tech [2007, 32 dead]).*
For a country whose Supreme Court is on the brink of declaring its undying love of the unborn fetus, we have a strange way of demonstrating that love once the unborn are actually among us. Our philosophy of life-before-birth appears to be “the State will do everything to protect the sanctity of life”; our philosophy of life-after-birth appears to be “You’re on your own.” The Greeks say ο σώζων εαυτόν σωθήτω, equivalent to “every man (woman, child, newborn) for him/her/itself.”
I have spent the past days following the Uvalde mass shooting story, but – like other, more prominent writers – feel hesitant to comment on what happened during the hour or so from the time the 18-year-old gunman entered Robb Elementary School until the double classroom where he was holed up was breached by a BORTAC team (a federal tactical unit belonging to Customs and Border Protection, CBP), who killed him.
Videos shot by cell phone users make clear that there was chaos and confusion and terror around the school from the beginning (around 11:20 am on Tuesday). Here’s a timeline published within the past few hours – four days after the shootings (will it be further revised/altered?). The most salient details as of today:
…a school officer drove right past the shooter — 18-year-old Salvador Ramos — while Ramos fired at the school; that as many as 19 officers were inside the school more than 45 minutes before the suspect was killed; that the school district police chief decided not to breach the classroom where the shooter was; and that a young girl from the class called 911 several times asking for police while authorities were right outside.
The most likely explanation (so far) of law enforcement’s delayed response was the police chief’s conviction that they were dealing with a hostage situation and not an active shooter one – the protocol for the former being to negotiate with the shooter in order to save as many lives as possible, that for the latter being the requirement to take out the shooter as quickly as possible.
The timeline contains multiple references beginning at 12:03 am to 911 calls by students in a nearby classroom, begging police to help their classmates (12:03 initial call; further calls logged at 12:13, 12:16, 12:36, 12:43, and 12:47). The classroom where the shooter was located was opened at 12:50 with keys taken from the janitor.
Given this timeline – and, as of yesterday, the admission that police made “the wrong decision” – calls for more SROs (School Resource Officers), more local police, more county police, more anything police are ringing pretty hollow. If the shooter couldn’t be taken out by all the law enforcement on site within minutes of his entering the school, well, law enforcement might not be the solution to mass shootings after all.
What can be done, given Americans’ loving relationship with and profound attachment to guns – or rather, the profound attachment of 30% of Americans to guns, given that 70% of the U.S. population doesn’t own even one? In the U.S. currently, it is estimated there are 120.5 guns per 100 people; next in order come the Falkland Islands, with 62.1 guns per 100 people. Put another way, the U.S. has around 400 million guns as of now, and a population of ~330 million. Nearly half the civilian guns in the entire world are in the U.S., which comprises 5% of the world population.
That’s a lot of guns.
Can Anything Be Done about Gun Violence?
Efforts to impose a ban semi-automatic weapons like the AR15 and its various knockoffs and permutations are underway, and have been for some time, but this would need to be at the federal level (state-level gun control isn’t really useful, given the free and unfettered movement of guns across state borders – e.g., 60% of gun deaths in Chicago are caused by guns brought in from across state lines). And given that 60 votes would be required in the Senate to pass such a ban (similar to the Federal Assault Weapons Ban passed by the Clinton Administration in 1994, which was allowed to sundown in 2004), gun control advocates aren’t holding out much hope.
Additional restrictions: States that support gun ownership with minimal restrictions (like Texas, which since 2021 hasn’t required a permit or much of anything except proof of age [18 – the age limit was recently lowered from 21]) will do nothing. Texas has had 8 mass shootings in the past 13 years; most of the legislature’s efforts towards gun safety / school safety have been directed towards further arming and training school resource officers, teachers,** and “hardening” schools. Some funding has been directed towards mental health programs for at-risk youth. And there has been talk of red-flag laws (Gov. Abbott appeared to have supported such legislation until he didn’t) that would identify those who for various reasons should not be in possession of firearms.
“Hardening” schools: This term was new to me. It refers to making schools ever more impenetrable and inaccessible to gunmen through such measures as a single entrance/exit that would be heavily guarded, with strong fences and metal detectors, all interior doors locked at all times, more armed school police officers on duty, and more teachers and administrators carrying guns, etc. under the mantra “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” (This didn’t work in Uvalde, of course.) The basic idea seems to be to turn schools into prison-like fortresses, which casts a whole new light on the school-to-prison pipeline concept. It hardly needs saying that if a school goes into permanent lockdown mode, it’s also impenetrable to those who have legitimate reasons for visits (e.g. parents). And a school with bulletproof windows that don’t open, and permanently locked doors – well, that’s not going to do much for controlling aerosol viruses like Covid-19; every school and every classroom which is hardened in this way will become a veritable super-spreader hothouse of infection.
Other bizarre proposals: “Ballistic blankets,” “Man traps,” and retired police and military manning the perimeter and hallways of schools in order to obviate any need for (actual, non-retired) police. In return, these retired individuals would receive forgiveness of their state or federal (?) taxes, or something. It would appear that they’ll propose anything but the one thing it makes sense to propose.
It’s surprising no one has yet (to my knowledge) proposed Robocop style School Guardians.
Note: None of the above is intended to be transformed into an actual policy proposal, of course: “I think everyone realizes that none of what Republicans are saying about how to respond to mass shootings will translate into actual policy proposals. They’re barely even trying to make sense. Instead, they’re just making noise to drown out rational discussion until the latest atrocity fades from the news cycle.”
Concentrating on the “mentally ill”, i.e. beefing up mental health background checks. This approach, which some Republicans are paying lip service to, is in contradiction to the goal of the Republican Party over the past 40 years, i.e. shrink the state and all social services associated with it to literally nothing. Any Republican who proposes that his/her state (or the federal government) legislate stricter background checks that would include a full psychological work-up of all prospective gun owners is pulling the wool over everybody’s eyes. And that’s not the only reason to nurture little hope regarding a more stringent mental health screening process: many of the mass shooters in recent history (by and large, males in their teens and twenties) would slip through the net of the DSM-V. A mass shooting requires forethought, planning, and careful execution – not qualities normally associated with the mentally ill. While it is certainly true that most mass killers are shown – after the fact, as was the case with both the Buffalo shooter and the Uvalde shooter – to have been racists and/or misogynists, “racism” and “misogyny” are not officially classified as mental illnesses. If they were, the ranks of the diagnosed mentally ill would extend to the halls of Congress and today’s Supreme Court.
Searching for an “explanation”, aka excuse
Opponents are willing to lay the blame for America’s outsize gun violence on anyone and anything apart from the obvious culprit. “It’s the breakup of the American family, it’s all those fatherless children!” say some (e.g. Ted Cruz), as if (a) other countries don’t have high or higher divorce rates (they do), and (b) as if they cared about fatherless and motherless children (if they did, their behavior all throughout the pandemic would have focused on saving the lives of the million+ Americans who died, many of whom left their children orphaned).
Another gem: “Americans aren’t going to church enough! If they were God-fearing Christians (the only church Republicans recognize), these shootings wouldn’t happen.” And while it is true that Americans have lost religion in the past 30 years – more declare themselves as agnostic or atheistic than at any time in U.S. history – the connection between religious fundamentalism and preventing mass shootings seems a bit tenuous at best. Church attendance has declined in most developed Western countries over the past generation exactly as it has in the U.S. (Just check out Italy and France if you’re curious about this.) And one other point: Is it really any safer to go to church than it is to go to primary school these days? Consider, for example, the Charleston, SC shooting at an AME Church in June 2015, or the Pittsburgh Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in October 2018.
American “exceptionalism”: A bedrock explanation for gun rights enthusiasts as well as some sociologists/political scientists/historians. We’re America, we’re different than all other countries – we have a tradition of bearing arms (like no other country in the history of the universe ever bore arms), our country has a violent history that includes genocide (like no other country/empire has a history of violence and genocide).
And then we’ve got the Constitution’s Second Amendment, ratified in 1791.
About that Second Amendment: Yes, it enshrined the right to bear arms by a well-regulated militia: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
Here’s the sort of weapon the Second Amendment had in mind:
A trained Revolutionary War soldier could get off about 4 rounds a minute. Gunpowder got wet in the rain, so armies avoided engaging in inclement weather. Let’s bear in mind that “those who wrote the Second Amendment in the 18th century could not have envisioned how their perfectly reasonable intentions would be distorted 235 years later — or how 18-year-olds would be able to buy and carry assault weapons meant for a modern battlefield into grade-school classrooms.”
Military history and the advance of weaponry in the past 235 years aside, an important SCOTUS decision, District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008), interpreted the Second Amendment as giving individuals the right to bear arms to protect themselves, i.e. their persons, homes, possessions. (Note: Heller was recently characterized by Charles M. Blow as “a corrupt and bastardized interpretation of the Second Amendment.”)
However, Heller did recognize that there could be some limitations on this right to bear arms for personal protection (none of the Constitutional amendments is unlimited): It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose: For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues. The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.
On Thursday, Useful Idiots Podcasters Katie Halper and Aaron Mate hosted guest Michael Prysner, an editor of The Empire Files and Iraq war veteran; their sole topic was the school shooting in Uvalde. (starts at 21:00, well worth watching in full.) This wasn’t a typical interview – questions were few and far between – but rather, an extensive discourse by Prysner on all the issues discussed above, each concluding with the belief that nothing much, or nothing at all, could be done.
Prysner touched on some of the deeper issues that are weakening the U.S. both internally and externally – high levels of poverty (especially child poverty, which is rampant), low levels of mental health services and support for at-risk populations, and an increasing sense of alienation among a starkly-divided populace accompanied by the loss of a sense of community and core civic values.
Having recently become a father himself, Prysner discussed how to protect one’s children from senseless and random violence of the sort exhibited in Uvalde. He judged that there is nothing Americans can do to protect their children, concluding that the only way to feel they were safe was to move to another country (he mentioned Canada, which has a pretty violent history itself that in many ways mirrors that of its neighbor to the south, but where mass shootings are virtually non-existent).
In a nutshell, Prysner concluded “this is the way it is and there’s really no hope.”
Maybe the U.S. is special after all.
*“A shocking number of U.S. mass shootings take place in schools. According to the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, there have been 2,054 school shootings in the United States since 1970, with 681 deaths. Canada has had a total of eight school shootings in about the same time frame, from 1975, with a total of 31 victims killed. Mexico has had 17 school shootings since 2004, with 15 victims killed.”
**Teachers in Texas, indeed across the nation, had already reached their breaking point by the time the Uvalde shooting occurred. Both individual teachers and their professional organizations (AFT, NEA) are opposed to their taking up arms, which is in any case virtually pointless: in violent crime incidents, less than 1% even get off a shot against their assailant.
Further reading:
“Even Republicans Seem to Know Something Has to Change Now”
“A Timeline of How the Texas School Massacre – and the Police Response – Unfolded”
“Did Texas Police Fail School Massacre Victims?” (Useful Idiots Podcast, May 27, 2022)
“Gun Massacres Are the Grotesque Pinnacle of ‘American Exceptionalism’”
“Current Causes of Death of Children and Adolescents in the United States”
“12 Stats to Help Inform the Gun Control Debate”
“Bowling for Columbine” (Michael Moore’s film on the 1999 Columbine school shooting)