Lessons learned?

Paul Kandarian

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out America has a gun problem. Actually, America has a fill-in-the-blank problem – obesity, drug addiction, excessive use of force by cops, racial injustice, Covid, global warming, economic inequality, gas prices, etc. It often seems that America’s problems may as well be listed on a Mobius strip, because it ain’t gonna end.

I’m sitting here a few days into the latest brutal news of a school shooting. Another school shooting. I’m sitting here wondering how the hell a supposedly great country can see a mass shooting a day in all, but in schools in particular. The Texas shooting that killed 19 elementary school children and two adults was one of two dozen – in schools alone – as of the ironically named Memorial Day weekend.

Gun deaths are now the leading cause of death in children. Not playground accidents. Not car crashes. Not disease. Goddamn guns.

I’m as mad as hell as most of us are over this. But to quote the great movie line in full – “I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna this anymore!” (whereafter the character Howard Beale is shot dead on live TV). What the hell can we do about it?

The Second Amendment had its run when we were fighting the British and hunting for our food, not to mention slaughtering innocent Native Americans. We needed guns then. Not now. Soldiers do. Cops as well, at least the ones who don’t kill the unarmed citizenry.

How much of this can we take? How many times do we have to hold vigils, walks, rallies, to shake the power elite in this country to finally take action? We thought they would after Virginia Tech (33 dead, 2007). We thought they would after Newtown (28 dead, 2012). We thought they would after Stoneman Douglas High School (17 dead, 2015). We thought they would after Columbine (15 dead, 1999).

We are a gun-crazy country, with almost 400 million owned. Second place is so far away, there may as well not be a second place.

Numbers don’t lie. They are cold and immovable, much like the stone-hearted bought-and-sold in Congress who refuse to protect us. And who march out the tired, inaccurate trope about guns aren’t the problem, mental health issues are the problem.

At issue is access to guns, notably assault weapons, the guns of preference of someone looking to kill a lot of people at once. The issue is not, as the common bleat from the right crows, “mental health.”

In a USA Today article, Dr. Jeffrey Swanson, a leading researcher in violence and mental illness, said “We have way more gun deaths by a mile than these other [high-income] countries, and they don’t have a higher rate of mental illness or crime,” adding that America has similar rates of untreated psychiatric illness and mental health spending per capita to other countries.

“Even if you were to do everything possible to eliminate mental illness,” said Dr. Reena Kapoor in the same article, professor of psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine, “you’d really only be addressing around 3% of the violence in this country.

“Mass shootings are a uniquely American problem,” she said. “Any reasonable person would think maybe that has something to do with the big difference in our gun laws and those in other countries, and that access to very dangerous weapons is much easier here than anywhere else in the world.”

How many times can a nation’s heart shatter, sutured together every day by the gauzy, ineffectual promise of thoughts and prayers only to be torn asunder again and again and again, abetted by the bought-and-sold marionettes in Congress dancing at the end of lobbying strings, complicit in the slaughter of our young?

They rally against abortion, protecting the unborn, but when birth brings them into the world to be cared for, they turn a blind eye. “You’re on your own, little one,” they say by their inaction. “We won’t protect what doesn’t give us money or votes.”

Our power lies not in appealing to people with souls; theirs lie fallow in someone else’s cash register. Our power lies in the vote; we have that by the millions.