Isn’t it amazing when a plan comes together?
A gunman in Southern California shot and killed at least 11 people before killing himself. It was the second mass shooting in California in less than a week.
The shootings, though, aren’t confined to California.
The Gun Violence Archive, a not-for-profit research operation, defines a mass shooting as one in which at least four people are killed or injured.
By that standard, as of Jan. 23 there have been 36 mass shootings in the United States in 2023. That’s more than one per day.
That number doesn’t include the run-of-the-mill, day-in-day-out incidences of gun violence.
As of Jan. 23, again according to the Gun Violence Archive, nearly 2,700 people have died by firearm in the United States. Of those, nearly 1,150 were homicides.
There were 21 children killed and 95 teenagers.
Those numbers don’t include the number of people injured in gun-related incidents. If we do include the wounded in our calculations, the tally nearly doubles.
There now are so many shootings in the United States—mass or just everyday—that they often don’t even make the local news when they occur.
That’s the way the gun industry, the firearms merchants and their flacks and camp followers at the National Rifle Association and other lobbying organizations want it.
The multibillion-dollar firearms industry and its well-paid minions have been executing a long-term strategy. They have been trying to “normalize” the presence of guns in every corner of American life.
That’s been the reason for the spate of open-carry laws and other measures designed to bring guns out into the open. The gun lobby wants us to grow accustomed to seeing guns everywhere.
At the grocery store.
At restaurants and fast-food places.
In school parking lots.
In churches.
Everywhere.
And all the time.
They want us to see guns the way we see trees or traffic signs or train tracks—as just another mundane part of the landscape.
The plan is working.
The predictable result of normalizing the presence of guns in American life is that we also have normalized gun violence and gun deaths, too. Once we accept the premise, now a reality, that guns are everywhere in America, we also accept the tragedies that pile up, day by day, week by week, month by month and year by year, as a result of our acceptance.
We don’t question why a citizen of the United States is 20 times more likely to die by gun than a citizen elsewhere in the industrialized world. We don’t ask why we have more gun-related deaths in our supposedly peaceful nation than have occurred in the Russia-Ukraine war.
We also don’t stop to wonder how far into the American soil the weeds of gun violence will plant themselves.
Just a few days ago, a six-year-old in Virginia took a gun to school and shot a teacher. The teacher heroically ushered the other children in class to safety, but we can assume that those children’s days of youthful innocence are over.
Forever.
Here in Indiana, neighbors at an apartment complex video-recorded a four-year-old in a diaper playing with a loaded gun in a hallway. The only thing that saved that moment from being disastrous was the fact that there was no bullet in the chamber.
When we say we’re comfortable with seeing guns everywhere and all the time, we must expect that children—particularly unsupervised children or children in homes where guns aren’t securely locked away—will think it’s okay for them to have them, too.
Some of those kids inevitably will think that it’s all right to carry a gun around with them. Some of them even will come to believe that using a gun to settle a score with a classmate or address a concern with a teacher is fine, too.
We just must accept that.
Because, the gun industry and lobby assure us, firearms should be every bit as common in America as trees and traffic signs and train tracks.
Isn’t it amazing when a plan comes together?
John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students. The views expressed are those of the author only and should not be attributed to Franklin College. Send comments to [email protected].
