Once again, there was a shooting.
Once again, the victims were small children.
Once again, the shooter used military-style weapons to do the killing.
The mass murder in Nashville, Tennessee, is like a distillation of all the toxicities flowing through the American body politic.
Once again, we have a troubled soul able to gain access to weapons that in other countries only soldiers in combat would have. Once again, that troubled soul uses that access to murder innocents. Once again, families, friends, a community and an entire nation reel with grief, struggling with emotional wounds that never will heal.
As always, we ask why someone could be filled with so much rage as to shoot three nine-year-old children and three school staff members who were in their early 60s. We want to hear something that will allow us to make sense of a tragedy this horrible.
But there is nothing about this horror story that makes sense.
Including our response to such tragedies.
Our inability to have a rational discussion about guns and gun laws costs us so much. Because we cannot—because we will not—talk with any degree of honesty about firearms, we wreak havoc in our society in ways we rarely bother to calculate.
The body camera footage of the Nashville police’s confrontation with the shooter is chilling on many levels. It is a hard thing to watch as someone—even a person who has done awful things—is gunned down. We are reminded as we watch that there are no happy endings for anyone in stories such as these.
The police officers acted with admirable courage. They went into a dangerous situation without apparent body armor or other protection. They moved quickly and decisively.
Doubtless, they saved lives.
But we also cannot help but wonder why police officers in a nation that claims to hold peace dear must have military-level arsenals at the ready all the time.
It is because they know they might confront horrors such as this one at any moment. In a country awash in guns—studies peg the number of privately owned firearms in the United States at more than 350 million on the low end and at nearly 500 million on the high end—police officers could be confronting a shooter with an arsenal at his or her disposal at any time.
The shooter in Nashville had seven guns, including at least two assault rifles.
This reality does not completely explain this country’s tortured record of police-action shootings, but it does contribute to the problem. A police officer who has a reasonable fear that a traffic stop or domestic disturbance intervention could turn into Armageddon in an instant is likely to squeeze the trigger sooner than one who does not have to worry about the presence of deadly force.
This will not change if we refuse to talk honestly about guns.
The key word in that sentence is “honestly.”
Gun advocates across the nation already are spinning their absurdities, blaming this death like so many others on mental illness while doing nothing to keep people with mental health challenges from getting their hands on guns.
They also say that laws are ineffective when it comes to dealing with problems such as these because the laws are infallible.
Such thinking hasn’t prevented like-minded folks from rushing through laws affecting transgender citizens and trying to block students and others from reading books that might be dangerous.
If passing a law is such a futile exercise, then why do they devote so much time to ramming through legislation they like?
The reality is that gun advocates utter such inanities—even at a time of profound sorrow—because they will not advance their real argument for fear of sounding too callous.
The truth is that they see the carnage in our streets, our stores, our churches and, yes, our schools as an acceptable cost for preserving their right to own as many weapons as they want.
As they see it, better more than 40,000 Americans every year die via gun violence than one American, no matter disturbed or angry, be denied the opportunity to purchase a killing machine.
Guns now kill more Americans than auto accidents. Guns now are the leading cause of death among children in the United States.
This is the land we live in.
The country we have made.
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].
