As the number of shootings in the U.S. is projected to increase, we must ask ourselves: Is our best defense really to hope that a “good guy with a gun” is always waiting around to save the day?
Eighteen years ago, I was born in Highland Park Hospital. Earlier this month, in the most harrowing day of mine, I watched the news numbly from my home as 25 people were rushed to that same building to be treated for gunshot wounds.
The most prolific human rights organizations in the United States and abroad value equal and unrestricted access to all maternal care, including abortion, as a human right.
After a tragedy, it is calming for many to rationalize some of the pain by casting the event as unforeseeable, and thus, unpreventable. That comfort cannot be found in Buffalo.
Our approach to ending gun violence cannot be treated as a merely political issue. Gun culture is so deeply embedded into states like Texas that we must also push for a transformative cultural change.
Lost in the Biden administration’s progressive campaign rhetoric is the undeniable reality of sustained, nativist violence committed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers against the “huddled masses” at our borders.
This is the present we have picked. A present in which the American way becomes the mere skill of pretending that there is nothing to grieve even as we mourn.
Simply put, America is condemned to a future of mass bloodshed that is hypothetically completely preventable but realistically inevitable and intractable.
