In the aftermath of frequent, unsurprising, and completely normalized mass tragedies such as the one that occurred on Tuesday, May 24 in Uvalde, Texas, it is typical to see left-leaning news outlets and politicians ask a lot of rhetorical questions. I opened my inbox yesterday evening, for instance, to find an email from The Atlantic with the subject line: “When will it stop?” The hope, of course, is that the hopelessness that characterizes the initial conversation on the left following acts of gun violence will give way to unconditional optimism. “It won’t stop until we change and make it stop,” the thinking goes. Yet in reality, the answer to the question is equal parts obvious and dismaying.
It will never stop.
Mass shootings won’t stop. They won’t stop happening in elementary schools. They won’t stop happening in grocery stores and parking lots. They won’t stop happening in churches. They won’t stop happening if we arm teachers, talk more about mental health, or go through the perpetual charade that is a congressional debate about background checks.
Simply put, America is condemned to a future of mass bloodshed that is hypothetically completely preventable but realistically inevitable and intractable. A statement like this may seem blithely pessimistic or even nihilistic, but to argue otherwise is to indulge in Albert Einstein’s rough definition of insanity: to do, or in our case to watch, the same thing over and over again and expect different results.
We live in the most well-armed country in the history of the world. There are more guns in the United States than there are people, a statement that doesn’t become any less ridiculous each time it is written after mass shootings. At over 120 firearms per 100 people, the United States is without par — in second place is the Falkland Islands at 62.1. Whatever the founders may have intended when they wrote the Second Amendment in a nascent America that sorely lacked Bushmaster XM-15s, the modern-day U.S. does indeed have a militia that exercises the right to bear arms: its populace, which can hardly be called “well-regulated.”
When Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas surveyed the catastrophe that took place in Uvalde and said that the gunman “shot and killed, horrifically, incomprehensibly,” he both told the truth and lied. It is of course horrific that someone would enter an elementary school and shoot 9-year-old children in the face, but it is hardly incomprehensible. 100% of past K-12 school shooters have been male, and the majority have demonstrated a prior interest in guns. Salvador Ramos, the 18-year-old Uvalde shooter who posted a picture of two rifles on his Instagram story this year, fits this demographic.
Gov. Abbott is governor of a state in which individuals can find a private, unlicensed gun seller online and buy their firearms — similarly to how one might shop for a used couch. He, as any sane politician in his situation would, claimed that shootings like the one in Uvalde “cannot be tolerated in the state of Texas.” Yet Texas can tolerate, and host, the annual meeting of the National Rifle Association this coming weekend, and Gov. Abbott will somehow find it within himself to speak at the shindig.
The fact that Ramos marched into a school in Uvalde to murder 19 children almost 10 years after 20-year-old Adam Lanza massacred 20 children at Sandy Hook Elementary School is an indictment of Abbott’s claim of incomprehensibility. The parallels between Ramos’ and Lanza’s crimes — both attacked family members before leaving home to attack elementary schools — and the decade that separates their actions is perhaps the clearest distillation of American paralysis. In the time separating the two atrocities, the U.S. elected two Democratic presidents and one Republican, all of whom at some point during their presidencies vowed to act to prevent the next senseless tragedy. Though the location and the names of the dead may change, the story of gun-fueled American bloodshed remains the same. If anything, it worsens: According to the CDC, more Americans died of gun-related injuries in 2020 than in any other year on record.
In the coming days and weeks, advocates of stricter laws surrounding firearms such as myself will cite some of the verifiable legislative models for reducing gun deaths. We’ll point to other countries, such as Australia, which responded to episodes of mass death by making it harder to buy a gun and saw shooting deaths plummet. Perhaps we’ll look to liberal-minded states such as Massachusetts, which erected a phalanx of regulations on guns and now boasts the lowest per capita death rate from firearms in the country.
Opponents of stricter gun laws, if they choose to engage in policy discussions at the risk of offering fewer thoughts and prayers, could point out important differences between the U.S. as a whole and the foreign nations and individual states that have effectively cracked down on gun violence. Australia’s gun buyback program led to the confiscation of 650,000 firearms — a figure which represents slightly over 0.1% of the firearms currently circulating in the United States. Massachusetts is the most liberal state in the U.S., and even with its robust regulatory framework experiences higher rates of gun deaths than the United Kingdom and Japan.
Yet even staging this debate makes two crucial and misguided assumptions: that the people who wield the power to make change are listening, and that they are acting in the best interest of their constituents. These assumptions are as naive as expecting Sen. Ted Cruz — the recipient of $300,000 in gun money donations during his 2018 reelection campaign alone — to sincerely act on his statement on Tuesday that “we’ve seen too many of these shootings.” These assumptions presuppose that American politicians are beholden first to the people who elect them, not to the political action committees and influence groups who help sway the people who elect them. These assumptions optimistically, yet misguidedly, hope that politicians will do the right thing even if the right thing makes politics more difficult.
People with such unbridled optimism should continue to ask rhetorical questions and push for change from the outside. Those who have come to the same cynical conclusions as myself are faced with a few uninspiring courses of action. They can run for Senate, and hope that 60 like-minded Democrats have the same idea at around the same time. They can contribute to worthwhile movements such as March for Our Lives, hoping that change takes time. They can move to a country with a safer gun culture — that is, virtually anywhere else.
Or they can throw up their hands in disgust. Because America, by all indications, isn’t changing anytime soon.
Image by Colin Lloyd is licensed under the Unsplash License.
