Opinion: This country’s cavalier attitude toward gun violence is entirely unacceptable.
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Since I started writing this article in the wake of the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting, 20 mass shootings have happened in the United States. Eighteen people killed and 88 injured in a mere 10 days. How many did you hear about? I pride myself on following the news, and I certainly didn’t see articles about all of them.
When I first saw headlines about the Uvalde shooting, I distinctly remember thinking, “oh no, not another elementary school shooting.” As much as the news completely rattled me, it didn’t feel out of the ordinary. This year alone, 27 school shootings have happened in America. Mass shooting headlines roll in so often that it feels like this is just the way the world is. How sick is it that the death of 21 innocent people can be just another entry in a long list of tragedies? In any reasonable place, that would be a shocking, world-stopping disaster. Here, it’s just another Tuesday.
David Foster Wallace’s often-quoted allegory about fish feels appropriate in this scenario. As he wrote it, two young fish are asked how the water is by an older fish. When the older fish leaves, one of the younger fish asks the other, “What the hell is water?” When you’re immersed in something from the moment you’re born without a break, how are you supposed to know that it’s not the same everywhere? What the hell is a gun violence epidemic?
As a young person, I can’t remember a time in my life at which a school shooting was inconceivable. I was born after Columbine, and by the time I was in elementary school, lockdown drills were commonplace. I can’t remember a time when any of my teachers explicitly mentioned the possibility of a mass shooting, but we all knew what we were practicing for. I was nine years old when Sandy Hook happened. I was too young to understand the situation in depth, but it opened my eyes to the possibility that students just like me could be shot in school. Now, at nineteen, I’m disgusted by a country that has seemingly chosen to deal with the school shooting problem by training students to barricade doors and hide in corners.
This is an issue I’ve seen again and again with people in my generation. We’re so desensitized to mass violence in schools because we have never lived in a world without it. Repetition invites complacency, and it’s such a strange kind of cognitive dissonance to be horrified by school shootings while at the same time almost expecting them. It feels so indescribably gross to not be moved to tears every time you read a headline about people being shot to death, but it’s become such a normal thing that the same emotions don’t show up every time. There’s only so much you can take before you become numb.
This complacency is dangerous. If we allow ourselves to accept that this madness is “just the way it is,” nothing will ever get done. The more people believe this is normal, the more it’ll really become normal. As much as we’re used to daily mass shootings, gun violence is much less prevalent in other places. On almost every graph related to gun violence, the difference between the U.S. and other countries is striking. We tower above the rest of the world in terms of tragedy. It’s no wonder the recent mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, was barely in the news for a week.
The task of mourning every victim of this senseless and unnecessary violence can seem Herculean, but it’s important. Let yourself feel the full grief of America’s gun problem. It’s not easy, and that’s a good thing. It should be sickening and it should make you uncomfortable and that feeling should never go away.
If you think that things are fine the way they are, I don’t know what to tell you. If the graves of 19 children and two teachers who were just trying to enjoy a day at school aren’t enough to sway you, I don’t know where you can find a soul or conscience. If you think we’re getting out of this by increasing the number of “good guys” with guns, I don’t know how to make you see that we don’t live in an action movie.
The best I can do is hope you’ll take a look at the world around you and change your mind. There’s no reason for a school to have anything in common with a warzone. Get your head out of the water and start demanding action.
