Artwork by Michael DiMilo
By Geoff Carter
What’s it Going to Take?
On November 19th, a 22-year-old gunman killed five and wounded seventeen at Club Q, an LGBTQ in Colorado Springs using a semi-automatic rifle and a handgun, both so-called “ghost guns” with no serial numbers.
What’s it going to take? How many more must die?
Last week, on November 22nd, two days before Thanksgiving, a lone gunman killed six co-workers at a Walmart in Chesapeake, Virginia, before taking his own life. He used a 9mm weapon he had purchased shortly before the killings.
What’s it going to take?
On November 13th, three student athletes were slain and another two were wounded by a 22-year-old student who was in possession of a recently purchased Ruger semi-automatic rifle and a handgun.
What’s it going to take?
Last summer in Highland Park, Illinois, a gunman opened fire on a Fourth of July Parade, killing seven and injuring thirty. The 21-year-old shooter had been planning the attack for weeks and used an AR-15 style weapon, firing into the crowd from the roof of a nearby business.
What’s it going to take?
Nineteen fourth graders and two teachers were slaughtered at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas by a gunman wielding two AR-style rifles just days after his eighteenth birthday. The weapons caused such grievous tissue damage to the victims that DNA samples were required to identify the victims.
What’s it going to take?
On December 14th, 2012, a 20-year-old gunman massacred twenty-six people, including twenty six and seven-year-old children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. The other victims were teachers and staff who died trying to protect their students. The shooter used a Bushmaster XM15-E2S, an AR-15 style semi-automatic weapon to massacre these children.
What’s it going to take?
On October 21, 2017, a lone gunman smuggled 14 AR-15 style weapons—some of them modified with extended magazines and bump stocks—into his suite at the Mandalay Hotel in Las Vegas before opening fire on the Route 91 Harvest Festival, killing sixty patrons and wounding 413.
What’s it going to take?
On April 20th, two teenaged gunmen killed 13 and wounded 20 at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. The slaughters at University of Virginia, Brookfield, Wisconsin, El Paso, Texas, Virginia Tech, Santa Fe, and dozens of other locations do not seem to bother most Americans—at least for any length of time.
What is it going to take?
According to The Insider, in 2022, there have been 604 mass shootings in the U.S.—so far. We still have over a month left. And, according to The Gun Violence Archive, over 40,000 Americans have died because of gun violence in 2022. Over 2000 of those deaths are children and teens. These numbers have been steadily rising over the past few years
What will it take to stop the carnage? What will it take to protect our children in our classrooms and the rest of us in our universities, churches, theaters, nightclubs, outdoor festivals, shopping centers, spas, synagogues, workplaces, or parades? What will it take to keep guns and assault weapons out of the hands of the mentally disturbed people committing these heinous crimes?
How many more class photos of smiling gap-toothed children—slaughtered children—do will we have to see? How many more press conferences of bewildered and befuddled law enforcement officials trying to explain how the latest mass shooting happened will there be? How many more makeshift shrines with tiny crosses, balloons, and flowers do we need to see? How many more interviews of grief-stricken and anguished family members do we need to hear?
As individuals, and as a nation, we are appalled when a Columbine or a Uvalde or a Stoneman Douglas High School shooting story first breaks. Then, after the newscasters send out their thoughts and prayers, and politicians—endlessly and nauseatingly—explain that the ubiquitous presence of guns in our country is not dangerous, that there are plenty of laws on the books to deter these incidents—they’re just not enforced, we find ourselves back on the hamster wheel. They even suggest that teachers should be armed. Exactly what we need—even more guns.These statesmen—these political hacks—hide behind the Second Amendment and stoke fears that the government will be coming to take the people’s guns while holding one hand for donations from the NRA.
And then, after all this, this nightmarish cycle of newscasters, apologists, and handwringing about the latest mass shooting, we move on. Nothing seems to shake our complacency and our acceptance of these losses. It has become the new norm.
What will it take?
This past weekend, while flipping through some channels on cable TV, I happened to run across the documentary An Inconvenient Truth, the film version of Al Gore’s lecture series on global warming. At one point in the film, Gore spoke about the public’s complacency toward climate change, that the very gradual rise in temperature and slight changes in storm strength, frequency, and drought don’t seem that urgent. He compared public sentiment to a frog in hot water. Mr. Gore said if you put the frog in boiling water, he’ll jump right out, but if you then put him in lukewarm water and slowly begin to raise the temperature, the frog won’t notice he’s in danger until it’s too late to save himself. Hopefully, in terms of gun safety, we’ll never get to that point. Yet technology has made it possible to create guns on 3-D printers, gain access to untraceable “ghost guns”, and modify semi-automatics into automatic rifles with a small kit and twenty minutes of your time.
The non-stop gun violence in this country is reaching the boiling point. Some recognize it. The CDC has declared that gun violence is a serious public health problem. A majority of respondents in a Gallup Poll stated they would like mandatory background checks, red-flag laws, and an outright ban on assault weapons. Trauma doctors are warning of the extensive damage done to the human body by semi-automatic weapons. And yet shrug and say, “Oh, well.”
Pro-gun politicians cite the Second Amendment, tell their supporters that the government will take their guns, and that a few bad apples shouldn’t spoil it for them.
What will it take?
Even when Representative Gabby Gifford was shot in the head and miraculously survived or when Senate Whip Steve Scalise was shot while practicing for a charity baseball game, after the first shock, nobody seems to notice, or even wants to care. Both of these victims—somehow—lived. Yet their peers and colleagues in D.C. refuse to enact any meaningful laws.
Last year, after the Uvalde massacre, lawmakers passed a law that included funding for school safety that included funding for school safety and state crisis intervention—but no laws banning high-capacity magazines, assault rifles, or further regulating gun sales. They only did the bare minimum.
What’s going to shake us out of our complacency? What will wake us up? Will our own children’s schools have to be shot up for us to care? Will our workplaces need to be flanked with armed security in order for us to care? Will it have to affect us personally before we take it seriously?
Once we do recognize the proliferation of guns as a crisis, maybe it would be a good time to focus on gun laws and demand new laws from our representatives. If they refuse, vote them out. We do—Republicans and Democrats alike, have the vote. It’s in our own hands. Our own bloody, bloody hands.
Sources
- https://www.cbsnews.com/news/daniel-defense-uvalde-ar-15-lawsuit-post-malone-pewpew/
- https://www.9news.com/article/news/local/club-q-shooting/club-q-shooting-suspect-ghost-guns/73-7c1a9d2b-8e91-46a1-82f7-d5e917c58664
- https://abcnews.go.com/US/suspect-large-shooting-university-virginia-police/story?id=92780963
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Las_Vegas_shooting
- https://www.insider.com/number-of-mass-shootingsin-america-this-year-2022-5\
- https://www.gunviolencearchive.org
- https://news.gallup.com/poll/1645/guns.aspx
- https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/james-hodgkinson-shooting-republicans-baseball-game