Cemetery America

Time to tip a hat to America. We’ve only had 45 school shootings this year and what happened in Georgia is (only) the deadliest incident since the March 2023 massacre at the Covenant School in Nashville, which is where (only) six people died. The number of mass shootings in all venues is just 385 for 2024. Go team! Is it possible we are getting this thing under control? Nah. I am certain there are people out there now explaining how the singular method for ending this horror is to arm more people. We cannot stop the killings until we prepare ourselves to kill. Got that? The logic is crystalline, is it not?

We avert our eyes from the cause and nod sadly at the effect, but take no steps to prescribe a solution. The culture of the gun in the U.S. has lost no battles in the modern era. Our politics keep fertilizing the bloody fields with fewer and fewer controls and by blocking efforts to increase gun safety. The four deaths in Georgia are a fine example of how gun love is killing people and the future. Brian Kemp, the Republican governor of Georgia refused to answer questions about gun safety measurements and politics in the aftermath of killings of two students and two teachers. Instead, he suggested this was a time for “thoughts and prayers” for families of the victims, the most meaningless and inane sentiment ever offered to victims and their loved ones.

No one who has paid even slight attention to Georgia politics is surprised by Kemp’s soulless expressions of faux grief. Just over two years ago, Kemp signed into a law an open carry measure that made it legal for his state’s citizens to pack weapons on their person without training or permits. His heart was magnanimous, too, for gunslingers from out of state, because the law authorized them to carry in Georgia. Such gun fun! Prior to the legislation’s passage, firearms purchasers in the Peach Tree state had to get a permit and the application process triggered a background check against their driver’s license. But, Kemp, graciously removed that restriction. Because freedom! Hell, in a campaign commercial, he was essentially pointing a shotgun and threatening a young man interested in dating one of his daughters. Fatherhood has been redefined.

Kemp called the school shooting “everybody’s worst nightmare,” but there are numerous scenarios that are competing for that title. American parents, increasingly, spend their workdays worrying whether their children will come home alive on the bus. The 14-year-old student who committed the murders had an AR-15, according to reports, an automatic rifle that can fire sufficient rounds to nearly vaporize a flesh-and-bone target. Four families must live with that imagery because it was easy for the boy’s father to buy the weapon and give it to his son for a present. A few simple lines of law, inserted into that process, might have prevented a man from arming his son and two teenagers and two teachers would still be alive.

Kemp’s strategy followed that of Texas' Governor Greg Abbott, who pushed “constitutional carry” because of the belief that Americans are born with a right to carry the “big iron” on their hip and do not have to ask the government for permission. Abbott made his move about 18 months after 23 people were slaughtered in an El Paso Walmart. The Trump Republican had promised the West Texas community that he would increase gun safety with a committee to study the issue. The result was new laws removing all restrictions on ownership of any type of weapon. House Bill 1927, signed into law by Abbott on June 16, 2021, allows Texans aged 21 and older to carry handguns in public without a license or background check, and went into effect on September 1 of the same year. About eight months subsequent to the end of restrictions, 19 children and two teachers were slaughtered in Uvalde, unsurprisingly, by an AR-15, which was easily purchased by a demented teenager.

Abbott, and Kemp, began their psychological flutterings by praising law enforcement and explaining how things could have been much worse were it not for the actions of brave officers. In Uvalde, of course, that was a patent lie as a few hundred police, including Abbott’s Department of Public Safety (DPS) troopers, stood idle and listened as an AR-15 tore through a classroom of children. The Texas governor covered up the DPS’ inaction and did not even cancel his appearance before an annual meeting of the National Rifle Association. While he was affirming the glories of guns in a video presentation, families in Uvalde were contemplating unimaginable losses and why not a single law officer tried to save their children. They still have no answers, and endure endlessly the hollow compensation of, “It could have been worse.”

It is hard to imagine, maybe impossible, how it might have gotten worse in Texas under the administration of Greg Abbott. During the first five years he was in office, from 2015-2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported there were more than 20,000 firearms deaths in Texas. The number the agency recorded in 2021 was 4,613 killed by gunfire, and extrapolating a conservative average of 4600 annually through the next three years, a reasonable conclusion is that approximately 40,000 people have died in Texas from guns while Abbott has been the governor. Why has he not been charged with murder?

Abbott has made a choice of gun rights instead of public safety. He has presided over an era of frequent mass shootings and routine gun violence that included the Sutherland Springs church slaughter, Santa Fe High School, El Paso Walmart, and Uvalde. No matter what the public and policymakers demand, his response has been prayer, not legislation. Seems readily apparent prayers do not work since last year the U.S. witnessed more than 42,000 deaths from guns. The causes were homicides, suicides, accidental shootings, and law enforcement actions. America is gun crazy, by any measure, and determined to protect a constitutional amendment that was written at a time citizens might have needed guns in their homes to protect themselves from rogue armies or depredations by indigenous peoples resisting settlement.

There is no way that what happened in Uvalde and Georgia and Parkland and Columbine and El Paso could have been worse, but, as a friend has suggested, it could have been better. We might have laws that keep guns out of the hands of disturbed people. It could have been better if automatic weapons were banned from public sales. It could be better if every politician is voted out of office after standing in front of a killing scene and saying, “Now is not the time to talk politics.” It could have been better if the father of a 14-year-old did not think it was completely normal to buy his son an AR-15 for a Christmas present even after law enforcement authorities contacted the family to ask questions about school shooting threats the boy had made online. It could have been better if our culture and voters refused to accept rampant killings and bad laws leading to mass murders.

But there is no damn way it could have been worse.