The first time I did something about America’s epidemic of mass shootings was not when I looked up and saw on TV that a child had shot up a school full of children — although that has happened a lot of the times in the US. It was not when I saw a horrific video playing on a loop on Facebook on Wednesday, like so much of the rest of the world did, after another video of the same killing played in a loop on the cable networks and across Twitter, even as people called for the Virginia video to disappear.
No, there was not social media or an online death reel of snuff films in the midst of a sniper’s killing spree in the Washington DC metro area, way back in 2002. I did not write my then-Congressman demanding more gun control, of which America has little. I did not email my then-senators demanding that they do something to reduce the number of guns on the streets, because I knew they did not really read their emails. I did not even call my state assemblywoman or my state senator in Richmond, Virginia, to demand that they close the state’s well-known and egregious loophole that lets people buy guns easily at gun shows. Instead, I positioned the back of my car towards a building, and stood, bent over, behind my car door while I pumped gas — in case a teenage sniper was aiming at me, from somewhere I could not see, hunting me. The blase acceptance that, yes, you might well get shot some day is as much of a facet of American life in 2015 as it was in 2002. People in America are as desensitised now as they were in 1993, when Colin McCarthy shot up a Long Island Railroad train car of commuters and in 1984, when James Huberty shot up a McDonalds in San Ysidro, California. The shooting at the University of Albany, in upstate New York (1994) did not change anything. Columbine (1999) did not change anything. The Lancaster, Pennsylvania Amish schoolhouse shooting (2006) did not change anything. Nothing changed for Americans because their political leaders did not change anything. Instead, a nation ducked. The big names — Aurora, Sandy Hook, Fort Hood, Tucson, Virginia Tech, Lafayette, Isla Vista, the Navy Yard, Charleston — you remember.
The lesser-known ones (Jonesboro, say, or Carson City, or the courthouse shooting in Reno, or the other shooting on Fort Hood, or Northern Illinois University): Those we only dimly recollect, because we saw ourselves in the victims, because we could hardly even remember all of the details of all of the mass shootings in our lifetime. We remember because of the press coverage, the calls for more stringent gun control, because this one went after women and the other walked into a cineplex screening of the next movie you thought you would probably see. People in America remember because they are kind of scared to go to the movies now, or pump gas — or even watch TV or go on Facebook because they may catch yet another glimpse of a grim spectacle looking back at them.
In 2015, as in 2002, the threat is everywhere, and it is nowhere. The threat of American gun violence is the guy who walks into the movie theatre after the lights go down. The truth of America’s firearm obsession is the child who walks into the school long after the bell has rung for class. The horror of the United States doing nothing about the Glocks you can get for a couple of hundred bucks is the lookie-loo in your peripheral vision as you are trying to do a stand-up shot next to a lake. Is it still shocking that there are legally-armed Americans killing innocent strangers? The Washington Post points out that there has been more than one mass shooting per day in 2015 (that is, shooting incidents in which more than four people were injured).
The Centres for Disease Control statistics show that more than 33,000 people are likely to have fatal encounters with guns in a given year. When gun violence happens every day, it is hard to be shocked; fatal shootings are, at this point, a given of American life, whether we like to admit it or not. Let us admit it. At least that is doing something. Politicians call for background checks because it is the least they can possibly do to respond to yet another mass shooting and, besides which, there is growing support for background checks even as general support for gun control declines. It does not even matter that there is no good way to use America’s incredibly flawed mental health care system to somehow populate a database of people too ill to own guns without turning them on other people. It does not matter that the meagre background check system in place now flagged Charleston shooter Dylann Roof’s reported marijuana arrest, but an arrest is not enough to disqualify one from gun ownership. Background checks are apparently the only answer to mass shootings, because it is the only answer politicians can offer and still get reelected.
When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns, the gun lobby helpfully opines — but at least then people in America will be able to tell the difference. Now, you do not know until someone starts shooting. (Especially if you frequent restaurants preferred by so-called “open carry” advocates.) There will be another mass shooting soon enough, of course.
There will be another period of mourning in which any talk of doing something about just how many guns America has will be shushed by conservatives eager to not politicise the deaths of some new number of innocents. There will be another video to shock us and fulfil our collective voyeuristic instincts — maybe even, as happened on Wednesday in Virginia, a first-person documentation of another person’s brutality and inhumanity, filmed from the only end of a gun on which we are supposed to want to stand. There will be another round of political promises, another round of legislative failure, another period of time in which we all duck behind our cars until the fear eases just enough to carry on with our regular lives. And then someone else with yet another gun will murder yet another group of people and people in America will start the cycle all over again. And you will be watching. Now what are we going to do about it?
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
