You can be forgiven for not having noticed that today is the anniversary of the Sandy Hook shootings, the murder of 26 human beings, 20 of them children. There's not the usual wave of retrospective stories, perhaps because we're busy catching up on the latest US campus shooting from the weekend.
It makes me angry, every day. Sandy Hook stands out among all our many various mass murders in this country, all our long parade of school shootings, because Sandy Hook was the moment when it finally became clear that we are not going to do anything about this, ever. "If this is not enough to finally do something," we thought, "then nothing ever will be."
And it wasn't.
"No way to prevent this," says only Nation Where This Regularly Happens is the most bitter, repeated headline The Onion has ever published. We're just "helpless."
Today was the 13th anniversary of the shooting that established that we aren't going to do a damned thing about it, other than blaming the targets for not being hard enough. Need more security. Arm the (marxist untrustworthy) teachers. And somehow Alex Jones and Infowars have not been sued severely enough for them to STFU.
One thing that has happened over the past several years is a huge wave of folks expressing their deep concern about the children.
A whole industry of political activism has been cultivated around the notion that children-- our poor, fragile children-- must be protected. They must be protected from books that show that LGBTQ persons exist. They must be protected from any sort of reference to sexual action at all. They must be protected from any form of guilt-inducing critical race theory. They must be protected from unpatriotic references to America's past sins. And central to all this, they must be protected from anyone who might challenge their parents' complete control over their education and lives.
Well, unless that person is challenging the parents' rights by shooting a gun at the child.
The Second Amendment issue is the issue that combines so poorly with other issues. We may be pro-life and insist that it be illegal to end a fetus-- but if the fetus becomes an outside-the-womb human that gets shot at with a gun, well, nothing we can do about that. Students should be free to choose whatever school they like--but at any of those schools, people still have the right to shoot at them with a gun. We must protect children from all sorts of evil influences--but if someone wants to shoot a gun at them, well, you know, nothing we can do about that.
The other ugly development has been the ever-growing school security industry, peddling an ever-growing array of products that serve no educational purpose but are supposed to make schools safe, harden the target. Lots of surveillance. Lots of stupid mistakes, like the Florida AI reading a clarinet as a weapon. Lots of security layers that now make entering a school building much like entering a prison. It is what NPR correctly called the "school shooting industry," and it is worth billions.
That's not counting the boost that gunmakers get after every school shooting. The panic alarm goes off and the weapons industry sells a ton more product as the usual folks holler, "They'll use this as an excuse to take your guns" even though in the 26 years since Columbine, the government hasn't done either jack or shit about taking anybody's guns. I expect that part of that sales bump is also from folks saying, "Now that I'm reminded that the government isn't going to do anything about keeping guns out of the hands of homicidal idiots, I guess I'd better arm myself."
Miles of letters have been strung together to unravel the mystery of why this country so loves its guns and why none of the factors used as distraction (mental health, video games, bad tv shows) could possibly explain the prevalence of gun deaths in this country because every other country in the world has the same thing without having our level of gun violence.
We are great at Not facing Problems in this country, and there is no problem we are better at Not facing than gun deaths. Hell, we can't even agree it's an actual problem. The "right" to personally possess the capability to kill other human beings is revered, and more beloved than the lives of actual human children.
And if some of our fellow citizens and leaders are unwilling to make a serious effort to reduce gun violence and these folks insist that the occasional dead child is just the cost of liberty (particularly the liberty to conduct profitable business), well, how can we expect them to take seriously other aspects of young humans' lives, like quality education and health care.
It is a hard thing to know, every day, that we could do better, and we aren't going to. We have already taken a long hard look at this issue, and we have decided that we are okay with another Sandy Hook or Uvalde. A little security theater, a little profiteering on tech, a few thoughts and prayers just to indicate that we aren't actually happy that some young humans were shot dead (talk about virtue signaling), and that pivot quickly to defending guns. Send letters, make phone calls, get the usual platitudes back from elected representatives, who will never, ever pay an election price for being on the wrong side of rational gun regulation.
The whole dance is so familiar and well-rehearsed that we barely have to pay attention any more. It's exhausted and exhausting, and yet I am still angry.
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