I wish I could answer this one burning question. Why have Americans become completely immune to gun violence?
Most people seem to intellectually understand the facts:
- Number of mass shooting so far this year: 171
- Number of lives lost in mass shootings this year: 88
- Number of children killed by gun violence this year (ages 0-17): 542 killed, 1,318 injured.
- Number of suicides by gun this year: 7,458
- Number of guns in the United States: ATF estimates 352 million guns in circulation. The population of the U.S. 332 million. Meaning we have MORE guns than we have people.
- Number of AR-15’s in the United States: 20 million
But people haven’t allowed the horror to penetrate their lives enough to act. Why? Too painful, too busy, too overwhelmed, too self-absorbed… too, too, too, too? I’ve often thought that we lost the war on senseless gun violence when we didn’t stand up and fight back after 20 children between the ages of 6-7 and six adults were massacred at Sandy Hook Elementary School almost eleven years ago.
Today’s NY Times Magazine had an article intitled, What Can’t Be Unseen. The story followed the crime scene team who documented the Sandy Hook school shooting. This wasn’t a CSI television series; these were real people entrusted to document the last violent moments of the children, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers… lives.
- They took 1,495 photographs.
- They read notes like, “Thank god it’s Friday, Love, Mom” found lovingly tucked into a now dead child’s lunch boxes.
- They photographed the blackboard where children had written their goals for the year; I want to learn to tie my shoes, read chapter books, or learn to count numbers.
- They photographed the aftermath of 80 ROUNDS of ammunition rapidly fired into a 3-foot by 4-foot bathroom where 16 children were trying to escape the gunman. The bodies were not only unrecognizable, but they also literally filled the small space, in a grotesque example of the carnage an AR-15 can inflict on a human body.
- They categorized every abandoned personal item, sneakers, bookbags, jewelry, etc. Months after the shooting a victim’s grandmother managed to get a message to the team. Had they found a necklace with half a heart, she had the other half? The child’s necklace was never recovered.
A foreshadowing of what was to come could be seen by the disinformation storm that was brewing. Alex Jones and his compatriots were spinning an unbelievable tale. They were professing that the mass murder was all a hoax, and the children and parents were all “crisis actors”. The absurdity of that lie wasn’t vilified, it was allowed to fester. It took 10 years for the parents of the dead to have their day in court.
How did we let that happen?
Blessed are the children… my ass.
On Good Friday, a week after the school shooting at a private Christian school in Nashville where three 9-year-olds and 3 adults were gunned down, I was invited to join a friend in a silent protest walk against gun violence. Five of us met on the steps of Old St. Patrick Church. We silently walked through downtown to the seat of Chicago’s Catholic Church, Holy Name. We carried signs and a homemade crucifix. If you missed it, I said FIVE OF US.
Where was everyone else? They were inside their church’s “celebrating” Good Friday. Piously listening to scripture, reenactments of Jesus’s last day, and his crucifixion on the cross. This is a perfect example of why I left religion. All of those people who ask WWJD, were sitting in a safe space, reenacting something that happened 2000 years ago and ignoring what was happening right outside their doors. If the spirit of Jesus exists, I’m 100 percent sure he was walking with the 5 of us and not sitting idly by inside that church.
What is wrong with the world?
