Opinion
Enough Is Enough
By Charles M. Blow
Opinion Columnist
● May 20, 2018Image
People comforted one another at a vigil outside Santa Fe High School on
Friday.CreditMatt Patterson/EPA, via Shutterstock
The school shooting has become an American motif, a previously unthinkable
option for the odd, the alienated and the spurned, a way to find voice through
violence.
We had yet another one last week in Santa Fe, Texas, where a student killed 10
people and injured 13 others. After the shooting, Paige Curry, a student at the
school, offered a chilling assessment of our current predication.
A television news reporter asked: “Was there a part of you that was like, ‘This
isn’t real, this would not happen at my school?’ ”
Paige responded, shaking her head, an uncomfortable, reflexive smile on her
face that mocked the naïveté of the question: “No, there wasn’t.”
The reporter pressed: “Why so?”
Paige continued: “It’s been happening everywhere. I’ve always kind of felt like
eventually it was going to happen here, too.”
Schools across the country are preparing for this morbid eventuality.
According to a 2015-16 Crime and Safety Survey by the National Center for
Education Statistics, 92 percent of public schools have a written plan
describing procedures to be performed in the event of an active shooter.
According to Vox:
“Since Columbine, 32 states have passed laws requiring schools to conduct
lockdown drills or some form of emergency drill to keep students safe from
intruders. Some states went even further after 20 children died in Newtown,
Conn., in 2012. Now, six states require specific ‘active shooter’ drills each
year.”
These preparations — sheltering in place, ducking for cover, running for your
life — have become a routine part of our children’s educational experience.
This is not normal and must never be accepted as such. Neither are these
shootings normal. This is all insanity.
We have too many guns in this country, including too many based on combat
weapons, and as a result we have too many shootings and deaths.
Many of us know this. We also know that legislators in Washington, as well as
Donald Trump himself, are so beholden to the National Rifle Association that
little to nothing will be done to stem the real problem: guns and their
availability.
Instead, politicians talk about tangential issues like the mentally ill, the
“hardening” of soft targets like schools, and putting even more guns in
people’s hands, like the lunacy of arming teachers.
A main facet of Trump’s campaign was the condemnation of violence in
Chicago and what that said about the culture there.
As The Washington Post pointed out, Trump promised in his inauguration
speech to end this “American carnage,” but “gun deaths are up over 12 percent
year-over-year. Firearm injuries are up nearly 8 percent. The number of
children under the age of 12 shot by a gun has increased by 16 percent, while
instances of defensive gun use are up nearly 30 percent.”
Yes, gun violence is actually on the rise.
As Time magazine pointed out in November, “Firearm-related deaths rose for
the second-straight year in 2016.” The magazine continued:
“In 2016, there were more than 38,000 gun-related deaths in the U.S. —
4,000 more than 2015, the new C.D.C. report on preliminary mortality data
shows. Most gun-related deaths — about two-thirds — in America are suicides,
but an Associated Press analysis of F.B.I. data shows there were about 11,000
gun-related homicides in 2016, up from 9,600 in 2015. The increase in
gun-related deaths follows a nearly 15-year period of relative stasis.”
Furthermore, according to an April F.B.I. report: “The F.B.I. has designated
50 shootings in 2016 and 2017 as active shooter incidents. Twenty incidents
occurred in 2016, while 30 incidents occurred in 2017.” The state with the
largest number of those active shooters — six — was, you guessed it, Texas.
But as politicians in Washington have made clear that they have no desire to
address this issue, no desire to stand up to the N.R.A., no desire to stop
treating these deaths as collateral damage, those seeking change must change
tactics.
People seeking common sense gun control must become single-issue voters on
gun control. Support for more restrictions may not be the only reason to vote
for a candidate, but it must be sufficient to vote against one.
We have to stop waiting for politicians to display courage and instead start to
instill fear in them.
As an individual voter, you don’t need to have a slate of reforms in mind, you
only have to vote consistently for candidates who are committed to reviewing
the issue and advancing smart, effective policy.
This is now about the long game. The N.R.A. didn’t amass its clout overnight,
and the building of a contingent of politicians committed to gun control also
won’t come overnight. But it can, and indeed must, be done.
Students like Paige shouldn’t simply assume that one day a fellow student will
show up with a gun and an appetite for death, and that there is nothing
Washington is willing to do to prevent it.
Enough is enough!
