In the wake of Texas school shooting, America’s sick infatuation with guns says it all

I don’t have words, and as a columnist — someone paid to have them at the ready — that’s less than ideal.

As I write this it’s Wednesday, the day after the United State’s latest horrific mass shooting. Nineteen elementary school kids from Uvalde, Texas are dead, as are two of their teachers, making this killing spree the most deadly school shooting in a decade.

Roughly 24 hours have passed since news of the shooting broke, and already America’s predictable and practiced cycle of disbelief, grief, anger and, ultimately, inaction feels well underway. The Facebook posts and tweets have been crafted. The dinner table conversations have been had. Last night, on my way to see our oldest daughter’s orchestra concert — at her school — a lone man with a sign calling for common sense gun control stood outside a different school, putting our societal refusal to put a stop to the bloodshed in the face of every driver he encountered. People largely continued on their way.

Soon — and you can already feel it — the flags at McDonald’s will have been lowered to half-staff. The prayers will have been sent off into the heavens, and all the thoughtful basketball coaches will have been quoted at length. We will have moved on.

So what else is there to say? What can be said? How many times can you go through the same motions — and feel the same desperation, pain and blinding rage — before you go hopeless and numb?

We’re sick and refusing treatment. Nineteen children who went to school Tuesday morning never came home, and it’s a price we’re apparently willing to pay. “I can’t believe this happened to my daughter,” Jacob Silguero, whose 10-year-old Jailah was one of the victims in Uvalde, told The New York Times.

“It’s always been a fear of mine to lose a kid,” he said.

This is how we’re choosing to live — and it is a choice.

What is there left to say?

School shootings

I’m 41 and have no idea how many school shootings have occurred during my lifetime. I’m sure I could Google it. I’m sure there’s a regularly updated Wikipedia page, documenting each one. The truth is I don’t want to look.

The first school shooting I vividly remember was Columbine, in Littleton, Colorado. Like a lot of people, that’s probably because of the around-the-clock news coverage it received, and specifically the photos, videos and — soon thereafter — the chilling profiles of the young, disaffected killers that emerged. But there was also a personal connection. I was a high school senior 1,300 miles away in Puyallup, but Columbine was a high school, too — the one I would have attended if my family hadn’t moved to Washington a decade earlier. The evil and terror felt close, and recognizable. I saw myself and my classmates in the teenage victims.

A dozen years later, I was working for the Seattle Weekly when the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut unfolded. This time, a young gunman killed 20 first graders and six adults before taking his own life. This time, I remember thinking of my own daughter — the one who played with her high school orchestra last night — who had recently started kindergarten.

That night, I sat alone and cried on the train home to Tacoma, naively hoping that the unimaginable pain Sandy Hook families were forced to endure would serve as a national turning point. The prospect of 20 first graders gunned down in front of a culpable nation’s eyes felt like it almost had to.

As we were reminded on Tuesday, in Uvalde, no such national reckoning has occurred.

A decade after Sandy Hook, we haven’t done a damn thing to stop the killing of America’s children.

What is there left to say — except we’re sorry?

Anger and tribalism

Beyond the gnawing sense that I’m simply shouting into the void, there are other reasons why writing these words is difficult.

The gun debate in the U.S. is a war in itself — whether it’s cultural, or just a fraught, defining characteristic of our unique and callous selfishness — and partaking in it can leave a person despondent and exhausted.

It can also be terrifying.

Earlier this year, I wrote a column about a bill in the Washington legislature that sought to ban the sale of “high-capacity” magazines holding more than 10 rounds of ammo. I was angry — though nowhere near as angry as I am typing these words today — and I let my frustration be known. I argued that putting the perceived rights of the glory boys and tough guys who somehow believe the Second Amendment enshrines their right to not just own guns but any killing device conceivable to man is costing people’s lives. I used words like Rambo and cosplay, and I meant every one of them.

Still, even while knowingly entering the fray, I wasn’t entirely prepared for what happened next. As the bill made its way through the legislature, and eventually to the governor’s desk, I was greeted every step of the way with a fresh onslaught of rage. I went from receiving expletive filled emails from local readers to vaguely (and sometimes overtly) threatening messages from across the country. As my column bounced from message boards to online chat rooms, the missives intensified. Eventually, I locked down all of my social media accounts except for Twitter, where I figured my job as an opinion writer obligated me to face the anonymous masses, and anyone who wanted to use the platform to call me names unsuitable for print.

In this case, I had poked the bear, I thought to myself. Hate is what I get. And besides, it’s not like using rational argument or understanding instead of strong words would have fared any better. The gun debate in America isn’t about data, or honest analysis, or soberly assessing the problem for what it is. It’s about emotion, feelings, anger and power. It’s about tribalism, and the us-versus-them mentality that we refuse to shake even as the parents of the children lost in Texas are providing DNA samples so their bullet-mangled bodies can be identified.

Today, the reality is that even penning another column in anger feels pointless. Sure, I could use this space to call for strengthened background checks, or an assault weapon ban or safeguards or prohibitions on the online sale of guns. All of those are all things we should do, but will we? History suggests we won’t.

What’s left to say that hasn’t been said before? What reason is there to be hopeful?

How do we look our children in the eyes and explain the world we’ve created for them?

Unfortunately, I don’t have answers for any of it.