Fake Emergencies & Real Tragedies — Why We May Not Be Savvy Enough about Gun Safety
New Zealand’s vote to change its gun laws less than a month after a mass shooting and California Representative Eric Swalwell’s announcement two days ago that he’s running for President on a gun control platform, serve as a reminder of the US gun related tragedies that were briefly in the news less than two months ago. Tragedies that never appear to lead to change because strangely, none of us have savvy enough responses to them. Let’s go back to February to unpack this.
The horrific shooting in Aurora, Illinois took place on February 15th, 2019. A few days later was the Parkland Stoneman Douglas High School tragedy’s one year anniversary too. The President declared a national emergency that week but for a different and arguably fake reason (border control). Fast forward a few days from that moment and our national newspapers had already begun de-prioritizing the Aurora tragedy and the Parkland anniversary to cover other subjects. For example, a story of actor, Jussie Smollett, who manufactured a bullying attack on himself, was given more attention in the news the very day after the Parkland tragedy’s anniversary. There is something very wrong with this picture. We’re not focusing on what’s important.
We want to believe that this sorry state of affairs is fueled by misguided politics and a clickbait media trying to stay afloat. That our increasingly polarized political classes egged on by partisan media outlets are to blame for the predicament that we find ourselves in. We are being corrupted from the outside is our common response. It is always the easier answer to blame someone else, especially the other, for the moral corruption around us. The moral corruption which has prevented us from focusing on the gun safety question — how do we stay alive and protecting our children better?
We want to stretch the logic to say that we’re making a faustian bargain where the end justifies the means. We have no choice but to be partisan, to excuse incorrigible, inaction by our leaders, to allow for shoddy journalism and to refuse to listen to logic from those that disagree with our world view. We’re under attack, we’re being invaded and we don’t have time to solve this gun safety issue. These are arguments that have been used before.
The solution lies elsewhere though. As the Spanish American historian and philosopher, George Santayana once said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” In our technology-obsessed, dopamine infused age; we’ve lost memory and, as a result, are condemned to repeat the same mistakes or in this case allow the same tragedies to repeat themselves. It isn’t that we have forgotten the mass shootings that came before Aurora; from Parkland, and the Pittsburgh synagogue to the Santa Fe High School, the Las Vegas shooting and the Orlando nightclub, to name but a few. Many of us are reminded of them each time there’s another mass shooting. What we forget though is the disingenuous narratives that get spun around each tragedy. These are narratives which obfuscate the facts and render us immobile. These narratives prevent us from having meaningful responses to the tragedies that would normally drive us to action. Let’s reopen the Parkland tragedy to explain the phenomena.
On a sunny afternoon a little more than a year ago, a perpetrator with a semi-automatic rifle walked into a Stoneman Douglas High School building and within six minutes and twenty seconds killed seventeen people injuring many more. In the wake of the shooting, a myriad of narratives of what happened and who was to blame unfolded. Emma Gonzalez, a student at the school led a protest where she famously said, “We call BS” on the apathy of politicians funded by the NRA. She was disparaged in social media with a doctored image that showed her tearing up the constitution with dark circles added under her eyes to make her look sinister.
Conservative pundits blamed the school administration, the assailant’s parents and their lack of Christian values. Others called the students who were protesting easy access to guns, crisis actors. Sinclair Broadcasting, made its local stations read a message on air stating that national broadcasters should not be trusted. Laura Ingraham of Fox News and NRA supporter denigrated David Hogg, one of the school survivors detracting from the real story.
The President blamed the students and neighbors for not noticing that the shooter was mentally disturbed. He also pointed his finger at the FBI for spending too much time on proving Russian collusion instead. Other politicians wove their own distortions. Senator Marco Rubio, who had taken copious amounts of cash from the NRA, commiserated with the students in a nationally televised town hall pledging to prevent children from buying rifles while still supporting a bill in Washington DC that was about to allow them to do so. The liberal politicians framed the issue squarely as an access to guns one and used it as an opportunity to denigrate the NRA and take potshots at the gun laws across the country. Some even called for the Second Amendment to be repealed.
During this period, most companies responded with deafening silence. Tragedies were difficult for companies and few dared to take a stand as they risked alienating customers or inciting the wrath of the President. Dick’s Sporting Goods, one of the largest sporting goods and gun retailers, announced that it would stop selling assault rifles (even as we now know to be at a significant financial cost). However, they were more the exception than the norm.
The truth was in the eye of the beholder. Those that agreed with the NRA before the tragedy, continued to do so after it. Anti-gun advocates who were rigid in their views prior to the shooting only became more stubborn, absolute and obstinate in their points of view. Those who were in the middle didn’t know whom to believe and why. They retreated to passive disengagement on the gun control debate preferring not to engage in the subject, take a stand, and make their own voices heard. The horrific shooting of seventeen innocent people in Parkland was seen, and explained, through so many different lenses, and subject to much partisan spin, that no one narrative prevailed.
As a result, two tragedies took place — the horrific shooting itself and a second where the truth did not prevail, a tragedy of inaction. In the second, instead of being moved to action, many of us numbed ourselves to all the noise. We retreated to own safe worlds.
Returning to today, the speed with which the Aurora tragedy moved off the headlines in February, shouldn’t be the least bit surprising. Behind the scenes, the same behavior, by those on the left and the right was repeating itself. It was behavior that doesn’t get talked about, that is only visible across the arc of time but causes more damage to our society than any of us are willing to admit or appreciate. It is the damage that allows for all the other mass shootings that followed in 2018 and leading up to the Aurora shooting. And tragically, it is the damage that may allow for more of the same in the future.
This is also the damage that allows us to call border wall disputes national emergencies when many more people are dying with accompaniment untold, ongoing suffering for their friends and families in communities across the country in the real emergency. Worst of all, this tragedy of inaction doesn’t allow us to heal, to fix what is broken in our society and to do more to protect our children, our friends, our neighbors, and our co-workers.
We live in an unusual time. It is on us to learn from the mistakes of the past — not just about what allows tragedies to happen but what enables them to happen again and again. It is the Molotov cocktail of partisan politics, viewership hungry media and hyper-efficient technology that confuses and immobilizes most of us in the post-truth era allowing dual tragedies to happen — tragic deaths and human inaction. We must remember the past so that it stops repeating again and again. We must not let the tragedy of inaction repeat itself either. We owe this to our children. And we can and we should draw inspiration from that tiny country of five million people south of the equator in the Pacific that responded to a similar tragedy a couple of weeks ago by changing its laws quickly.
They didn’t let competing narratives get the better of them. We need to be savvy like them.
