Is America Even Capable Of Reaching an Inflection Point?

 

     Over a decade ago, a deeply disturbed young man shot and killed his mother then a school in Newtown, CT. 28 people would die in Newtown that day. The scene was so horrific they actually tore down the Sandy Hook Elementary School and built a new one in its footprint.

     We hoped, back in 2012, that the nation had finally reached an inflection point after 20 first graders and six faculty members were literally butchered by an AR 15. Instead, we read leaked emails sent between gun executives crowing about the "Newtown bump", or the predictable spike in gun and ammo sales after a mass shooting.

     Five years ago, we thought we'd reached that inflection point when a teenager shot up Majory Stoneman Douglas High School in which 17 were killed and 17 more wounded. Instead, we saw security footage of a school resource officer cowering behind a concrete pillar and refusing to engage the gunman.

     Nearly a year ago, we thought we'd reached that elusive inflection point when another teenage gunman entered Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas and murdered 19 students and two teachers while, again, police cowered outside the door for an hour and 17 minutes because none of them wanted to get shot by an AR 15. One of them was the husband of one of the teachers who was shot and killed.

     Once again, nothing was done. Governor Greg Abbott was more pissed off that he was misinformed by law enforcement officials than he seemed to be over the students and teachers getting killed. Once again, the scene was so horrific that they didn't know whose body parts belonged to whom. Parents had to provide DNA samples so what what was left of their childrens' bodies could be identified and reassembled for burial.

     This inflection point should have been reached after Columbine or at least after Virginia Tech in which nearly three dozen innocents were slaughtered.

     Instead, we see Republican inaction that at this point borders on the pathological. Lawmakers like Lauren Boebert and Thomas Massie stick long barrel guns in their kids' hands and pose for Christmas cards and wear AR 15 flag lapel pins in a shameless attempt to "own the libs".

     Texas alone has suffered through nine mass shootings just in the last 14 years. Last Saturday, another gunman drove to the Allen Outlet Mall in Allen, Texas and got out of his car. Seconds later, he began butchering innocent people outside the mall. Steven Spainhouer, a former police officer, was alerted to the shooting when he got a call from his son who works at the mall.

     On Jonathan Capeheart's show, he described what he'd seen when he arrived. EMS, even after six minutes, hadn't arrived. He encountered a girl who "had no face". He moved on to a man, who was dead. He moved on to another man and began chest compressions on him. After he spat up blood, he looked into his eyes and died. Then he found a little boy who was under the body of his mother who died saving his life.

     Is this the inflection point, we now ask ourselves and each other with diminishing hope?

     Greg Abbott, again, is yammering on about mental health. Spainhouer told Capeheart that mental health didn't kill those people in Allen, Texas and that rifles did. But the news wasn't all grim- Today, the Texas House passed a bill that would raise the minimum age to buy an AR 15 from 18 to 21. But, even if it passes the right wing-dominated Senate and get signed into law by Abbott, all it would do is set Texas back to where it was a few years ago when the minimum age was already 21. It does nothing toward restricting the sale of assault weapons to those with mental health issues. It does nothing to strengthen red flag laws.

     Red flag laws and stringent background checks are baby steps in the right direction but that's all. Dabbing at the problem by shoring up one policy or another isn't going to solve the problem of gun violence in a country in which it's unique in its frequency and body count.

     And political obstruction.

     So we have to seriously ask ourselves and each other, Are we even remotely capable of reaching an inflection point efficacious enough to bring about meaningful change?

     Again, Australia reached its inflection point right after the Port Arthur shooting that claimed the lives of 35 people and wounded 23 others. The new conservative Prime Minister, John Howard, urged the conservative Australian Parliament to pass strict gun control measures and that's what he got. The National Firearms Agreement was one between the central and state governments that heavily restricted the sale of semi automatic weapons, instituted a gun buyback program that eventually took 650,000 guns off the streets.

     It also set up a national gun registry.

     Australia hasn't had a mass shooting since Port Arthur in 1996.

     So how come Australia's conservatives could bring this about and ours can't? Well, maybe it has something to do with the fact that ours are bought and sold by the NRA and theirs aren't.

     Maybe it has something to do with the fact that gun violence has become so ingrained in our so-called culture that children dying from gun violence more often than from any other cause is a necessary synonym in the hallowed name of "freedom". And it seems the furthest we can advance the issue is for cartoonists to draw bitter cartoons drawing limited attention to it.

     I'm not going to rehash old statistics because those of you who read this blog have heard them all before infinitum ad nauseam. But we are the only industrialized country in the world in which guns kill more kids than anything else. We're the only one that has more guns than people. We're the only one that has over one and a half mass shootings a day (we're barely in the second week of May and we've already had 200 mass shootings in 2023).

     And we're also the only one that had meaningful gun control with the 1994 assault weapons ban that, thanks for Bush, went to the wayside a decade later. We had gun control that was efficacious then stepped away from it. No other nation has done that.

     That's because our politicians, virtually all of them Republican, are incapable of shame. They never seem to find themselves backed into that corner that doesn't seem to exist. And as long as they feel no shame, we are going to be incapable of reaching that blessed inflection point.