The day after a 14-year-old boy in
Georgia shot and killed two classmates and two teachers at his Georgia high
school with his father’s military-style assault weapon in September, GOP
vice presidential nominee JD Vance decided to speak up about the
atrocity.
But he wasn’t announcing his
support for banning AR-15s or instituting universal violent criminal background
checks. He wasn’t mobilizing support for red flag laws.
Vance simply wanted to share his
reflection that mass shootings are a “fact of life” in America. This passive
observation seems designed to lull the American people back into political
complacency and resignation.
Although the senator depicts mass
shootings in schools, churches, synagogues, grocery stores, and town malls as a
“fact of life” in America, they are better described as a fact of death
in America. Gun violence is a constant and ubiquitous threat to human
life.
Whether it arrives in the form of
mass shootings or the more common one-on-one firearm attack, gun violence
destroys the lives of tens of thousands of Americans every year. It is now
the leading cause of death for children and teens under 18 years old in our
country. Americans represent 97 percent of all youth firearm deaths among peer
nations, where people regard American politicians’ blithe acceptance of gun
violence death for children as something freakish and macabre.
Despite what the NRA and MAGA
politicians invite us to believe, we do not have to treat the ceaseless flood
of gun casualties in American morgues and hospital emergency rooms as an
inescapable, “tragic” part of human existence on earth. In fact, gun violence
in our society is eminently preventable because experts agree that the easy
availability of unrestricted guns is the chief cause of the colossal loss of
life we face from guns every year.
But instead of acting on popular
gun sense bills to create a universal violent felon background check or to
remove weapons of war from school communities, GOP leaders like Vance and Lindsey
Graham strike the pose of Marie Antoinette. After every massacre, we are
invited to share their blasé attitude that “c’est la vie,” and “Let them eat
thoughts and prayers.” As Donald Trump bluntly urged Americans after a recent
mass shooting, we “have to get over it, we have to move forward.”
But contrast this
passive-aggressive response to an assault weapon mass shooting at a public
school with the GOP’s muscular response to an assault weapon mass shooting
involving Trump himself. After the attempted assassination at Trump’s July 13
rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, Republicans did not throw up their hands and
bemoan AR-15 gun violence as a sorrowful “fact of life.” They joined Democrats
not only in aggressively condemning this appalling act of violence but in
demanding a thorough federal investigation, insisting upon both House and
Senate hearings. When those hearings uncovered myriad failures in the Secret
Service’s preparations and response, the then-director of the Secret Service,
Kimberly Cheatle, promptly resigned, making way for refocused leadership to
improve security at presidential campaign events. Republicans seem to know how
to act aggressively to protect Donald Trump and his rallygoers from mass
shootings and AR-15 gun violence.
But when it comes to
schoolchildren, churchgoers, and Walmart shoppers, Americans are invited to
accept mass shootings as an immutable fact of life.
The terrible violence at Trump’s
rally in Butler is in fact just a small piece of America’s broader gun violence
epidemic. The lethal chaos in Butler wasn’t even the worst mass shooting in
America that took place that day: On the evening of July 13, 2024, mass gunfire
claimed the lives of four other Americans and wounded 10 others in Birmingham,
Alabama. Each day in America, firearms take the lives and livelihoods of people
from communities all over the country.
The Constitution defines our
government’s purposes to be to form a more perfect Union, to establish justice,
to ensure domestic tranquility, to provide for the common defense, to promote
the general welfare, and to perpetuate the blessings of liberty. These
imperatives are fundamental to our social contract. But all of them are undone
and crushed by gun violence.
I’m heartened that Democrats and
Republicans came together after the Butler attack to chart a new course for the
Secret Service to better protect our presidents and candidates. Now we must
summon the same shared resolve to protect America’s young people and all our
communities from gun violence. Let’s make mass shootings a fact of American
history and not a continuing fact of American life.