The United States failed its children again: another school shooting silenced the lives of several

() — It’s hard to imagine a more heartbreaking and all-American scene.

A human chain of children, hand in hand, led by policemen, fled from the last school hit by an unfathomable tragedy. On Monday, it was Nashville’s turn to join the list of cities made famous by an epidemic of mass shootings that much of the country seems willing to tacitly accept as the price of the right to own high-powered firearms.

The reality of what unfolded inside a school was inhumane, but unfortunately one can imagine given the gruesome inside accounts that have emerged from previous school shootings: in Uvalde, Texas, last year; or at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in 2012.

Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs and William Kinney, all aged nine, were shot and killed by an attacker armed with two AR-style weapons and a pistol, two of which police say were purchased legally. Their names, known only to the rest of the United States after their death, were released by the police around the same time they should have returned home from the Covenant School that day.

Three employees, all half a century older, also died. They were Cynthia Peak, 61; Katherine Koonce, 60, and Mike Hill, 61.

They were all killed in the place that should be the safest: where the children go to school. But a plague of recent classroom riots, singled out even among America’s gun violence for its depravity, shows that no place is truly safe. That’s why millions of parents often leave their children with a nagging fear about whether their school is next. And that’s why a generation of children has endured drills of active attackers that will scar them, just as children in the middle of the last century would dive under desks in practice duck and cover in the event of an atomic war. The difference now is that the danger does not come from a foreign nuclear rival but from within, from their own country.

Firearms are the leading cause of death for American children ages 1-19, based on 2020 data from the Kaiser Family Foundation. And while many guns kill children in violent neighborhoods, not in the classroom, schools appear to be increasingly vulnerable.

According to data from the Gun Violence Archive (GVA), the Nashville tragedy was among at least 130 mass shootings so far this year, more than this point in any previous year since at least 2013. (GVA, like , defines a mass shooting as one in which at least four people are shot, excluding the shooter.) Such events are now so frequent that there are a few cases of people surviving one such event and getting caught up in the aftermath of a subsequent one.

Ashbey Beasley, who escaped last year’s July 4 mass shooting in Highland Park, Illinois, was visiting Tennessee on a family trip when the shooting occurred Monday. He made an unannounced appearance on live television and asked, “How does this keep happening? Why do our children keep dying?

Revealing yet another tragic web of consequences of gun violence, Beasley later told ‘s Erin Burnett that he had arranged to have lunch with a friend whose son was killed in a mass shooting at a Waffle House in Antioch, Tennessee, five years ago. years old, and called her to let her know that her living son was locked up in a Nashville school due to the mass shooting on Monday.

“This is where we are, we have children living through multiple mass shootings (incidents). What are we doing?” Beasley told Burnett. Former President Barack Obama tweeted a video of Beasley’s original comments, writing: “We are failing our children.”

The useless rituals are repeated after the shootings

Monday’s shooting in Nashville was very frustrating for people like Beasley because the rituals that followed were as familiar as they were pointless. Everyone knows that soon they will go through the same routine again. Republican politicians were quick to offer “thoughts and prayers” or remained silent. Their Democratic counterparts demanded gun reform. Calls for improved mental health care, which come after every mass shooting, are likely to follow.

At the White House, President Joe Biden deviated from comments at a previously scheduled event highlighting the role of women in small businesses to address another school shooting.

“We have to do more to stop gun violence. It is tearing our communities apart, tearing at the soul of this nation,” the president said with a grim face. Biden issued the call to action that is now a defining feature of the ineffectual political maneuvering that always follows mass shootings, whether at schools in Texas or Tennessee or at a supermarket in Buffalo or on a college campus in Michigan.

“I am asking Congress again to pass my assault weapons ban. It’s about time we start making more progress,” Biden said. The president fully understands that such a step was impossible in the past Congress and will be so in the present, where Republicans control the House and Democrats are still well below 60 votes in the Senate. A presidential call to action has become almost as much a custom of mourning as a plea for the formation of political coalitions. Biden is likely to do something similar again very soon.

The frozen debate on guns in the United States

One of the Senate’s leading Republicans, Senator John Cornyn of Texas, quickly quashed any idea that the deaths of three young children and three adult caregivers would make any political difference. “I would say we’ve gotten as far as we can go unless someone identifies some area that we’re not addressing,” Cornyn told .

The Texas Republican was a vital player in passing bipartisan gun legislation last year, despite fierce opposition from gun rights activists in his home state. The new law, which was the most significant federal gun reform in the decade, followed the horrific shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde that killed 21 people, including 19 children. While it doesn’t ban any guns, it does include measures that offer states more incentives to fund red flag laws, which allow courts to temporarily seize firearms from anyone they believe is a danger to themselves or others. . This was all a fragile coalition in the Senate could bear.

Despite his previous role, Cornyn also expressed some frustration with Biden’s comments. “The president keeps coming back to the same tired old talking points. So he is not offering new solutions or ideas. If he does, I think we should consider them, but so far, I haven’t heard anything.”

In a sense, Cornyn, who predicted no action on guns until at least the next election, was simply stating the facts. Biden calls for an assault weapons ban after most mass shootings. But hearing such a suggestion described as “tired talking points” is still jarring after Monday’s shooter wielding two AR-style weapons and killing six people.

The Texas senator also summed up the reality, frustration and limitations of the gun debate. He said such bans would affect “law-abiding citizens,” adding: “I don’t think those law-abiding citizens are a threat to public safety.”

Cornyn is correct that the majority of Americans who own these types of firearms never break the law, use their guns recklessly, or much less carry out mass shootings. But at the same time, some of these weapons designed for the battlefield have the capacity to cause enormous carnage in just a few moments. The assailants who open fire with them in schools, shopping centers or bars have sometimes been law-abiding even before their attacks.

The political argument over guns is essentially about the rights Americans take precedence over. Are those of the citizens who own such weapons, despite the fact that a small minority of them use them to create chaos and murder? Or should it be the victims of gun crime, like those children and adults gunned down in Nashville, whose rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were eradicated in a few seconds of terror?

A political tragedy lies behind many of these mass shootings. In a bitter political climate, where any attempt at gun legislation is portrayed as an attempt to illegally seize firearms, there is no achievable common ground between upholding the constitutional right to bear arms and the wishes of many Americans who want gun laws. stricter.

The late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a hero of the conservative movement, wrote in Heller’s 2008 opinion that the government was allowed to regulate firearms while remaining true to the Second Amendment. He wrote that the right guaranteed by the amendment was not “a right to keep and bear any weapon in any manner and for any purpose.”

That’s a position that has long been overtaken by the GOP’s march to the right, a fact Cornyn implicitly underscored in his remarks.

This lack of common ground on an issue of paramount importance is paralleled by the broader disconnect in a politically polarized society that increasingly lacks a common cultural understanding.

This political paralysis makes it almost certain that there will be some children going to school as usual on Tuesday mornings, who, one day, will not come home after class.