April is bringing more mayhem. More vile, ugly gun violence and more deaths of American children. A sentence that is tough to write. We are enabling this freakishly gruesome yet uniquely American phenomenon. Nowhere else in the world does this go on.
Did you know there is a Gun Violence Archive, which tracks shootings almost in real-time? This week four young people under 30 were shot mistakenly in the wrong place at the wrong time. I scrolled through to see how many other gun-related murders there have been since the Covenant School shooting in Nashville on March 27 – just under a month ago when I referenced that shooting of school-age children in a column. There have been 35 mass shootings in one month, triggering 36 fatalities and 168 injuries, including 32 people injured and four dead in a shooting at a sweet sixteen birthday party in Dadeville, Alabama. Thirty-six people who attended that sweet sixteen are either dead or wounded.
As Americans, it is incomprehensible that we allow this to continue. How do you process this? Are we processing this? Does it have to happen to you or someone you know before you feel a sense of outrage? We kept track of COVID death statistics in a ticker on a government website. Maybe it is time to do the same thing. Gun violence is a public health threat.
I am not advocating for complete gun control. Hunt, keep a gun for your safety. I am speaking up for banning AR-15s. Why should a weapon primarily used for hobby purposes endanger you, me, or anyone else? How can we keep the horror of what these guns do to people front and center? How can we make people feel so uncomfortable that they might finally hold politicians accountable who favor lax or no gun at the ballot box?
Maybe the aftermath of a crime scene is too abstract. Perhaps our minds save us from comprehending the horrors of what these monsters with their AR-15s do to school students, teachers, janitors, worshippers, shoppers, partygoers, and people dancing or attending a concert. Maybe another idea is for first responders to tell us precisely what they see when processing these crime scenes. Perhaps, the more graphic, the better.
I was shaken recently reading an account of the first responders to the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut in December 2012. A 20-year-old with an AR-15 killed 20 first graders, their principal, the school psychologist, and four teachers.
One specialist with the Major Crimes Unit in Connecticut who worked on the crime scene said he did a tour in naval explosives post 9/11 in Afghanistan, where he processed bomb scenes to collect DNA. He said, “The worst thing he’d ever seen was the inside of an elementary school in Connecticut.”
His colleagues were assigned to clean jewelry, toys, and backpacks of the deceased children and adults” so their beyond bereaved families could have their belongings back. One recalls seeing “a teacher with a child’s body in her arms, scattered little cups of milk still on the children’s desks along with crayons and scissors and sheets of stiff-bright construction paper: the last thing they would get to do in this life before the strange man with yellow plugs in his ears and a loud gun entered.”
Our tax dollars paid for a similar clean-up at Oxford High School in November 2021 and again at Michigan State two months ago.
Hopefully, legislation signed by Governor Gretchen Whitmer will help prevent more mass shootings in Michigan by creating universal background checks for all firearms, mandating safe storage requirements around children, and red flag laws for gun purchasers. We regulate so many things in our country, and we have a better society for it. Let’s support lawmakers who support gun safety and banning AR-15s. And until we do, let’s hear from first responders who might, just might, say something about the horrifying scenes they see in an attempt to outrage enough people to become informed voters. We can have our last mass shooting by a demon with an AR-15 we can. But we can’t until we finally say, “Enough!” And vote like we mean it.
