Mass shootings, 20 years after Columbine are now banal and common. They should not be.
“It’s not the military or video games or music that causes this…It’s the inaction of people in authority,” said Evie Cluke, the Newbury Park High School track coach who coached the Thousand Oaks shooter 10 years ago, to AP.
“Forty years I have been at sea. A war, at sea. A war with no battles, no monuments ... only casualties,” said Captain Marko Ramius in 1990's "The Hunt for Red October."
On the morning of April 20, 1999, as I drove to class, I remember a news report breaking into the typically childish antics of KROQ’s Kevin and Bean, informing the audience that a number of high school students had been massacred by what seemed to be a pair of student gunmen at Columbine High School in Colorado.
I remember my first and second reaction to this news. The second reaction was the acceptably human one: I pulled over my car, started punching my steering wheel and swearing at the radio, then lit a cigarette and sat, weepy for a few minutes, shaking and shaken. The first reaction, however, has become the reflex reaction, the one used over and over to weather similar news and stop myself from pulling over on the road again. This line to myself was modeled on a line of Jerry Seinfeld’s, intentionally and repeatedly delivered on his era-defining sitcom with only the slightest hint of empathy: “That’s a shame.”
The second reaction was a reaction to the news and my own first reaction: mass shooting casualties, as with all needless and intentionally nihilistic death, are in fact beyond shame and in fact tragedies demanding collective action. They should cause one to pull over, curse and punch inanimate objects.
But I am no longer 20, I am 40. While this is a particularly bad year in the annals of modern mass shootings, in the half my life that is post-Columbine I have witnessed news report after news report about massacre after massacre, each far too similar to the others. I simply do not have the surplus emotional energy to spend on a teary outrage over a state of affairs that will continue to persist in every permutation of national politics that I can, for now, predict. The occasional mass shooting, like potholes and annoying advertising, seems something that our nation as an aggregate collective whole is willing to accept as the price of going about daily business in the USA.
I plan to revisit this topic soon, but those in authority then and now (which includes myself and my peers) have failed miserably in stopping mass shootings in what should be safe public spaces. The polar positions of the debate are deeply entrenched. What are the facts, and can we use them to minimize the instance of mass shootings? I hope so.
A small death of my soul occurs every time I hear of another slaughter. I worry that enough of these small deaths, felt as a nation, will leave no one to take a hold of the wheel and swerve us off of this terrible path.
