There may be dozens of questions people have across the country about the shooting of twenty one innocent people by an eighteen year old male.
How could a person do this?
How did the shooter get the weapons?
How did he get into a school with security resource officers?
Did the shooter's family know of his mental state and intent?
Did the shooter's family unknowingly or knowingly abet his preparation?
What could the school have done to further fortify the campus and prevent such a tragedy?
Weapon technology and mental illness are ubiquitous worldwide so why is this problem unique to America?
What has paralyzed America's ability to eliminate this problem?
Why did it take over ten hours to identify the number of victims and notify family?
Those first few questions seem to wind up having fairly predictable answers. The shooter was mentally unstable / anti-social / psychotic. The guns were obtained legally and red flag rules either didn't apply because the shooter had no prior criminal record or known psychiatric problems were not tracked in state systems. The shooter's family might have been aware of some mental issues but not months of journal entries declaring war on society, etc. Or maybe family members who were aware were equally unbalanced and didn't act upon the behavior. Not all school districts have spent the money to install exit-only locks and two-layer "man trap" doors at their primary entrances. Whatever similarity can be identified in the answers to these questions, they are primarily situational and fail to address the sheer volume of incidents.
It's the last three questions that have stuck in my mind the most. And maybe therein lies a way to solve this problem.
Why is this problem unique to America? What has paralyzed America's ability to correct this problem?
The answers to these two answers are related. The problem is unique to America because of one of the most poorly written sentences ever written in the English language -- the Second Amendment to the Constitution.
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
The idea and language date from 1791. The state of the art in weaponry at that point ranged from muskets (which fired a single shot and took about 18 seconds to reload) to cannon which could fire two to three shots per minute but required a crew of eight to ten people. The politicians of the time had no inkling of weaponry that could accurately fire dozens of rounds per minute with ammunition optimized for maximum damage to internal organs. No inkling of telescopic sights, laser sights, bump stocks. And absolutely no bullet-proof body armor protecting an assailant from counter-attack by legitimate law enforcement.
For the first one hundred and eighty years of the Constitution, there was little debate about the second amendment's intent to ensure the right of people (plural) to possess weaponry as part of formal duties in (well, it says it right there…) a well regulated militia. Only in the last forty to fifty years were the clauses of this horrendous grammatical hodgepodge broken apart into separate, unlinked statements that turned the second amendment into a distinctly INDIVIDUAL right with an ABSOLUTE interpretation of the "shall not be infringed" clause.
America is not the only country to experience mass shooting events. On March 13, 1996, a single gunman killed 17 people and wounded 15 others in Stirling, Scotland at Dunblane Primary School. On April 18 and 19 of 2020, a single gunman killed 22 people over thirteen hours in Nova Scotia, Canada. On March 15, 2019, a lone gunman killed 51 people and wounded another 40 in an attack on two mosques in New Zealand.
However, Britain passed two bills within one year after Dunblane that banned handguns. New Zealand passed laws applying new restrictions to automatic and semi-automatic weapons in less than one month after the Christchurch mass shooting. Canada imposed bans on 1500 types of military grade assault weapons within twelve days of the Nova Scotia attacks. In contrast, the "modern era" of mass shootings in America dates back to Columbine High School in 1999 and nothing has been done at the national level.
So there are examples of three different countries that all suffered the same problem. All democracies. All with a mix of urban and rural populations. Why is America uniquely unable to respond?
The paralysis around this problem is unique to America because America is the only democracy with a legislative body that has institutionalized a profoundly undemocratic super-majority hurdle to its processes -- the Senate filibuster. And for Constitutional purists and disciples of "originalist" interpretations of what the Founding Fathers intended, it is worth stating that nothing in the Constitution, Bill of Rights or the Federalist Papers ever contemplated, much less recommended a process by which a forty percent minority could prevent ANY legislation from being considered by the entire body, thereby impeding the ability of a majority to act upon the business of that body. The process became entrenched in Senate process via rules changes adopted in 1806 and went virtually unused for 150 years before it was used to combat civil rights legislation beginning in 1957.
That single rules change, that single blatantly undemocratic cog in the procedural arcanery of one half of one-third of our federal government, sloppily introduced 216 years ago and discovered anew by racist obstructionists in the 1950s civil rights era has become the lever by which a narrow minority can push back against an overwhelming majority who ARE reacting to the near daily carnage visited upon the country.
So how can this undemocratic, deadly paralysis be broken?
Let's go back to that final question.
Why did it take over ten hours to identify the number of victims and notify family?
Identifying the victims does not seem to be a difficult problem, logically speaking. X students were in a given room. Y students known to be assigned to that classroom are found outside the classroom…. Do the math, right? Well, it is possible victims and survivors ran away from expected places or fled the school entirely and cannot be immediately located… That requires more analysis of the victims found…
I have never experienced a shooting directly or seen detailed footage of the aftermath of a shooting -- of any size. I cannot bring myself to put down words providing analogies for what such scenes must entail. However, consider this. Parents were kept away from the scene. Matching of parents to victims was accomplished in many cases via DNA swabs. As one first responder put it, some of the victims were completely unrecognizeable.
Perhaps those advocating for absolute, unrestricted rights for any weapon for all circumstances have romanticized the idea of lone citizens brandishing a high-powered weapon acting as a bulwark against a tyrannical government. Perhaps these advocates have an unrealistically quaint image in their mind of what it must be like to be shot. Maybe they imagine it to be like being taken out in a game of paintball instead of being shot using a modern high-velocity weapon with specialty ammunition designed for maxiumum carnage -- MULTIPLE TIMES.
Given the fanaticism of those still stuck on an absolutist interpretation of that "shall not be infringed" clause and their slavish devotion to the history and intent of our founding fathers, perhaps the only way to alter their perspective is to force them to be in the "room where it happened." LITERALLY. Require twenty Representatives and five Senators to be IMMEDIATELY flown to a mass shooting site within four hours. Not to offer "thoughts and prayers" to the families. Not to grandstand in front of the ghoulish national press spouting their talking points. Make them enter the scene and just watch. No cameras, no reporters. No distractions. No interactions with first responders. Not a word. Just observe.
With twenty Representatives and five Senators per planeload and America's current rate of mass shootings, it will take less than a month for EVERY member of Congress to gain first-hand insight into the true impact of the violence made possible by their collective failure to act.
I'm open to other ideas but this is the only one I have left.
WTH
