Uvalde

The simple, and so-very-satisfying, way to deal with the Uvalde shooting is to wave it away as the irrational act of a crazy person. And there is, as there always is, something deeply appealing to that approach. Who but a truly insane individual, after all, could bring a loaded weapon to an elementary school and start shooting, apparently randomly, at the children and teachers present? (That the shooter started off his day by shooting his own grandmother only makes it easier and simpler to explain the school shooting as the act of a deranged person.) But is that really all there is to say?

In crime novels, the perpetrator is generally located through some thoughtful application of the cui bono rule. Those Latin words, originally spoken in this context by Cicero more than two thousand years ago, mean “to whom does it benefit” and supposes that, because people generally commit crimes because they expect to reap some sort of benefit from their actions, perpetrators can often be identified by figuring out who stood to profit from the crime. According to this line of thinking, jewel thieves generally steal jewels because they want them but can’t afford to purchase them honestly. The murder of people about to appear as witnesses in court can be supposed to have something to do with the person they were going to testify about wishing to keep them from doing that thing. Arsonists set fire to buildings because they believe they will somehow benefit from that specific edifice burning to the ground—and out-of-control pyromaniacs are merely the exceptions that prove the rule. And now we get to the point: since the police have yet to uncover any specific way that the shooter can possibly have imagined that his terrible act would benefit himself or, for that matter, anyone at all, it feels reasonable to wave this horror away as the insane act of a crazy person. Doesn’t that feel logical?

Maybe not so much. Would you have the courage to tell one of the bereaved parents that this was just a bad thing that happened, that crazy people do crazy things all the time, that there is no one to blame because the shooter is dead and there is no one else to blame? And what of the shooter’s own family? To know that your son’s name will live on in infamy as the murderer of innocent children has to be unbearable, as no less so must also be the knowledge that, not only is your son dead, but the overwhelming majority of citizens think that’s a good thing, that he deserved to die, that even had he survived he should have been sentenced to death and then executed by the state—would you comfort them by explaining that their son was crazy and that no other explanation is called for or needed?

Statistics provide no comfort at all. About thirty-five Americans die every single day of the year from gun violence. Americans own about six times as many guns per capita as, say, Germans, but have thirty times as many gun murders on an annual basis. Comparisons with other countries are even more unsettling: Americans own about six times as many guns per person as Spaniards, but there are in these United States three hundred times as many gun murders per year as there are in Spain. Are Americans simply more violent and prone to gun-based crime than other nations? Is there such thing as a national predilection for violence that can be brought to bear to explain events like Uvalde or Buffalo? Or is such a thing just a made-up fantasy promulgated by people eager to explain away this never-ending carnage as something indelibly stamped on our national character, thus as something we have to live with despite its obvious undesirability, something like the way blind people  have no choice but to learn how to cope in the world without being able to see?

I have never been able to understand how the specific words the Second Amendment uses to permit citizens to formed “well-regulated” armed militias to defend their cities and states can magically be made to mean that teenagers with no training in gun safety have the right to buy assault rifles even though they specifically do not belong to any sort of state-run militia, well-regulated or otherwise. So I won’t even begin to go there. I understand I am fully out of step with the way the text has come to be read. But, unburdened as I am with any actual training in constitutional law, I simply do not see anywhere in the language of that amendment anything even remotely related to the issue at hand.

And so that leads me to my next question: is it possible that there simply is nothing to do to stem these kinds of mass shootings, events so numerous in our nation that no one can keep them straight any longer or remember precisely which shooter goes with which event? In an article I read a few years ago by Nicholas Kristoff, the author argued that what’s needed is a national approach to gun safety based on our very successful efforts to make driving cars safer. And, at the face of things, there is something to recommend that approach: by introducing more and more safety features in automobiles (seat belts, air bags, etc.), we have managed to lower the rate of deaths per 100 million vehicle miles by six-sevenths since 1946. That number would be amazing under any circumstances. But to note that we reduced automobile fatalities by 85% without outlawing cars or making them impossible to acquire or use is beyond amazing. Kristoff’s essay very interesting and I recommend it to you all. (Click here to see the updated version published on the Times’ website earlier this week.) But it’s also a cosmetic solution—something worth exploring and putting into action, but still an approach that wants to alleviate the symptoms because it seems impossible to cure the disease. Doctors do this all the time, of course, and who, if we are dealing with a terminally ill patient, would object to a doctor focusing on the effort to make the symptoms of that patient’s disease easier to bear? But—in medicine as in life—the first choice will always be to cure the disease and not merely to alleviate the symptoms.

So what would that mean on a national level for our stricken country as the blood of murdered innocents yet again seeps into our American soil? That is the question I think American should be asking themselves today.

The ultimate answer, who knows? But I don’t think there is no point in trying to think this through—and specifically not with reference to making guns safer and harder to steal. (Those would be too good things. But neither speaks to the real issue at hand.) Instead, we need to repair our cavalier American approach to the value of human life…and then seriously discuss the price we are prepared to pay to live lives in sync with that approach. In our cultural milieu, being “pro-life” means being opposed to abortion either entirely or mostly. (I’ll write about that some other time.) But what if we were somehow to nudge society along to the point at which the inviolate sanctity of human life was paramount in the minds of all as the bedrock foundation upon which the national ethos rests, and not just as a handy slogan to push one specific approach to one specific issue? What if it were to become natural and normal to do everything conceivable—with no exceptions at all—to safeguard the lives of the children in our schools? Or if it started to go without saying that the willful taking of another person’s life was never, and not under any circumstances, to be explained away with reference to the circumstances of the murder or the mindset of the murderer, but instead was considered, as an offense against the living and against God? What if we taught our children truly to believe that human life is of inestimable value—by which I mean that its value cannot be calculated in terms of money—and then enacted legislation based on that assumption? What if the notion that you can effectively express political or personal rage by buying an automatic weapon and then discharging it in a public place were to be so totally anathemized that only the truly deranged—and not the merely angry or disgruntled—would even consider expressing themselves in such a way? If we as a society were to find the courage to answer all or even just some of these questions, we’d be on our way to restoring the secure decency of our lives in this place.

There is no way to make the world totally and absolutely safe. But there are nations where the chances of being killed by a violent maniac holding a loaded gun are basically infinitesimal when compared to our own nation. It can, therefore, be done. And, that being the case, the only real question is whether we have the national will to do it.