When news of the Apalachee school shooting happened yesterday, I felt nothing. I checked to make sure none of my contacts worked at the school and checked in on a friend who graduated from there, but the sad truth is that I didn’t feel emotion.
Even though the school is just 30 minutes from my home, and I’ve been on that campus several times, and I know several people who went to Apalachee, I was emotionless. And it’s not that I’m an unemotional person — I cried during Sandy Hook. I cried during Parkland. I cried during Vegas.
But now, I’m just numb.
School shootings in America are like fatal car accidents — for those directly involved, it’s unexpected, it’s tragic, it’s devastating. For everyone else, there may be a fleeting moment of sadness, some “thoughts and prayers,” but then it’s back to normal until the next tragedy.
In America, more children die as a result of gun violence than from any other cause, including vehicle accidents and health issues. We are the only wealthy country in the world that has this epidemic, but instead of doing something about it, our leaders wear it like a badge of honor.
Two-thirds of the Supreme Court possess an incredibly broad interpretation of the 2nd Amendment … so much so that they even overturned President Trump’s sensible ban on bump stocks. Members of the Republican Party are so afraid of the NRA that they won’t even consider proposals that even a majority of Republican voters support, like raising the minimum age to purchase a gun or requiring mental health background checks for gun ownership. And we have politicians — including the governor of Georgia — who continuously downplay the seriousness of guns by using them as props in campaign commercials.
Over the next few days, pundits will be quick to blame first-person shooter video games or violence in movies (like the summer’s top movie, Deadpool vs. Wolverine) while ignoring the real problem. Although such fictional works may play some role in normalizing guns in society, it’s a reality that we as Americans accept real gun violence. Other first-world countries share our affection for fictional violence, but only in America do we replicate that violence. The correlation couldn’t be clearer — those other countries have sensible laws preventing their citizens from owning weapons of mass destruction. America does not. And when people point this out, we’re chastised by some for making this political.
But the Apalachee school shooting was political. Because policy could’ve made it preventable. Uvalde was preventable. Parkland was preventable.
Canada, France, Germany, Australia, the United Kingdom — and every other first-world nation — has demonstrated that school shootings are preventable. Until a certain segment of the population decides to value life over guns, we will continue to add more children to the list of preventable deaths when another school shooting happens.
And when the next school shooting happens, we’ll go through the same steps of confirming to see if anyone we know was impacted, perhaps have a moment of sadness, and offer our “thoughts and prayers” before going about our day. But if we’re being honest, that rote pattern repeated after every preventable tragedy is on par with the same emotion I will likely feel again — nothing.
Joe Dennis 