I grew up in a time when mass shooters were few and far between because such things simply did not happen in a civilized society.
I was 13 or 14 when a young man named Charles Starkweather, 19, went on a killing spree in the winter of 1957-58. He shot to death several people in Nebraska and Wyoming before he was captured. His murder spree made headlines across the country. People could not believe such a thing was possible.
I was a senior in college when Charles Whitman took weapons to the top of the bell tower on the campus of the University of Texas and began shooting people at random. He killed several and wounded many more before he was stopped. Again, it was almost impossible to imagine.
I am in the twilight of my life now. Mass shootings happen so terribly often that I sometimes find it difficult to keep track of the locations, much less the names of all the victims. There are just so many of them in our nation today.
The shootings at a private school in Nashville — three 9-year-old students and three staff members killed, along with the 28-year-old shooter — were the latest as I write this. It is possible, far more than possible these days, that in the time between when I finish writing and when the column makes the newspaper or the Mitchell Republic online edition, there will be another mass shooting. That’s how often it happens in what is supposed to be the greatest country on the planet.
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A few years ago, it became fashionable in some political and cultural circles to talk of American exceptionalism. I love this country. Gosh, how I love this country. I love the very idea of a country such as ours. But there is nothing at all exceptional about how we allow our citizens, especially our school children, to be slaughtered as they go about the business of learning, working or playing.
That is not exceptional at all. It is sickening.
I seldom write about the epidemic of mass shootings in our land. I don’t have the answer. I am no smarter than most other people. But the school shooting in Nashville struck something in me. It was no different from so many other mass shootings. Someone armed with rapid-firing weapons, called “assault-style’’ rifles or handguns, broke into a school and killed several people.
That happened more than two decades ago at Columbine school in Colorado. It happened a decade ago at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut. It has happened again and again since, including a horrific mass shooting at a school in Uvalde, Texas. There, responding officers failed to take on the shooter for an hour or more. In the Nashville event, officers rushed into the building as soon as they reached the scene.
Perhaps Nashville struck me because it was just one more school shooting. It wasn’t a rare event. It had become the norm. An armed assailant breaks into a school and shoots people. Response teams arrive and kill the assailant. Surviving children are hustled away to safety – physical safety. Who can say if any of those children will ever again feel mentally and emotionally safe?
News crews come on the scene to ask the same questions they have asked so many times before. Thoughts and prayers are offered from around the nation. Vigils are held for victims. Pundits and politicians talk about gun control and mental health services and further fortifying schools and further training children.
Mass shootings in this country have become like a Hollywood horror film with endless sequels.
Back when Columbine happened, I believed it was an aberration. By the time of Sandy Hook, I had begun to lose hope that we would change things and prevent further massacres,
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I no longer have any hope things will change, no expectation that “this time will be different.’’ Why would it be? How can anything change if we do nothing other than what we have done each time before?
If nothing else, maybe we can get rid of elected officials who have done nothing to address the issue. That isn’t a solution, but perhaps it is a start.
The Trust Project
