How many children have to die like those in Nashville before the US changes its gun laws?
If these stories sound like numbers to you, if it feels like they blur, could that not be because they’ve become so commonplace as to be obscene?
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Your support makes all the difference.This morning I checked on my two children, asleep in their beds. They’re both under 11, and I was fretting about the fact that one has a sore throat, the other asthma and a bad cough. I wasn’t sure if they would be able to go to school, and I was worried about it. In Nashville, there are parents exactly like me, with one crucial difference – they’re not waking their kids from sleep. They’re mourning them.
We now know that after an attack at The Covenant School in Tennessee city on Monday, three adults and three children are dead. The youngest victims were just nine years old.
CCTV footage released by Metro Nashville Police shows the shooter, identified as Audrey Elizabeth Hale, 28, driving to the school before opening fire on students and staff with an assault rifle. Hale was killed after being confronted and killed by police.
It is tragic, terrible – and enraging. But the worst thing? It will happen again. This isn’t the first time we’ve had to write about the death of innocent children at the hands of guns in the supposed land of the free, and it won’t be the last. The news from Uvalde elementary school in Texas in May a year ago was similarly unthinkable. Nineteen children between the ages of five and 11 – the same age as my kids – and two teachers, dead after an active shooter targeted Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
So what, now, is the US going to do about it?
I remember reporting on the tragic death of Adam Toledo in 2021. The 13-year-old was shot dead by police in an alleyway after being chased. Camera footage showed him moments before he was killed: arms in the air, oversized black Nike hoody, scruffy cap on backwards. The words on his chest, “Just Do It”, like a premonition. Just a boy. Moments later, he was dead.
Tamir Rice was a boy, too – just 12 when he was shot in 2014 in Cleveland, Ohio, by white police officer Timothy Loehmann. Tamir was reportedly carrying a replica toy gun – he was killed almost immediately, after police arrived at the scene.
Many gun violence victims are young, but there are older, terrible losses, too. Breonna Taylor – a medical worker – died after a botched raid on her apartment. George Floyd died at the hands of a white former Minneapolis police officer. Some names stick out. Many have rightfully sparked protest. But others will already be forgotten.
Why? Well, if these stories sound like numbers to you, if it feels like they blur, could that not be because they’ve become so commonplace as to be obscene? As to almost (though certainly never for the families) have become routine?
After all, the Nashville school shooting is America’s 129th mass shooting in 2023. The headlines merge into one, and the world sighs: a dozen or so dead. A tragedy at a university campus, a work place, a spa, a nightclub, a grocery store, a dance studio. A gunman with a rifle and body armour opens fire at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. and nobody is shocked. Horrified, yes. But not surprised.
It’s just another day in America, another mass shooting. Another terrible waste of life.
Sometimes the victims are random. All too often, they’re members of ethnic minority communities. How many fathers, mothers, medical workers and kids have to die before America wakes up? How many times does this have to happen before people like Marjorie Taylor Greene stop calling for more “good guys with guns”; as if that would solve the problem?
US President Joe Biden has pledged to take action on gun violence – he announced a range of actions two years ago to aim to stop the sale of so-called “ghost guns”; and encourage the adoption of “red-flag” gun laws, denouncing gun violence in America as an “epidemic” and an “international embarrassment”.
In April last year, he promised he would introduce a “comprehensive package” of measures to curb the killings. Biden has branded the latest school shooting in Nashville “sick” and “heartbreaking” and has renewed his call for a ban on assault weapons. Good. But I can’t believe we’re still having this conversation.
Biden was right, there is a scourge blighting America – guns.
And we’ll keep seeing parents mourning their kids, we’ll keep writing “thoughts and prayers” on social media, until America finally wakes up and scraps the Second Amendment, once and for all. Until then, more children will die. And we can’t do a thing about it.