OPINION
THE EDITORIAL BOARD
A Heartbroken Nation
May 28,
2022
By The
Editorial Board
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/28/opinion/school-shooting-texas-buffalo-gun.html
The
editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by
expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate
from the newsroom.
The United
States seems to be failing to protect its people by the week. With the gun
massacre in East Buffalo followed by the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, many
Americans have spent the past few days gripped by overwhelming incredulity and
grief, exhaustion and fury over the loss of life. What can be done beyond
living with heartbreak?
There is
incredulity at the inaction of the police in Uvalde. Seventy-eight minutes
elapsed after the gunman walked inside before police, believing “there were no
kids at risk,” finally confronted him, according to Steven C. McCraw, the
director of the Texas Department of Public Safety. Meanwhile, 911 dispatchers
received several calls from inside the classroom, including repeated calls
from a child begging them to send the police. By the end of his rampage, the
gunman had killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School.
Mr. McCraw
acknowledged the multiple failures of judgment. In response to a question about
whether the commander at the scene should offer an apology to the victims’
families, he said, “If I thought it would help, I would apologize.”
Police held
back a group of horrified parents who gathered even as shots continued to ring
out inside the school and begged officers to move in and try to rescue their
children. At least one mother was put in handcuffs, only to spring over a fence
and sprint into the school to scoop up her child when the opportunity presented
itself. The police, she said, were “doing nothing.”
Those
officers had been training for years for just such an attack. Yet when the
moment came, all that preparation did nothing to stop a gunman wielding an
assault rifle in a school full of children.
There is
unspeakable grief over the deaths of children like Layla Salazar, who liked to
make TikTok videos, wear denim jackets and sing “Sweet Child o’ Mine” on the
way to school each morning.
“They took
her away from us,” Layla’s grandfather Vincent Salazar told The Times. “How do
you mend a broken heart from a family as close as we had?”
Irma
Garcia, a teacher at Robb Elementary, liked classic rock. Her body was found
with children still in her embrace, according to her nephew. A fourth grader
who survived the attack said that Ms. Garcia and another teacher, Eva Mireles,
had saved his and other students’ lives. “They were in front of my classmates
to help,” he said. “To save them.”
There is
also a profound sense of national exhaustion that comes when tragedy is layered
upon tragedy. In Buffalo, three funerals were held on Friday for victims of the
mass shooting that took place at a supermarket on May 14. Ten people were
killed, and three others were wounded.
In Buffalo,
a white gunman targeted a predominantly Black neighborhood with his AR-15-style
assault rifle; he was an adherent of the racist conspiracy theory known as
replacement theory, which posits that white Americans are being displaced by
immigrants and people of color. Nearly half of Republicans told pollsters
recently that they agree with the general thesis that a cabal of powerful
people is encouraging immigrants to come here to sway politics.
The
combination of paranoia and firearms has led to tragedy again and again. “Why
are we willing to live with this carnage?” President Biden asked the nation on
Tuesday.
The report
of each gunshot in a mass killing echoes long after the next killing eclipses
it. According to his family, Joe Garcia, Ms. Garcia’s husband, died on Thursday
of a heart attack. Mr. Garcia, 50, had just gotten home from the memorial for
his wife on Thursday morning when he collapsed.
It is
entirely reasonable to ask how much more of this a nation can be expected to
bear. The answer is infuriating: There have been 213 mass shootings in the
United States in the first 21 weeks of 2022. An average of 321 Americans are
shot every single day. And every day, there are roughly more than 50,000 gun
sales recorded. Properly maintained, those guns will fire like new for decades.
There was
some hope after the massacre at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown,
Conn., in 2012, which left 20 children and six teachers dead, that America had
finally reached the limit of tragedy it could withstand and that, perhaps, the
gun lobby had reached the high-water mark of its power.
A decade
later, neither of those holds true. On Friday, the former president Donald
Trump, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota and Lt. Gov.
Mark Robinson of North Carolina all spoke at the annual convention of the
National Rifle Association in Houston, a few hours’ drive from Uvalde. There is
no better manifestation of the gun lobby’s total capture of so much of the
G.O.P.
States
around the country have made halting but commendable progress in passing
sensible gun safety measures — red flag laws, background checks and age of
purchase requirements. They face stiff headwinds. A federal court this month
struck down a California law that set the age limit for purchasing
semiautomatic weapons at 21. But the legislature is now considering other
promising bills that would limit the advertising of certain guns to children
and allow Californians to sue gun makers. Anything that introduces friction
into the system of gun acquisition is to the good.
In New York
this week, a federal judge tossed out a challenge from gun groups to a law that
allows civil lawsuits against companies that have endangered public safety. And
Gov. Kathy Hochul called on the legislature to raise the age limit to purchase
some assault weapons to 21. The shooter in Texas waited until his 18th birthday
to buy a pair of assault weapons and hundreds of rounds of ammunition.
In
Washington, D.C., there is talk that Republican and Democratic lawmakers might
make a deal on some type of national red flag law, which would allow the police
to take guns away from people judged to be an imminent danger to themselves or
others.
Senator
Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, has been leading a bipartisan group of
senators that is considering establishing a more comprehensive federal
background check system, a reform supported by 88 percent of Americans.
We have
seen these bipartisan efforts on gun safety measures come and go without
results. Still, in the face of Republican intransigence, Democrats — Mr. Biden,
in particular — should do whatever they can. Senator Murphy, who has led the
charge for tougher gun regulations since Sandy Hook, put it well on the floor
of the Senate this past week:
“What are
we doing?” he asked his colleagues. “Why do you go through all the hassle of
getting this job, of putting yourself in a position of authority” he wondered,
if the answer is to do nothing “as the slaughter increases, as our kids run for
their lives?”
It’s a
question that speaks to the Senate directly and the entire system of American
government more broadly. Yes, the country’s democratic system represents the
diversity of views in this country on guns. But as currently structured,
Congress is fundamentally unresponsive to the needs of its most vulnerable
citizens and has been corrupted by powerful interest groups, allowing those
groups to block even modest changes that the vast majority of Americans
support.
We
Americans all share this vast country and need to figure out how to make it
better and keep one another alive and thriving. Right now, we’re failing at
that primary responsibility. There are glimmers of hope, especially at the
state level, that things are changing. But even there, progress is agonizingly
slow and won’t be enough for the hundreds of Americans who will be shot today
and tomorrow and every day until action is taken.
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