How School Shootings Became a Uniquely American Tragedy — And Nightmare

What Does It Say About a Society When the Top Cause of Death for Kids Is…Guns?

Image Credit: John Bazemore

It’s happened again. That uniquely American tragedy, crime, monstrosity. A school shooting. This one, in Tennessee, killing six people. By now, you’ve heard the story, and about many of the details. But there’s a thing, a fact, that maybe you don’t know. An especially disturbing one, even at this grim juncture.

Guns are now the number one cause of death among kids in America. Number one. More than car accidents, the previous leading killer. More than illness, disease, anything. and to give credit where it’s due, this fact comes to me viathe excellent Philip Bump of the Washington Post, whom I consider an essential voice.

Think about that for a second with me. Really think about the meaning of this bizarre, nightmarish fact. “School shootings.” What are they, really? We’ve come to think of them, worldwide, as an American institution. But there are different kinds of institutions. Institutions of democracy — those are peaceful ones. People of different creeds and colors and faiths walking down the street hand in hand. And then there are the institutions of a failing society. Perverse, backwards ones. Violent ones. School shootings are just such an institution.

When I say institution, I mean what it says on the tin. A regular, commonplace feature of life. Something that we all take — even if wearyingly, maddened, haunted — for granted. Not all institutions are good ones. Slavery was an institution. Lynching was an institution. Markets where human beings were bought and sold and separated and their names taken away were an institution. School shootings are an institution.

They’ve become an institution in plain sight. It wasn’t so long ago that there weren’t many — if any — school shootings. Then Columbine happened. And in its wake followed more than I can recount, and you have time or will to read about. Sandy Hook. Uvalde. Stoneman Douglas High School. Those are just the ones we all know about. But there are so, so many we don’t, because, well, there are too many.

How many? There have been 13 school shootings in America in 2023 so far. 13. Think about how…words fail me, so if you have some, please supply them. It’s not even April. It’s still March. That’s more than four a month. Culminating with the massacre in Tennessee. Let me try again to put those numbers in perspective. This is week number 13 of the year 2023. This was the 13th school shooting. That’s one a week.

School shootings are so ubiquitous that a reporter covering this one recounted being a survivor of one. Pause to let that sink in for a second — how disturbing that fact really is. A Michigan State University student who lived through the shooting on their campus last month was a Sandy Hook survivor. We now have kids surviving multiple shootings.

And then there’s this. 

I couldn’t even fully process it,” Beasley said. “What do you say? Because only in America can you survive a mass shooting and go and make a friend who is the victim of a mass shooting and then go to meet that friend for lunch… and end up in the middle of another mass shooting event.

This is institutionalized violence, my friends. That is the most accurate way to put it. Now, before I say what I’m going to say next, I want to put my cards on the table. I grew up in the South. I wear my cowboy boots most days of the week, even when I’m in Europe. I grew up in what was then country, before it became bleak exurban subdivisions. So I understand there’s a need for guns — a practical one. Many European countries understand that too, and so, sure, you can have your shotgun or rifle or what have you.

But AR-15s? I’ve written about school shootings more times than I can count. And one of the times that I did, I called AR-15s “machine guns.” For which, instead of focusing on the shooting, the nutcases on the far right hounded me. “LOL, that’s an assault rifle, idiot!” Don’t cry for me, because I’m making a point. I’m not the victim here, and neither was the gun. But that is what these fools thought. Anyone with an ounce of common sense should be able to see that guns are completely out of control in America.

In some pretty obvious ways, too. One, guns that are only for killing — killing people, in horrific ways, weapons of war — are available to any crackpot, lunatic, extremist, or fanatic. As toys, sporting goods, collectables, trophies. Hello, weapons of war are not toys, and killing people is not a sport. Two, there are just too many of them, they’re too ubiquitous. Three, because of one and two, situations arise where kids, who get radicalized in all sorts of ways — or just people who get radicalized — can get their hands on the kinds of weaponry that’d make the Taliban jealous.

That’s not an exaggeration. I’ve been to the Afghan border. Have you? The gun nuts haven’t, most of them. I can tell you, therefore, with certainty, two things. There are two places in the world you can buy weapons of war casually. There, and America. Hit the border there — and open air markets will happily sell you machine guns, oh sorry, I mean “assault rifles,” too. But what kind of sense does that make?

You know much of that. You know guns are a problem. But like I said, I want you to really think about it, because, lost in the tragedy, surrounded by so damned much of it, so constantly, we go into shock, survival mode, fight or flight. Thinking shuts down. So let me recap the point which should be understood here.

America’s gun problem is getting worse. Much worse, fast. It isn’t the same gun problem anymore, not really. Guns are now America’s leading cause of death for kids. What does that say about a society? That’s not a rhetorical question. It’s a question that everyone should think about.