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mass shootings
Even a Good President With a Gun Won’t Save Us
VP Harris’ recent political messaging about guns has been less about curbing them and more about how she and her running mate Tim Walz possess them. But that won’t prevent mass shootings.
Sep 25, 2024
It’s happened far more times than I care to remember. Waking up super early on Sunday morning to write my weekend column, I flip on the TV and there’s some dark and fuzzy video of multiple police cars, flashing blue and red outside some urban nightclub or restaurant, as the anchors solemnly report that while we were sleeping, there was yet another mass shooting in America.
But this Sunday morning, the news cut a little differently.
The rapid machine-gun-like fire had lit up a crowded street in Birmingham, Alabama, the city where I lived and worked as a young journalist in the early 1980s. CNN zoomed in with a map, and my heart sank because I instantly knew the exact area where four people were murdered and another 17 were injured, some seriously.
If a mass shooting happens in the dead of a Saturday night and America has forgotten about it by the time Sunday’s 1:00 pm NFL games kick off, did it make a sound?
The shooter, or possibly more than one shooter, fired more than 100 rounds at a packed sidewalk in the Birmingham entertainment district known as Five Points South, a few blocks from the University of Alabama-Birmingham campus. My fading 20-something memories of the place are fond ones—meeting journalist pals for a beer on the Deep South’s brutally humid summer nights, nodding along with the ever-present Alabama or Auburn fans, even drinking my first-ever Long Island iced tea (and, thankfully, one of my last) from a Mason jar.
Some 40 years later, it took just a few seconds for a shooter with a legal semi-automatic and, police believe, a “switch” that turned it into a machine gun, to shatter any happy recollections of the place, and the lives of the people there just out for a fun Saturday night.
“All of a sudden it was just gunshots, gunshots, gunshots,” 24-year-old Gabriel Eslami, who was on the line for the Hush hookah bar, told CNN. “I started running for my life”—but he was struck by a bullet in the leg and fell to the ground. When he looked up, the scene felt like a “horror movie... There are bodies laid out all over the sidewalk, gun smoke in the air. There are shoes. People ran out of their shoes trying to escape. I saw people hiding behind cars, laying under cars.”
It may have sounded like the climax of a gory Hollywood movie, but in 2024 news cycle, the Birmingham mass shooting was something of a blip. NPR did lead its Monday afternoon newscast with the story, but The New York Times buried its print article on pageA14. In an age of school shootings and presidential assassination attempts, bursts of gunfire on crowded city streets are getting shorter and shorter shrift. This was, after all, the third quadruple murder in Birmingham this year, including one outside a public library. Didn’t hear about that? Me neither.
And yet like any mass shooting in the only developed nation that routinely has them, the Birmingham incident raised some serious questions about policy. Why has the gun-loving red state of Alabama not banned these switches, given their potential for mass carnage? Why has Birmingham seen its murder rate increase in 2024, even as crime is mostly falling nationally? Are we truly helpless to get high-powered assault weapons—subject to an imperfect but highly effective federal ban from 1994-2004—off the streets of America’s cities?
If a mass shooting happens in the dead of a Saturday night and America has forgotten about it by the time Sunday’s 1:00 pm NFL games kick off, did it make a sound?
Where is the sense of outrage from the Democratic ticket and the media that I felt when I saw that somebody used an assault rifle to carry out an act of terrorism in Birmingham?
One place where the bullets didn’t seem to have much impact was in the presidential race, where guns have been an issue, but not always in the ways one might expect. To be sure, the Democrats are the party that believes government can do something to reduce gun violence. I was there in Chicago’s United Center in August when the loved ones of gunfire victims gave poignant pleas to Democrats, and the party has vowed to again to ban assault rifles and enact common-sense gun laws—in the highly unlikely event it can get around a GOP Senate filibuster. Republican nominee Donald Trump brags that when he was president,“nothing happened” to stop mass killings.
The Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, didn’t release a statement about the Birmingham shooting. Maybe there’s just too many mass shootings in America, or maybe it would be different if Alabama were a swing state. But also, Harris’ recent political messaging about guns has been less about curbing them and more about how she and her running mate Tim Walz possess them.
Harris again confirmed last week to Oprah Winfrey that she owns a gun for her personal protection from her prosecutor days, telling the TV icon that “if somebody’s breaking into my house, they’re getting shot.” First, if someone’s breaking into the vice president’s home, then the Secret Service is in worse shape than we thought. Second, multiple studies have shown that people with guns in their home are more likely to get shot than those who do not, so I’m not sure why Harris encourages that choice. Her campaign then released an online spot that kicked off with highlighting her gun ownership before saying all the right things, including support for an assault-weapons ban.
It’s Politics 101, right? Harris didn’t have to run in any primaries and woo left-wing Democrats as she did for a time in 2019, but now she hopes her affirmation of gun ownership will win over middle-of-the-road undecideds in the general election. Except where is the sense of outrage from the Democratic ticket and the media that I felt when I saw that somebody used an assault rifle to carry out an act of terrorism in Birmingham? Because that outrage is necessary to convince the public that we need some radical changes if people are going to feel safe again going out on a Saturday night, or putting our kids on a school bus.
A good president with a gun wouldn’t have stopped a mass killing in Birmingham. A good president with a moral crusade and a plan just might stop the next one.
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To Save Children’s Lives, Harris Should Campaign on an Assault Weapons Ban
The shooter in Apalachee High School had an “AR-platform-style weapon,” the popular semi-automatic gun all-too-widely available in the U.S., with hundreds of variations flooding the multi-billion dollar gun market.
Sep 07, 2024
School shootings are recurring markers of a societal sickness, an unshakeable acceptance of violence and senseless death. The murder of two 14-year-old students and two teachers on Wednesday, and the wounding of nine others, at a mass shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, is the latest in this seemingly permanent contagion.
Ninth-grader Colt Gray, 14, had an “AR-platform-style weapon,” the popular semi-automatic gun all-too-widely available in the U.S., with hundreds of variations and modular accessories flooding the multi-billion dollar gun market.
We know that the accused lived in a home with guns, thanks to a statement from the FBI issued on Wednesday, that read in part:
In May 2023, the FBI… received several anonymous tips about online threats to commit a school shooting at an unidentified location and time. The online threats contained photographs of guns.
Within 24 hours, the FBI determined the online post originated in Georgia and the FBI’s Atlanta Field Office referred the information to the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office for action. The Jackson County Sheriff’s Office located a possible subject, a 13-year-old male, and interviewed him and his father. The father stated he had hunting guns in the house, but the subject did not have unsupervised access to them. The subject denied making the threats online. Jackson County alerted local schools for continued monitoring of the subject… there was no probable cause to take any additional law enforcement action.
Authorities had advance warning over a year earlier. Apalachee High School then reportedly received a telephoned threat on the morning of the shooting, warning five schools would be targeted, starting with Apalachee.
The so-called “AR platform” has become the weapon of choice for mass shooters. At the Uvalde mass school shooting in Texas on May 24, 2022, the teenaged shooter killed 21 people, injured 21 more, and held 400 law enforcement personnel at bay, while he killed children one by one for over an hour. It was the lethality of the AR rifle that kept those hundreds of heavily armed agents too frightened to intervene.
As a candidate for the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 2019, Kamala Harris, then a U.S. senator from California, made a renewal of the assault weapons ban a central part of her campaign. She called for the same as recently as December, 2023, while still just the running mate for President Joe Biden.
But now, amid a tight general election race against former President Donald Trump, Harris is being more measured. As news broke of the Apalachee shooting, Harris was taking the stage at a rally in New Hampshire.
“Our hearts are with all the students, the teachers and their families, of course, and we are grateful to the first responders and the law enforcement that were on the scene. But this is just a senseless tragedy on top of so many senseless tragedies,” she said. “We have to end this epidemic of gun violence in our country, once and for all… it doesn’t have to be this way.”
Kris Brown is the president of Brady, a gun violence prevention organization named after James Brady, the former press secretary for former President Ronald Reagan. Brady was shot in the head during the attempted assassination of Reagan. Brady survived, and went on with his wife Sarah to campaign for gun control.
“Jim and Sarah Brady are responsible for the Federal Assault Weapons Ban that was put into effect the year after the Brady Law passed in 1993. During the 10-year time period that that assault weapons ban was in effect, you saw a marked decrease in the kinds of mass shootings involving those firearms than in the previous period,” Kris Brown said on the Democracy Now! news hour, the day after the Apalachee shooting.
Brown is optimistic that positive change is possible, despite the entrenched power of the gun lobby.
“There is a growing desire for an assault weapons ban in this country,” she said, “including among Republicans and including among gun owners. So we will certainly push the Harris administration, if we have one, to make that a priority.”
These weapons of war, marketed to U.S. consumers as benign “modern sporting rifles,” need to be banned.
Assault weapons bans can work. A 1996 mass shooting in Australia left 35 dead and 23 injured. Almost immediately, that nation of gun lovers passed an assault weapons ban and mandatory buyback law. There hasn’t been a shooting anywhere near that scale there since.
Success won’t be so swift here in the U.S., a nation awash with hundreds of millions of guns. Still, the Harris-Walz campaign should make an assault weapons ban a central demand and take it to the voters in November. The lives of our nation’s children depend on it.
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US Media Weeps for Georgia School Shooting Victims, But Not Those Massacred in Gaza
The carnage and suffering inflicted on Palestinians by the Israeli military is daily, so it has ceased being reported on at all.
Sep 05, 2024
The ongoing carnage wrought on ordinary Americans by this country’s bizarrely permissive gun laws dominated the cable news networks for hours on end Wednesday after a 14-year-old shooter killed four people and wounded nine at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia.
Two of the dead were also 14-year-olds, destined never to grow older. The other two fatalities were teachers. As a teacher, I take their deaths personally. The teen shooter had spoken about killing people last year, but since Georgia does not have a red flag law, guns were not removed from his house. The deaths of the teens, and the wounding of eight other students, along with a teacher, underscore the horror of these mass shootings, their little lives cut unforgivably short, their parents’ lives blighted in ways that give nightmares to all parents of a child. Regular mass shootings are not permitted in actually civilized countries, whether Europe or Japan. They are as much an American peculiar institution as our form of plantation slavery was, and they are just as rooted in a valuing of property over humanity (in the case of slavery it involved turning humanity into property).
By the magic of empathy and identification, the news hits us in the gut when we hear of these strangers torn to pieces by hot bullets. They are also Americans. It shouldn’t matter, but the vigil-keepers and interviewees are blonde and white. They are like the majority of Americans.
Those who mouth “thoughts and prayers” and who clearly do not feel the deaths viscerally perhaps lack that empathy. Perhaps they are sociopaths, who cannot empathize with others. Some of the unsympathetic, though, distance themselves from the rawness of these murders by seeing them as a cost of living in a “free” society, by which they mean a society that has few effective regulations about the ownership and use of guns. They see the mass shootings the way many people see automobile deaths, as “accidents,” as a feature of life that they believe unavoidable. Many automobile deaths, too, however, are avoidable, and they are collisions, not accidents. Some 25% of them are from drunk driving, which is a conscious choice and not an accident at all. The most common cause of collisions is distracted driving, which also results from choices people make, and it is a problem that is getting worse. As for guns, it is odd that so intentional an act as premeditated murder should be classed as a natural disaster by so many Americans.
Sociologists use the notion of framing to understand the stories people tell themselves about events. Gun safety advocates see responsible gun ownership as requiring laws and regulations that protect owners and others. Those men who are insouciant about mass shootings think requiring gun safety detracts from their individual freedom (and possibly from their manhood, which frankly speaks poorly of them).
Although the cable news channels went into hyperdrive covering the sickening events in Georgie, they ignored other killings of children on Wednesday.
On Wednesday, Israeli bombardments killed 42 Palestinian victims in massacres of three families. The Gaza Ministry of Health said, “Many people are still trapped under the rubble and on the roads as rescuers are unable to reach them.”
Judging by past such bombardments, a majority of the victims, over 20 people, were children and women. The Israeli military allows an astonishing, and sickening, 20 civilian deaths for each militant of the Qassam Brigades that it kills with drones and rockets. No civilized military behaves in this way. It is creepy. U.S. officers would be rightly court-martialed for implementing such lax and inhumane rules of engagement. Officers have told me that the Geneva Conventions are their “Bible.” They are deeply angered when it is suggested that the Israeli military is behaving no worse than the American does.
The 22 or more women and children killed and the dozens of others injured or trapped beneath the rubble in Gaza did not receive even 15 seconds of air time on America’s multi-billion-dollar “news” screens on Wednesday.
I don’t understand why. Is it that they are not coded as “white?” But if you met many of them, you couldn’t tell them by skin color from many “white” Americans, including Italian-Americans. Is it because they aren’t Americans? But opinion polling shows tremendous U.S. empathy with Ukrainian victims of Russian bombardment.
For some, indifference is achieved by framing. “People die in war,” said President Joe Biden. Some people take seriously ridiculous Israeli army allegations of having killed 13,000 Hamas fighters, which makes the total dead of nearly 41,000 (though this is a vast underestimate) seem like par for the course. In fact, the Israeli military counts any young able-bodied male as a militant. And since they kill so many people from the air, the Israelis don’t really know whom they killed in many instances. The U.S. used to do that in Vietnam when it engaged in body counts. One of my late friends, a Green Beret, complained to me bitterly about such body counts or “kiting.” “If it was dead and it was Vietnamese, it was Viet Cong,” he said bitterly.
So the murdered children of Gaza (the Israeli military ROE amounts to mass murder in International Humanitarian Law) are put off stage. They aren’t configured as “news” as U.S. mass media conceive it. The carnage and suffering is daily, so it has ceased being reported on at all.
Boutique outlets like Middle East Eye, helmed by veteran Middle East correspondent David Hearst, show us the reality, which is not easier to take than the deaths in Winder, Georgia — that is, if we haven’t erected frames that prevent us from seeing and feeling it:
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