It’s not that America can’t stop its bloody sequence of mass killings. It’s that it lacks the national cohesion and common will to do so.
The elementary school massacre in Texas underscored that the world’s most powerful nation can’t even ensure that its most vulnerable — young children — are safe from violent death at their desks. A more stunning failure of government would be hard to find.
A deep political and cultural estrangement on guns — caused principally by the right’s blocking of efforts from Democrats and moderate Republicans to pass even modest safety measures — is boiling up again over Tuesday’s shooting.
Mass killings are a sickeningly familiar background noise to daily life in the US, but the latest school bloodbath, which killed 19 children and two teachers, came as an especially devastating blow. It rekindled the sense of dread millions of American parents feel when say goodbye to their kids at school drop off. And it will further scar a generation of students haunted by the perpetual fear of a school shooting — a frightful vision for young minds that was only alleviated by Covid-19 pandemic virtual learning, which traumatized many of them in other ways.
The carnage in Uvalde, Texas, was so horrible that even Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, whose nation has suffered appalling atrocities and war crimes since the Russian invasion, felt compelled to express his shock and condolences.
At a time of national angst, America’s fractured politics is predictably falling short, and failing to overcome the curses of personal political ambition and gridlock.
Familiar and futile rituals following mass shootings are playing out — “the thoughts and prayers” for victims, Democratic calls for more gun safety measures and Republican denials that such killings are inevitable in a society swamped by deadly firearms.
But the bloodshed — perpetrated by an 18-year-old who legally bought semi-automatic rifles in a state where he was deemed too immature to buy a beer — is exposing the political paralysis over ending mass killings as never before.
People marveled after a hauntingly similar massacre in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, why not even the murders of 6- and 7-year-olds in class could lead to gun reforms.
No one would make such a comment now. A blood-soaked decade has rendered the country’s politics more feral and divisive and even less capable of compromises that might save lives. Conservative power and the Senate filibuster have stalled multiple attempts at overhauling firearm laws, which would surely have saved some lives — despite a recent Democratic monopoly on elected institutions in Washington. Regular shootings, like the slaughter at a Las Vegas music festival in 2017 or a 2018 high school massacre in Parkland, Florida, have sparked outrage and calls for change but failed to break the inertia of Washington politics.
In fact, momentum appears to be heading in the opposite direction. The right’s ascendency on the issue could be further underscored if the conservative-majority Supreme Court further loosens gun laws in a pending landmark Second Amendment case.
