Three Shootings in America

I want to highlight three incidents of gun violence this last week, each very ordinary — and each shocking in its own way.

First: A white nationalist attempted a mass shooting and to assassinate a member of Congress — and you probably didn’t hear about it. It’s taken a few days for the pieces of this story to come together, but last Sunday, a 19-year-old attempted to storm a Hindu place of worship in Aurora, Illinois, while Democratic Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi was inside. The would-be shooter’s gun jammed and he texted a coworker from Taco Bell, who then contacted police. Officers found hundreds of rounds of ammunition at the suspect’s house, as well as an eight-page “manifesto-in-waiting” entitled “Why I Fought: A.K.A.: (Aurora Shooter’s Manifesto)” that explicitly targeted South Asian, Jewish and Black people.

“I think we were very fortunate that something much, much worse did not happen,” a local police chief told the press.

The shooting is another reminder of how right-wing and white nationalist violence remains the biggest threat to the United States domestically. And yet the FBI and the federal government has all-but given up investigating it, and the President is in fact one of the nation’s leading spreaders of hate-speech and extremist rhetoric, including just this week mocking the Arab-American candidate for senate in Michigan and the politically-motivated targeting of Rep. Ilhan Omar. Indeed, racist targeting of South Asians — like those at the Aurora temple — appears increasingly to be a central political strategy of the GOP.

“The threat of such violence shows how dangerous anti-Indian hatred and white supremacy have become, and we cannot wait until innocent people are killed to take these threats seriously,” Krishnamoorthi said last week in a statement.

We do not talk enough about how central the threat (and reality) of political violence is to the Trump movement and to the paralysis that so many GOP figures feel when they attempt to speak out or act against President Trump and the MAGA movement. We are “both-sides”-ing a threat where one side is a gasoline-fueled mass arsonist by pretending that the other side also plays with matches.

Second, the Bend, Oregon, elementary school shooting. This shooting you probably did hear about — three children and a teacher were killed Thursday at Silver Rail Elementary School — but in the never-ending stream of news and tragedies, it’s already been mostly washed away from the headlines. A teacher wrestled with the attacker, likely saving numerous lives — a story that, again, feels like it should be more extraordinary than it is.

The 16-year-old shooter was a former special needs student at the school whose mother had purchased him the shotgun used in the attack for his upcoming birthday. I will leave aside how we live in a country where parents purchase firearms for their emotionally disturbed children as birthday presents, and I will also leave aside the heartbreaking bravery of a teacher wrestling with a gunman to save her students. And instead I want to focus on another outrage:

For all of the Trump administration’s transformation of ICE into a domestic secret paramilitary police force, the reality is that being an elementary school student in the United States is more deadly than being an ICE officer. Since its creation after 9/11, there has never been an ICE officer killed in the line of duty, but dozens of elementary school students have been killed in shootings. Firearms remain the leading cause of death for American children — more than motor vehicle crashes. (The fact that there’s not an easily calculable and agreed-upon total of school students killed in shooting is itself an indictment of how severe the problem is.)

That this fact is not front-and-center in American politics, a screaming, drop-everything, red-alert-blinking first-order scandal stands as one of the greatest indictments of our country. Quite the contrary. Instead, the Republican Party has repeatedly made clear that it’s okay with children being killed in schools, church-goers being killed at worship, music fans killed at concerts, shoppers killed at Walmarts and grocery stores — the GOP has collectively agreed that the Second Amendment somehow outweighs every other right and privilege in American life and has, as I traced in the third season of my podcast Long Shadow, run a forty-year campaign to get more Americans to carry more guns in more places.

I do not understand how the prevalence of gun violence targeting America’s schoolchildren has not turned every parent in the country into a single-issue voter.

Then, third: Friday I was in the middle of a very routine and completely unremarkable shooting in Washington, D.C. It was 4:30 in the afternoon in Dupont Circle, and I was in town for a dinner and browsing the racks outside my favorite used bookstore, Second Story Books.

As I had been walking up to Dupont, I saw a crowd of a hundred or more rowdy teen schoolkids spilling into the street on New Hampshire Ave. NW—something more rambunctious and out of control than pure fun, but not necessarily anything angry or scary—and during the minutes I browsed old books, the situation clearly escalated. (Washington has struggled this year with so-called “Teen Takeovers.”)

First, a masked youth ran by chased by police officers with guns drawn, then a few minutes later, at the end of the block amid a group of teens, a series of shots rang out, and the group scattered running. The rest of the area was filled with commuters, students, families, the whole spectrum of urban life in a busy and popular neighborhood intersection, and a group of us moved quickly to shelter-in-place inside the bookstore, while scores of police descended in a never-ending series of racing engines and screaming sirens.

What struck me was how entirely unremarkable the gunfire was — it was dramatic, sure, but everyone around me treated it more as an annoyance than anything to really fear.

Within minutes, the whole area had returned to its normal bustle, and when I left the bookstore, commuters were just ducking and dodging around police crime scene tape while a whole lot of officers, including one of DC’s much-maligned “Safe Streets Task Forces” of FBI and ATF agents stood around, as did the National Guard troops who we’re spending millions to house and feed as they walk beats far from the states where they signed up to serve. It doesn’t appear that anyone was shot — a kid with access to a handgun and who was carrying it likely on the way home from school just decided to open fire as part of some dispute, real or imagined.

In between the attempted mass shooting at the Hindu temple and the Friday gunfire in Dupont — incidents that will never register in our statistics because actually no one was shot in either incident — nearly a thousand other Americans did die in gun violence, including the victims in Bend, Oregon, all part of an annual toll that nears 50,000 lives.

We suffer a rate of gun homicides that, according to Everytown for Gun Safety, “is 26 times that of other high-income countries.”

There are more gun deaths in the US on a single day than there are in the UK, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Japan in a year combined.

Our weekly total is roughly equal to the annual total of gun deaths of France, Canada, or Germany.

All of this, as I concluded in my podcast on gun violence, is a “uniquely American problem.” And just a few weeks out from the midterm elections, it’s astounding that we accept it as the background noise of American life so thoroughly that gun violence isn’t anywhere on the national political radar.

GMG