An American Reckoning

*This was written in the wake of the Uvalde massacre in 2022, then published again after the Covenant School shooting in Nashville in 2023, but it’s telling that the state of our country is such that I can dust it off and repost it year after year and it still feels relevant.

I’ve also not addressed the utter demonization of the trans community that has already started to show its horrid face after this. I’m so sad and am grieving with my trans friends that they are yet again being thrust into a narrative where their entire existence is up for debate.*

I was a freshman in High School when a kid my age showed up at his own High School, 10 miles east of where I was sitting, and opened fire on his classmates.

He ultimately killed 4 people (2 of his classmates, and his parents the night before,) and wounded 25 more.

One of the kids in my church group had a dad who was a teacher at the High School and was present that day. I’m still not sure if he’s okay, and I think about him often.

Our teachers stopped class and told us what had happened, and we were all understandably sad, and equally unsure how to feel about the whole thing.

What I don’t remember, however, was any sort of collective communal unity. This may have to do with the fact that I was 15, just having come through puberty, and navigating being 5 foot tall, 98 pound trombone playing kid.

Fast forward to today.

We are 6 days removed from the second deadliest school shooting in US history.

And both of them have taken place at elementary schools.

And it doesn’t seem like it’s even possible to move through the world today, to go to the grocery store, or run to Home Depot, or stop and get coffee, without this collective, communal sense of grief. Of unity. Of “aren’t we all so damn tired of it all?”

I’ve often heard the line “the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun”

I’m not sure where it came from, but I’m inclined to believe that it was the NRA that decided to trumpet this piece of propaganda. After all, that’s their whole thing, isn’t it? Good guys with guns?

But then the facts started to come out about what took place in Uvalde, TX and we all sat in collective horror as we watched news stories about parents begging police to go save their kids while the police waited.

They waited.

A gunman was on the loose in an elementary school, and 19 police officers waited.

How am I ever supposed to tell my kids that the police are there to help them?

How do I do that with a straight face and not feel like I’m just lying to them?

19 “good guys with guns” stood around waiting.

I’ve long considered myself a reasonable person, especially when it comes to the second amendment.

I don’t own a gun. I have no interest in owning a gun. But I’ve always been on the side of “responsible gun ownership.”

But I’m past that now.

I no longer believe that you can responsibly own an agent of death. That you can responsibly own something that is only intended and designed to inflict maximum damage and pain.

The United States, as of last count, has just shy of 394 million civilian-owned guns.

Our country has just over 5% of the world’s population, but 46% of the civilian owned firearms.

That’s 1.2 guns for every person in the country, and that’s not counting all the firearms owned by the military and police forces. If guns made us safer, we’d be the safest country on the planet by a measure of 10.

We are the only nation in the world where this is the case.

And we won’t even admit that we have a problem.

We’ll blame it on video games, our own “evil nature,” Marilyn Manson, rap music, or violent movies.

Because blaming someone else for our problems is easy. It’s what my children do when they get in trouble. It’s always someone else’s fault. Someone else made them do it. It’s never their fault.

We are a nation unwilling to face our own inadequacies, and our reckoning is coming.

We have utterly failed our children. We have normalized lockdown drills and active shooter training in our school without batting an eye. We have companies creating bullet proof backpacks and binders, and are installing metal detectors in schools.

We’ve laid our kids on the altar of gun-rights, because the gun lobby demands blood atonement. Because it’s the price we have to pay for our “freedoms.”

Sandy Hook should have been the end of the gun debate in the United States. The moment that 20 children were murdered in their school should have been the moment that we said “enough is enough.” But we decided that dead children were just the price we had to pay for our freedoms.

Instead, we doubled down on our “rights.”

Our nation is sick.

But instead of addressing our sickness, we’re plastering over it, rubbing essential oils on it, and hoping it gets better.

We’re content to blissfuly live in the dark, with our heads buried in the sand, refusing to even acknowledge that we may have a problem.

But given our nation’s history, I can’t say I’m surprised.

I’ll leave you with words from the southern rock outfit Drive-By Truckers. They close out their 2020 song, “Thoughts and Prayers,” with the following:

When my children’s eyes look at me and they ask me to explain
It hurts me that I have to look away
The powers that be are in for shame and comeuppance
When Generation Lockdown has their day
They’ll throw the bums all out and drain the swamp for real
Perp walk them down the Capitol steps and show them how it feels
Tramp the dirt down, Jesus, you can pray the rod they’ll spare
Stick it up your ass with your useless thoughts and prayers