Tom’s Tidbits- It’s time to look horror in the face

Greetings,

Like a still-reassuring majority of Americans I’m sickened and appalled at the latest mass killing (which was Uvalde when I wrote this, but has already been eclipsed by Tulsa, Philadelphia, and Chattanooga). Among other things I’ve been struck by the fact the killer livestreamed his massacre, playing out his grisly fantasy with dying children reduced to scenery. The images were scrubbed immediately but they’re still circulating in the darkest corners of the web. Like the images of the 10 people dead in a Buffalo grocery store less than two weeks ago. Like so many more. And so many more to come.

Our current gun deaths are shaped, at least in part, by our gun legislation. The value in responsible gun ownership can easily be pressed too far, and 2^nd Amendment Fundamentalists accept the bloody status quo and ask us to do the same. We should think of guns like automobiles, they say, accepting the deaths as an inevitable consequence of the system. For an appalling number of Americans this argument carries weight. But pretending slaughter in our country is the price of freedom is insane.

As I read about the 11-year-old girl ‘playing dead’ in the blood of her friend while cops waited for an ‘active shooter’ to become a ‘barricaded suspect’, I wonder if those videos aren’t just for the sickest among us. Most of us don’t need to see gore to understand the problem, but it’s possible to become numb to a constant rain of horror. Maybe without seeing the reality, we healthy people aren’t making the clear-headed decisions we think we are.

Emmet Till wasn’t the only Black boy lynched in 1955 Mississippi. This particular 14-year-old was tortured, shot, and dumped in a river by two white men who were tried and found innocent, but who later admitted guilt and told the whole story to Look magazine for $4000 in 1956. Emmet’s funeral drew attention from a growing Civil Rights movement at the time, and with media ready to cover it there was a serious practical question… should his casket be closed? His mother, Mamie Till Bradley, made the gut-wrenching decision to have an open-casket funeral saying “There was just no way I could describe what was in that box. No way. And I just wanted the world to see.” When the pictures were published in Jet magazine and around the world they did see, and they were shocked. Emmet Till’s death became one of the galvanizing events of the Civil Rights movement but it might not have unless people saw the bloated, beaten corpse of a 14-year-old boy. Not an emotional overstatement, but the reality of the situation.

Sometimes our understanding can be criminally wrong without video. “Man Dies After Medical Incident During Police Interaction” is the headline of this official police press release:

“Two officers arrived and located the suspect, a male believed to be in his 40s, in his car. He was ordered to step from his car. After he got out, he physically resisted officers. Officers were able to get the suspect into handcuffs and noted he appeared to be suffering medical distress. Officers called for an ambulance. He was transported to Hennepin County Medical Center by ambulance where he died a short time later.”

It’s only when you actually watch George Floyd die under the knee of Derek Chauvin for nine minutes that you understand the reality of the situation.

No right can be absolute and every freedom is a balancing act. Ineffective, complex, ‘feel good’ gun proposals won’t solve mass killings but some possibilities do make sense. None perfectly balance rights or can ever be perfectly effective, but we are drowning in a sea of our childrens’ blood. We’ve waited far too long to act because of a complex swamp of legitimate constitutional concerns, unlimited campaign lobbying and corruption, political ineptness, but perhaps also in part because of a human impulse to sanitize reality. We can read about it, hear about it, watch an endless parade of news analysts, distraught parents, and impotent politicians, but it’s not the same. Seeing reality has an impact all its own, and maybe it’s time to see at the whole ugly reality of the situation.

Make a great day,

A Few Quick Statistics…

- The Uvalde killings are the deadliest shooting incident since 23 were killed at Sandy Hook in 2012 and the 27^th school shooting this year.
- According to an April report in the New England Journal of Medicine, between 2019 and 2020 gun deaths in kids and adolescents increased by 29.5 percent, surpassing car accidents as the leading cause of death in children and teenagers.
- Over 45,000 people die each year from gun deaths in the US.
- Mass shootings have tripled since the federal assault weapons ban ended in 2004.

A Few Thoughtful Memes…