The U.S. is finally starting to own up to its gun-crazy nature

“This is us.” “This is who we are.”

As another hideous school shooting unfolded this week, this time in Parkland, Fla., where 17 were killed, the above sentiments appeared on newspaper front pages, news networks and social media. They were almost a welcome relief. This growing acceptance of self, of the very nature of gun-crazy America, is more honest and therefore more helpful than the usual “thoughts and prayers” (or TAP as it sometimes gets shortened to in a bleak acronym) uttered in sepulchral tones by politicians.

Clearly America is TAPPED out these days. Thoughts and prayers have been obscenely inadequate for some time.

So yes, it’s a form of progress in the national conversation and in the American psyche to own the shame of being the only country in the world where school shootings take place so frequently — this was the 18th this year and we’re not even through February — that in order to break through the public consciousness, they have to be really bad.

Think about it. One of the skill sets a child going to school in America absolutely must have is clear knowledge of how to survive a mass shooting. Not to mention how to live-text or tweet it.

Consider those shaky texts and videos: the sharp pop of gunfire, the sight of a sneaker, the wavering point of view from a floor crouch captured in gut-wrenching real time. It’s heartbreaking war correspondence from the youngest and

One of the skill sets a child going to school in America must have is knowing how to survive a mass shooting

most tender accidental journalists ever.

For this is a war. The fiercely protected ability to legally own a semi-automatic rifle, one of the most popular guns in America, whether you’re mentally troubled, on a terrorist watch list or just a normal God-fearing citizen, is a war against sanity, safety and humanity.

Of course, students in Canada and many other countries participate in lockdown drills, and even occasionally confront violence in their schools.

But for American students from kindergarten through university, being shot and killed while in class by a shooter with a legally purchased semi-automatic weapon is a clear and present danger.

Not only have such shootings not been curtailed in any meaningful way, even since that nadir in 2012 when 20 little children between 6 and 7 were wiped out in the Sandy Hook elementary school killings. They’ve increased. There have been by most counts, 300 since then U.S. President Barack Obama cried in sorrow and frustration on live television.

Back then Obama was responding as the moral leader of a nation but also as a father, to the immoral lack of political will to tighten gun laws. The AR-15, which the reportedly mentally troubled and disaffected accused young man, a former student of the high school, allegedly used this week is “a ridiculous gun to have in our society” national security analyst Juliette Kayyem said on CNN. She also said drily.

“We are exceptional in very bad ways when it comes to our children dying.”

Another commentator used the word “complacent” to describe American society when it comes to school shootings. No, the word you’re looking for is complicit.

An entire political system looks the other way as the formidable gun lobby, the National Rifle Association, donates millions to mainly Republican lawmakers, goes radio silent when there’s a mass shooting involving kids, and then pops back up again to fight even the notion that someone, however compromised or troubled, should not be able to own a high-powered gun normally used in a war zone.

Ban those AR-15s. Ban them outright.

The high school, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, which saw such terror and carnage this week, was named, according to the Palm Beach Post, after the late Marjory Stoneman Douglas, a “famous Floridian” and “author, feminist and ardent environmentalist” who fought to protect the Everglades.

The community where this happened is tree-lined and park-like, affluent and lovely. It was proclaimed only last year “the safest city in Florida,” according to its citation, which counted in 2017 “seven reported violent crimes.” Now her good name and the name of Parkland are notorious, synonymous with evil and shooting and death.

“I’m going to watch them sheep fall,” the accused shooter Nikolas Cruz apparently had declared openly on social media. “I want to shoot people with my AR-15.”

Like so many people I know, I usually avail myself of the luxury of acknowledging another school shooting but then turning away from the aftermath, the images, the responses. It is all so numbingly repetitive. And nothing changes.

This time, worried about family friends who had recently moved to South Florida and enrolled two of their kids, one a teenager, in schools there, I watched obsessively, tried to reach them and even strained to catch a glimpse of them in the coverage.

It turns out their new community is more than an hour’s drive north of Parkland. They were safe.

They are European, and when they told me last year they were going to spend some time in Florida for business reasons, my very first thought was for the safety of their kids. But how do you say, “Gee, I hope there’s no school shooting while you’re there” as you sit listening to what a teenager excitedly hopes she will get out of the experience?

You don’t. You just hope they’re lucky.

You hope too that after America has admitted “This is us” enough times, that it moves on to another change-inducing question: “Is this who we want to be?”

The answer to that can’t possibly be forever yes. Judith Timson writes weekly about cultural, social and political issues. You can reach her at judith.timson@sympatico.ca and follow her on Twitter @judithtimson