Another massacre of kids
Almost a decade after the deaths of 20 children and six adults in Sandy Hook Elementary School, it’s clear that it will take a whole lot more dead children before enough politicians acknowledge that America’s fetishization of guns is the altar upon which we’re sacrificing thousands of our fellow citizens every year.
This metaphor — meant to conjure up a Lovecraftian ceremony of devotion — owes a debt to Garry Wills’ essay “Our Moloch,” which was published in the New York Review of Books just days after the December 2012 massacre in Newtown, Conn. In this relatively brief but absolutely devastating piece, the writer compares this nation’s obeisance to the ancient world’s adoration of pagan gods with burnt offerings, including children.
“The gun is not a mere tool, a bit of technology, a political issue, a point of debate. It is an object of reverence,” Wills wrote. “Devotion to it precludes interruption with the sacrifices it entails.”
The rituals of sacrifice have been enacted in the often awkward Q&As between reporters and Republican politicians in the days since the Uvalde murders. Just as the Catholic sacrament of penance ends with absolution for sins, these exchanges almost always conclude with the assertion that, when it comes to the unfettered right to easily acquire high-powered weapons, nothing needs to change.
So again: It’s going to take a lot more dead kids to change this mindset — and even that might not do it. Because if you’ve responded to Sandy Hook and every other school shooting with nothing more than thoughts ’n’ prayers, is it really possible to change course without tacitly admitting that your prior stance was rather inadequate? I looked at the five-foottall pile of bodies and was not moved to action, but a 10-foottall pile? Well, that’s a different matter.
For these politicians, there is always another cause to focus on: violent video games (usually violent in the sense that they fetishize guns), the hip-hop subgenre known as gangsta rap (ditto), poor parenting (such as buying your troubled offspring a powerful handgun as in a recent Michigan shooting that left four dead), inadequate mental health resources (as in Texas, where Gov. Greg Abbott recently slashed more than $210 million from the agency that provides those services), the lack of an armed resource officer in the school (except in cases where there’s an armed resource officer in the school and they hide out, as in Florida’s 2018 Parkland massacre in which 17 were killed), world without end, amen.
The truth, of course, is that the only meaningful difference between this nation’s repeat massacres and the relative scar
city of these bloodbaths in other industrialized nations — all of which have violent video games, problematic pop culture, lousy parents and imperfect social safety nets — is America’s truly stunning stock of readily accessible firearms. Everyone knows this, but we are still unable to do anything about it. And the reason for that is that the veneration of the gun has become more akin to a religion.
In “Our Moloch,” Wills called the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre “the pope of this religion” — but that was before revelations about LaPierre’s boundless greed pushed the organization to a comical attempt to declare bankruptcy in order to shake off legal action brought by the New York attorney general’s office. The NRA today is a reduced force, but not a spent one, as displayed in the willingness of politicians like former President Donald Trump and U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz to appear before the faithful this weekend at the group’s annual meeting in Houston.
If you’re looking for a glimmer of hope in the aftermath of the back-to-back carnage in Buffalo and Uvalde, consider the cases of Larry Gatlin and Lee Greenwood, two country music artists who in the days leading up to the NRA gathering announced they would not be performing there.
In a statement, Gatlin pushed for expanded background checks for gun purchases, and said he was praying “that the NRA will rethink some of its outdated and ill-thought-out positions regarding firearms in AMERICA.” (Gatlin also said he thought training teachers in firearms and arming them for classroom combat might have prevented the killing in Uvalde.)
Greenwood, who has appeared alongside Trump at campaign rallies and whose obituary will begin by noting that he recorded “God Bless the USA,” announced his decision to pull out with a vaguely worded statement that said the decision had been made “out of respect for those mourning the loss of those innocent children and teachers in Uvalde,” without mentioning firearms.
But in a Friday morning appearance on “Fox & Friends,” Greenwood went considerably further. “For me to go and play at the NRA just days after the shooting would be an endorsement, and people would then deem that as, ‘I like this weapon,’” he said. “Obviously, that weapon killed kids. I just couldn’t go.”
It is, of course, heresy against our Moloch to imply any kind of causal link between the NRA,
the weapons it venerates and mass killings. With Brian Kilmeade’s swift assistance, Greenwood immediately pivoted to a less controversial subject: Memorial Day.