Showcasing suffering
Asignificant aspect of the March For Our Lives event organized in response to the Parkland, Fla., school shooting is that it was sparked by survivors.
Those who survive violent crime often get overshadowed by fatal incident victims; it’s easy to falsely equate survival with well-being in such situations. We fail to consider that in much the same way a bullet rips through muscle and shatters bone, terrifying visions of death and bodily trauma and suffering tear into a person’s mind.
Surviving the incident of a shooting or stabbing or beating doesn’t mean one isn’t harmed, even if there is no physical injury inflicted. It can result in a horrific life sentence of haunting and tormenting memories. The sense of violation, the manic fear, the guilt of survival—all and unimaginably more is never fully forgotten.
Across the vast expanse of individual victims in America, that collective cost is astronomical.
Mass shooting attacks on schools are exceedingly rare events; thus their newsworthiness. But heinous violence in regular society is an everyday affair.
Its victims dwarf those from schools by exponential measure. But because the headlines are localized and scattered across states and communities, there’s never enough critical mass to achieve unified public outrage.
Until, possibly, now.
The March For Our Lives showcased gun violence, which is but one offshoot of the overall problem of violent crime, just as school shootings are but one infinitesimal subset of firearm assaults.
Still, hundreds of thousands of voices—young and old—united on an issue, if not the solutions, can make a difference for good.
A march is not a movement, however. Strolling on a Saturday is easy; accomplishing meaningful grist from the grind of government policymaking is another matter altogether.
Recall the “million-something” marches over the years (Million Mom/Dad/Family/Worker/etc.); the sum figure evaporated quicker than summer rain on hot asphalt.
Maybe this will be different, not because it will prevent the unpreventable (maniacs, often suicidal, who decide to shoot up something), but because it can broaden the discussion and put the problem of violence, period, front and center in the national viewfinder.
As a citizenry we’ve become numb to violent crime statistics, but survivors who witness it can never un-see, un-feel or un-experience the event.
Actress Mary Hollis Inboden was a student at Westside on March 24, 1998, and like other youngsters there that day, she saw friends die and others wounded. In a poignant and eloquent essay about the 20th anniversary of that shooting, she spoke for countless others in relating her own struggles with coping as a guncrime survivor.
Violent crime is a nagging national problem, despite half-truthers’ claims that it has dropped.
Compared to what? The highest national crime rates ever from the 1990s? Woo hoo and hurrah! What joy there is in being slightly better than the worst-case scenario.
Unfortunately, in Arkansas we can’t even say that. FBI statistics show that the number of rapes and aggravated assaults in 2016 set all-time records.
The more violence in general in a society, the more manifestations it will have, such as school shootings.
Easy access to guns has been a constant. There were far more guns on school campuses—commonly displayed in young hunters’ truck racks—40 or 50 years ago. The gunviolence variable isn’t guns, it’s the violence.
With public scrutiny high on violent offenders at this potential tipping point, we need a spirit of cooperation.
To conservatives: Sure, regulate assault rifles with reasonable rules; heck, make an owner be 25, not just 21. Those are weapons with advanced features that warrant maturity, and responsible owners understand that.
To liberals: Stop leaving the cruel and cowardly criminal out of the problem. We wouldn’t be having a gun control argument at all if lawless, violent miscreants weren’t constantly abusing guns against innocent citizens.
We can all learn from a successful two-prong tactic from the past that delivered real gun crime accountability and results.
Back in the gangster-plagued early 1930s, Congress outlawed machine guns unless federally licensed.
Then, like now, criminals didn’t bother about the license. So to combat the “only outlaws will have machine guns” problem, the government also did something else: It named gun-wielding gangsters as “public enemies” to be captured dead or alive, and dramatically increased capital punishment.
After a record 198 executions in 1935, the murder rate plummeted.
During that decade nearly 1,700 murderers were executed (plus a large number of gangsters gunned down by G-men), none of whom ever committed another gun crime. Proportional to today’s population, that would mean executing more than 4,200 violent criminals over the next 10 years (current rate is about 25 annually).
Permanently removing violent people reduced violent crime then, and would do so now.
The March for Our Lives will perish on the partisan vine if it merely morphs into another misguided gun control gambit.
But if it will persist in showcasing the damage wrought to victims and survivors by gun crime, those innumerable stories can be shared to shape a real movement—one that finally demands, and gets, a return to the very low violent crime rates of the pre-1970s.