Shots fired (again)

Not the preferred normal

FOR THE last several months, folks have planned how to get back to normal. It seems like we’ve been dreaming of that day since the pandemic began. Normal sounds so nice—a return to movies, lunch with friends, live concerts, open theaters, autumn fairs, and no masks or social distancing.

But the news this month isn’t the normal we were looking for. Two mass shootings in two weeks feels like pre-2020 normal, and the fact that it’s even considered a type of normal is awful for this country. Eight people died in an Atlanta shooting last week, and on Monday, 10 died in a Boulder, Colo., shooting.

That’s 18 mothers, fathers, daughters, and sons who won’t be around the dinner table tomorrow, this Thanksgiving, or ever again. And it wasn’t something invisible like a virus that killed them. There’s no arguing about the cause of death or whether certain hygiene practices might have prevented it. There’s no vaccine for what murdered them.

Over the last year, Americans have spent so much time worrying about covid-19 that the threat of mass shootings sort of fell off the radar for a lot of us. And now that infection rates are on the decline, these two crimes have reminded everyone of a disease America was fighting for years before covid-19 came around.

Atlanta and Boulder may be the sites of the most recent mass shootings, but Arkansas has had its share of bloodshed as well. Some of us are old enough to remember December 1987, when Ronald Gene Simmons killed 16 friends and family members in Dover and Russellville. On March 24, 1998, an 11-year-old and a 13-year-old shot and killed four students and a teacher at Westside Middle School in Craighead County. Just a few years ago on July 1, 2017, 28 people were injured when shooting broke out at a nightclub in Little Rock.

And that’s just Arkansas.

What follows mass shootings is an exhausting conversation across social media, cable news and dinner tables. And how that conversation goes is sometimes determined by who pulled the trigger.

In Atlanta, a white man was arrested for the shooting. And because six of the victims were Asian women, America is having a conversation about the increasing number of hate crimes against Asian Americans.

But it wasn’t long before the usual arguments broke out on Twitter over gun control, hate crimes, and more. Because the pain of that mass shooting was so real for Asian Americans, passions flared. And as was expected, tempers spiked among folks who are tired of hearing about race. Productivity among these arguments was not to be found. People are arguing over how mental illness was brought up in conversations about the Atlanta shooting suspect. They argue about race, about terrorism, about gun control. And among all of that digital noise are sprinklings of good points.

But our original point stands. How conversations that take place after mass shootings go is largely determined by the identity of the shooter, skin color, ethnicity, religion, and politics. It shouldn’t be that way.

APASTOR we know often paints these kinds of conversations as fighting for camps. Everyone holds their breath until the shooter’s identity is released. Most folks hope the shooter isn’t part of their camp. That way, they can point fingers and yell at the other camps. What camp the shooter belongs to becomes more important than the people he killed. And as soon as a name and a photograph drop, it’s off to the races.

The Second Amendment crowd on social media mounts the usual defenses to stifle any conversations on gun control. And the other side screams about banning “assault weapons” again.

You might think with the break from frequent mass shootings during the pandemic that we’d have rebuilt some tolerance for these tiresome arguments, but somehow we’re just as exhausted as we were before 2020 ever began.

There are important conversations to be had regarding expanding access to mental health care, convincing more legislators to support red flag laws, and expanding background checks for firearm sales.

But if everyone is busy screaming about identity politics because the shooter is from this camp or that camp, none of that is going to happen.

This is a song and dance we’ve seen too many times. We don’t have a solution to preventing mass shootings. What we know for certain is that when everybody is yelling, nobody has the answers.