Let’s wake up from our national nightmare
Ever feel like you’re stuck in a nightmare from which you can’t wake up?
Twenty-eight dead, most of them little children, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut less than six years ago. Fifty people deadat anightclub in Orlando, Florida, some20monthsago. Fifty-nine dead on the Las Vegas Strip four-and-a-half months ago. Twenty-seven dead at a Baptist church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, a bit over three months ago.
And on Wednesday, 17 dead — three adult staff members and 14 students ranging in age from 14 to 18 — at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The attack took just six minutes.
Even with gun violence on the decline in the United States, our nation has become a world leader in mass shootings. And the pattern has become agonizingly familiar: horror, grief, candlelight vigils, stories about the victims, stories about missed warning signs from the perpetrator, angry debates about gun laws that go nowhere — and then a wait for the next bloodbath.
The perpetrators are occasionally would-be terrorists or true anomalies, like the well-to-do 64-year-old businessman who carried out the mass shooting in Las Vegas. But usually these events follow a dismal pattern: an angry, unstable young man — known by family and friends to be difficult and volatile, but not necessarily considered insane or under treatment — has no trouble getting his hands on high-powered weapons.
The19-year-old arrested in the Parkland shootings, Nikolas Cruz, seems to have raised every red flag he could reach. Hewas expelled from the school. He evidently posted a comment on YouTube — under his own name — about wanting to be a “professional school shooter.” Then, on Jan. 5, the FBI’s tipline was called by someone saying that Cruz owned guns, wanted to kill people, was behaving erratically and had made disturbing social media posts.
Somehow, this information never reached FBI agents. The agency is currently investigating why.
Since government agencies, even at their best, will never be perfect, it’s uptothe community — parents, students, teachers, local law enforcement — to keep an eye out for the danger signs. As county schools Superintendent George Arlotto says elsewhere on this page, in a column reviewing his system’s security measures, “If you see or hear something, say something.”
Mental health is a factor in this problem, but hardly the most obvious factor. Actually, very few of the mentally ill are violent or a danger to anyone, except perhaps themselves.
For whatever reason, many Americans — or at least their lawmakers — won’t come to grips with the idea that something is out of kilter when a young man like Cruz can easily and legally purchase a modified version of a military weapon designed to kill as many of the enemy as quickly as possible.
As we wrote after the Las Vegas massacre, simply weaving these atrocities into ournational fabric — shrugging andrationalizing that mostlikely next time it won’t beourchurch, school or kids — will do worse damage to the nation than even the loss of life. Do we really want to be that sort of country?