When El Paso makes even Juárez look safe …

Luis Carrasco says we’re getting used to the unimaginable and that’s scary, since mass killings should not be the new normal in the U.S.

Carlos Arias doesn't feel safe in El Paso anymore.

The 46-year-old was shopping at the Cielo Vista Walmart alongside his wife and two young daughters on the morning of Aug. 3 when he heard what he thought were fireworks going off outside. They didn’t pay any mind until the popping sounds started getting closer, he said. That’s when people started screaming. Suddenly everyone started running. He and his wife took their 8-month-old baby out of her stroller, grabbed their 10-yearold and ran with the crowd to the back of the store.

“The whole time I kept thinking. ‘This is it, we are going to die,’” he said. “The shots sounded so close to us that I felt he was behind us and that at any moment one of us would get shot in the back.”

Walmart employees led customers into shipping containers, where Arias said they hid for what felt like a lifetime as his daughter cried, asking to leave. “The more she heard the sirens and the commotion, the more scared she got.”

When tears rolled down his own cheeks, he turned away so his daughter wouldn’t see him. “We tried to remain calm for her and to tell her she had to be patient and that everything was going to be OK.”

The Arias family was lucky. They survived a shooting that claimed 22 lives and injured 24 others. They were killed by a white supremacist from near Dallas who drove 10 hours just so he could shoot “Mexicans.”

Arias lives in Juárez and was one of hundreds of Mexican shoppers at the Walmart that day, part of a crowd of around 2,000 people, many doing back-toschool shopping.

He and his wife have relatives in El Paso, where they visit often. Now, they don’t even want to think about going back.

That’s heartbreaking. They are afraid of returning to El Paso, one of the safest cities in the United States, which averages less than two dozen murders a year. They’d rather stay home across the border in Juárez, which in 2018 reported 1,247 killings. That’s more than three murders a day.

But on another level their logic is unassailable: Nothing ever happened to them in Juárez, Arias said, not even during the city's most violent years of cartel street battles, when thousands of murders happened each year.

Arias told me while you can always be at the wrong place at the wrong time in Juárez, the violence is limited to clashes between criminals, while shootings in the U.S. are either random or, as in El Paso, target innocent bystanders.

As the number of homicides climbed in Juárez, its residents — including my family — became numb to the scenes of decapitated bodies being hanged from bridges, from the daily reports of shootings and images of streets covered in blood. Juarenses adapted, utilizing perhaps one of humanity's greatest survival skills. This was the only way to head out the door every morning. It was the only way to survive and lead a normal life. The situation was untenable, and yet they carried on.

I’m afraid this is happening to us here. That after each mass shooting, we become a little more numb. That eventually the forces that oppose any sort of gun control will hang on long enough so the majority who favor reasonable change will stop asking and learn to live with the new normal.

Look at a couple of stories in the Chronicle recently. Last week there was a shooting on the highway, which officials say may have been drug related. It casually mentioned that another driver pulled out a gun and started shooting at the first gunman. The front page of Tuesday’s business section had a feature on bulletproof backpacks — just in time for back-toschool! Sometimes it seems it’s now common that children hide under their desks during active-shooter drills.

There are rumblings that after the shootings in El Paso and Dayton, political leaders are finally willing to act, but I’ll believe it when I see it.

In the meantime, after each mass killing goes unanswered by our society, we get closer and closer to being like the boiling frog, who was comfortable in a pot of tepid water and cooked to death as the water temperature slowly rose.

We are in the pot right now, only instead of the heat rising it’s the number of bodies stacking up. Instead of being boiled alive, we’re just slowly getting used to what should never be normal. We adapt after each shooting and convince each other that everything’s fine. That as we head out the door each morning, or send our kids off to school, the sounds we hear approaching are only fireworks.