KEITH C. BURRIS TALKS WITH THE MAYORS OF DAYTON, TOLEDO ABOUT GUNS
Two mayors confront our reality
Iasked Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley how any mayor deals with what she is dealing with: Nine dead in a mass shooting. Twentysevenmore wounded.
She gave two answers: You keep doing what comes next. Thereis a lot to do.
But the second answer was: She’s not sure she has fully dealt with it, as a leader or a human being. There has been no time to process. This weekend, she begins attendingthe funerals of the victims.
The rest of America has moved on. We wait for the next outrage, the next crime against humanity, the next mass shooting, made possible by a bizarre and intolerable equation: untreated mental illness plus assault weapons. Instead of putting sick people in hospitals, we turn them loose and let them buy weaponsof war.
It’s quite incredible when you think about it. But we seem to have,as a culture and as a republic, chosen not to think about it. We turnaway and pretend mass shootings are an aberration. Except that they are not. They are the new norm, a regular occurrence, almosta contagion.
There are now Americans who have survived multiple mass shootings. There are families, like the shooter’s in Dayton, who have lost more than one child to them. We have now reached the point at whichtwo mass shootings occur in onenews cycle.
We have been absorbing it all. But maybe we cannot absorb it anymore.
Mayor Whaley says we are reaching a point of “critical mass,” in which more and more Americans, perhaps a majority, have some connection with some mass shooting — a cousin who was there;an ex-spouse who had left the scene just minutes before the shooting started; or, every parent’s nightmare,a child the bullet hit.
Another observer puts it this way: This stuff is getting closer and closerto all of us.
So, as the nation begins to turn back to other things and Dayton emerges from shock and begins to grieve, and to bury the dead,
might we hope that this time will be different?
Maybe. Republicans are sponsoring red flag laws that would ID mentally unstable people and disarm them on a temporary basis. And the president has come out for backgroundchecks in some form.
It’s not enough. The nation needs to feel outrage about something that actually matters, something that affects us all, something that unites us all. Congress needs to pass a law that makes a difference. A national system of background checks, with no holes and with teeth, would. An assault weaponsban would.
Mayor Whaley says: “This is Ohio. Many of us are gun owners. Manyof us hunt. But I told the president ... I don’t see why anyone needsa weapon of war — a weapon like the one that killed nine people in29 seconds in Dayton.”
The good guys with guns were present in Dayton. The police ended it all in less than 30 seconds. But look at the carnage that a crazy young man with such a weapon canunleash in the blink of an eye.
And each of these incidents seems to zoom in on the American psyche, bringing the madness closer and closer to us all. If the Second Amendment entitles any person to any weapon of war, why not gun shows for tanks and grenades?
“No right,” says Mayor Wade Kapszukiewicz of Toledo, a friend of Mayor Whaley’s for over 20 years, “is absolute, not even a constitutionalone .”
He sees evidence that assault weapons bans have made a difference in individual states. And in any case, he says, we don’t want more in circulation. “Because you cannot do everything does not mean you should not do something.”
During the first vigil in Dayton, as the politicians spoke, a spontaneous whispered chant began quietly and then built in volume: Do something,dosomething,dosomething.
We can actually do a lot, says MayorKapszukiewicz. “This country can do anything. Anything it sets its mind to. We resolved to put a man on the moon when we really did not know how to do it. And we got it done.” It was impossible, really, but we did it. From polio to the unsafe Corvair, from women and orphans living in poverty to the AIDS virus, Americans have attacked their most stubborn plagues.Why are we helpless in the faceof this one?
Whenwe focus and unite, we are invincible.
There is strategic leadership, says Mayor Kapszukiewicz, and there is purely human leadership — “I feel as you feel.” Somehow, he says, what Mayor Whaley calls “emotional leadership” is more real, like Rudy Guiliani after 9/11 or Winston Churchill during World War II. The true leader articulates not only sympathy but the feelings themselves. “Everything Nan has said and done since the shootings has been right because it has been real,” says MayorKapszukiewicz.
Doing something about mass shootings will depend on the strategic leadership of Republicans, like the president, and Sen. Rob Portman and Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio. All three were visibly moved at what they saw and heardin Dayton.
Mr. Portman, who has led the Senate on human trafficking and once took a huge political risk by endorsinggay marriage, is particularly key. We need his change of heartand leadership on guns.
Mr. DeWine who, said Mayor Whaley, has been in Dayton or called every day since the rampage, is also key. He once voted for an assault weapons ban. What he is now proposing for the Ohio legislature does not include such a ban, and one wouldnever pass. But he is a man at the end of his career who only wants to serve. He could be a national voice of conscience and change on thisissue—apropheticvoice.
Meanwhile, Mayor Whaley has families to comfort and a city to heal. “I can tell you this,” she says. “We will not forget.” Dayton cannotrest in peace.