San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Monument to mass shooting victims would honor them, shame us
Our nation needs a living memorial to mass shooting victims.
A monument to honor each person we have lost, growing with the name of each new victim. A monument to shock our conscience about our failure to reduce and end gun violence. A place for Americans to make a pilgrimage to honor the dead and feel the magnitude of our national sorrow.
A place to stand in silence and feel the weight of the 21 deaths on May 24, and the 11 deaths on Jan. 21, and the seven deaths on Jan. 23. A place to feel the lasting consequences of our inaction, to run our fingers over each name.
We honor our war dead. We should honor those murdered with weapons of war.
It has been about a week since the mass shootings in Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay in California, and eight months since Uvalde, and 10 years since Newtown, Conn. And all the passage of time has taught me is that we respond to gun violence in so many wrong and repetitive ways.
We respond to the immediate tragedy — the motives of shooters, the birth of impromptu shrines, small details of the lives of the victims — but our attention then drifts away from the repercussions of calamity. We move on even as life stands still for grieving loved ones. It has been eight months since the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School — a phrasing that creates distance from that calamity. But in so many ways, we are only at the beginning of a trauma that will span generations.
As Gloria Cazares, whose daughter Jackie was murdered at Robb Elementary, told me in December: “I am scared the world’s going to start forgetting. Just because of the fact I remember Sandy Hook. I remember Santa Fe. I remember the past shootings. I grieved. I grieved with the parents. But then you move on. You move on. And once it happens to you, there’s no moving on.”
A national memorial in Washington, D.C., to honor mass shooting victims, growing to reflect each new calamity, would bridge this divide. It would pull the American public
back to each shooting while breathing life into our memories of the dead. Like the trauma of gun violence, it would also span generations. Unlike the impromptu shrines that have become all-too familiar in community after community, it would be permanent.
We have websites like the Gun Violence Archive, which tracks all forms of shootings and, in a sense, memorializes the issue. And we have countless local monuments to honor victims in their respective communities. But a permanent and living national memorial — in virtual and physical
forms — would reflect our national sorrow while also beginning a conversation at a place where most Americans agree. And that place is an end to gun violence.
Some have argued that to break the gridlock in our dialogue about gun violence — the rote debates over gun rights and gun reforms, the familiar discussion about the presence of “well regulated” in the Second Amendment, the recitation of firearm mortality rates and gun specs, the capitulation to gun violence implied in arming teachers — we should show graphic images of gun violence
to shock the nation into action.
I have never felt comfortable with this idea partly because that should be a decision for loved ones to make, not pundits or outsiders to urge, and partly because it should not require the gore of slaughter to awaken our conscience. Simply knowing a child was identified by her green Converse shoes, or a person was murdered while dancing to celebrate the Lunar New Year, or slain while working at a mushroom farm, or attending a movie, or worshiping God, or dancing at a nightclub should be more than enough.
But I also don’t see how such a display would stretch our attention from the immediate aftermath to the everlasting grief, much less truly honor the lives of the victims and the anguish of their families. I don’t see how it would shift our intractable national conversation. And what I am truly yearning for is a new conversation about gun violence. One that is enduring, not simply rising and falling with each mass shooting; one that frames all forms of gun violence as a public health crisis; one that gives full focus to the victims and the reverberations of their stolen lives. One that brings people in rather than pushes them away.
As Katelyn Jetelina, author of the popular “Your Local Epidemiologist” newsletter and an expert on violence prevention, told our Editorial Board in the immediate aftermath of the Uvalde shooting: “While we can leverage mass shootings as a way to start educating people, we also need to not just wait for mass shootings but also educate in between them as well, to start moving this (change) much quicker.”
And so I return to the need for a national memorial to honor victims of gun violence — as well as the need for a robust national public health campaign to help shift our conversation.
To be clear, a national memorial is not in replacement for overdue and much-needed gun laws. While our intractable politics around gun violence is depressing, that many Americans support universal background checks, red flag laws, safe storage requirements, and raising the purchase age of firearms while banning AR-15 style rifles offers a measure of hope.
In honoring the dead, a national memorial would also reflect the full scope of our failure to value the living.