America’s normalization of mass shootings since Sandy Hook

In the five years that have now passed by since the horrific mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, we have come to treat public mass shootings as normal — or at least with a known routine.

We wait to learn about the shooter while listening for the praise given first responders (rightfully) for their speedy and brave actions and to hospital personnel for their trauma care (again, rightfully) as, afterwards, ordinary citizens graciously open their hearts offering support, blood, and money (admirably) while community leaders tell the grieving families (decently) they are in our thoughts and prayers. Then we learn (sadly) about the precious lives lost. That’s what we do.

As I listened to the end-to-end news coverage of the shooting in Las Vegas — now the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history — I remembered hearing it all before. And a month later, we heard it all again after the mass shooting of a church congregation worshipping on Sunday in Sutherland Springs, Texas — now the deadliest mass shooting in Texas.

The details are different in each shooting, but the basic story told the same: The community visited upon by the gun violence is resilient; the community response — by first responders, physicians, nurses, and ordinary citizens — represents the best in America. While such is commendable, this response to mass shootings has also now become normal and what we expect to hear.

We now wait to hear such refrains repeated by local government officials and national congressional representatives as they fulfill their duties to the community taking turns stepping up to the podium at news conferences where updated information is provided on the shooting and shooter.

And the response of our body politic away from that podium is also exactly what we have come to expect: No enactment of more comprehensive gun-control measure will happen, for which the National Rifle Association will be partly blamed.

Gun-safety advocates cite polls showing gun owners favor stricter gun laws. Yet these expressed opinions by gun owners have not alone altered the political divide existing on the broader question of gun rights versus gun control. Among Republicans, 79 percent believe protecting gun rights more important than gun control compared to 20 percent Democrats and 47 percent Independents, according to a Pew survey in April 2017.

In his essay in The Washington Post, “The NRA is pushing policies that gun owners like me don’t want,” Matt Valentine at the University of Texas discusses small gun clubs that have emerged recently, some seemingly more favorable toward gun-safety legislation. He suggests that a “useful role for a socially responsible gun club could be to work with government to help keep guns out of the wrong hands” and, among other things, “write legislation to restrict civilian access to battlefield weapons.”

Maybe a change in America’s gun culture does require the creation of a new rival national gun organization favoring comprehensive gun-safety measures competing with the NRA. How about calling this new organization the National Firearm Society of America, NFS, with its primary mission of promoting national firearm safety, including comprehensive gunsafety laws? If opinion polls are correct, many gun owners would likely join.

Gun owners favoring more gun-control measures should root for (and join) such a new national gun organization that would counter the positions of the National Rifle Association. Otherwise, there will be the next mass shooting with likely only the sad repetition of what we heard before but in a different town. And gun control will likely remain in a dead state, as will definitely the victims of the next shooting we remember in their life stories told.

Frederic Decker, a sociologist earning his PhD from Florida State University, is the author of “Second Amendment: An American tragedy.”