America’s tragedy
Active-shooter events at schools since Sandy Hook, Dec. 14, 2012
‘We can’t tolerate this anymore,’ Barack Obama said in 2012, in the wake of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School. ‘These tragedies must end.’ Yet nearly 10 years later, the violence continues. Here’s how school shootings became part of American life
Three local high school girls brought flowers to leave near Robb Elementary School on Wednesday afternoon, in memory of the 19 young children and two teachers who were killed there Tuesday.
It was a small gesture, but they felt the need to do something, they told the journalists who swarmed them: this is their neighbourhood, these were children of their family and friends.
“Uvalde is small. Everyone is either related or friends with each other,” one girl said. It made it harder to comprehend the shock of the loss. “It doesn’t feel like reality. It’s like a movie.”
A horror movie, maybe. The worst horror movie, now on its umpteenth sequel. Everyone you talk to here says that although they’d seen these mass-shooting scenes in other places on the news, they cannot believe it happened in this tiny, charming — and yes, very friendly — town about an hour’s drive from the Mexican border.
“You never think it would happen here,” said Frank Salazer, a former Robb Elementary student who was scheduled to graduate from the same high school the alleged shooter attended this week, until classes were suspended indefinitely as a result of this shooting. “Everybody gets along with everybody.”
This scene — an angry young man with high-powered guns walks into a school or a church or a shopping centre and kills a bunch of innocent strangers — has been revisited countless times in the U.S. over the past two decades, and the relative frequency does nothing to dull the emotional punch. I was in Buffalo, N.Y., just last week covering a massacre in a supermarket.
But there is something particularly gutting about the slaughter of children — in this case children younger than 10. Nineteen kids died in their classroom, alongside two teachers, and at least 17 people were wounded, according to police.
“These are real people, real loss. They aren’t just numbers, though you hear about so many. They all have families. They had lives,” said Amber Ybarra, who came to the scene where Eva Morales, a member of her extended family, was one of the teachers killed.
“I heard she was killed trying to protect the children. She was a hero,” Ybarra said. “I just want people to know who she was.”
Adolfo Hernandez attended Robb Elementary when he was a boy, and his 10-year-old nephew is a student there who witnessed the shooting and survived. “This whole community is devastated. This doesn’t happen here,” Hernandez said, his own son by his side. “If there’s a murder here every two years, that’s a lot. It just breaks my heart.”
As has become tradition in these scenes, the international media descended on the traumatized community, filling the small neighbourhood streets with satellite trucks and remote broadcast tents, setting up on front lawns dotted with swing sets and crosses, and quickly crowding around local residents.
In a scene repeated a few times through the afternoon, a mother and child showed up to bring flowers in memory of a classmate and were surrounded by cameras that followed them as they waded through the maze of densely parked cars, electrical cables and media tables to get to the line of police tape, where they were able to awkwardly hand the flowers off to a police officer to place on a growing makeshift memorial in front of the school.
I was part of that media frenzy and, while trying my best to be gentle and respectful, I feel conflicted about being there. This is how the world learns the truth about what happened, and who it happened to — maybe, we all hope, this is a step in understanding the full gravity of it, and towards having it happen less often. But it does seem like maybe a further traumatization of an already shattered community.
And at a certain point, the prospect of it happening less often starts to seem remote.
“Evil swept across Uvalde yesterday,” Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott said at a news conference Wednesday. Most people here would agree with him, on that description, at least. But it was evil carrying what may have been legally purchased weapons, the same kind so often used in these massacres (the alleged shooter, who was shot and killed by police at the scene, is reported to have purchased two semiautomatic rifles legally shortly after his 18th birthday).
Abbott — a champion of gun ownership who is scheduled to appear at the National Rifle Association’s convention just up the road in Houston this week — didn’t mention guns much. He was attributing the killings to “mental health,” when he was interrupted by Beto O’Rourke, his Democratic challenger in this year’s election.
“You’re doing nothing,” O’Rourke said. “This was totally predictable.” O’Rourke was quickly removed from the room.
But his message had some support in Uvalde. “I just really want the government to take more control and more action,” a person who lives near the school said when asked about gun control by a reporter. “A lot of this could be prevented.”
President Joe Biden sounded a similar note in his response to the shooting on Tuesday night. “As a nation, we have to ask: When in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby? When in God’s name will we do what we all know in our gut needs to be done?”
The widely expected answer to his plaintive question added an even sadder undertone to the grieving, here in Uvalde and across the United States. The country has lived through this horror before, and each time the response is to cry a lot and then do nothing. As the old saying goes, we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas.
Ten years ago, after the Sandy Hook massacre that took 26 lives, it seemed like a threshold might have been crossed that would finally spur action. The watered-down legislation that resulted — mandating background checks for gun purchases — didn’t even make it to a vote in the Senate. Since then, authorities have done nothing to respond to mass shootings at schools in Parkland, Fla., and Santa Fe, Texas.
After the second-deadliest school shooting on record, here in Uvalde, it seems unlikely they’ll do anything now.
Things appear to be moving in the opposite direction, with more states moving to legalize the open carrying of firearms. Just days ago, a federal court actually struck down a California law that would ban gun sales to those under 21. The NRA announced Wednesday that its meeting this week in Texas, where Abbott, Sen. Ted Cruz and former president Donald Trump are scheduled to speak, would go ahead as planned.
Many politicians and members of the public, shocked anew by the unthinkable happening yet again, have resolved once more to take action. But like the girl said, it doesn’t seem like reality. It seems like a movie. A particularly nightmarish horror movie. Americans have already seen it too many times before, and know how it ends. And also how it never really ends.