Another bloody weekend

Can’t stop the violence without talking about the guns

It was another brutal, bloody weekend in the United States. Twenty-one people were wounded or injured in three shootings on Friday night in Milwaukee. A shooting at a Los Angeles-area church on Sunday killed one person; another at a Houston-area flea market killed two. Seven people were injured in a string of related shootings In North Carolina.

And in Buffalo, 10 people were killed and two others wounded in a brazen attack on a grocery store. The suspect, an 18-yearold wearing body armor and armed with a high-powered rifle, was apparently motivated by white supremacist ideology and chose his target, a market with predominantly Black customers and employees, deliberately.

The nation’s attention justifiably has turned to Buffalo, offering comfort and compassion to that community in a time of mourning. Our outrage over an explicitly racist act — the suspect boasted about it in a lengthy manifesto and live-streamed the attack — is right; our desire to help those now suffering is good.

But when those feelings pass, and they will, the nation will experience the same cynicism and hopelessness that envelops us after every mass-casualty shooting. We are united in our thoughts and prayers, and deeply, destructively divided about how to stop the daily carnage on our streets, in our schools, in our grocery stores and seemingly everywhere else imaginable.

Certainly Hampton Roads knows the urgency of the crisis. This weekend saw shooting deaths in Chesapeake, Hampton, Norfolk, Portsmouth and Suffolk. The number of homicides in the region is up sharply so far this year, and that’s following a year in which Hampton Roads recorded an alarming 207 homicides.

The Buffalo attack confronts the nation with a number of difficult issues: the radicalization of young people on the internet; the perpetuation of the false belief that whites should fight back against being “replaced” by minorities in American society; right-wing media that delivers white supremacist ideas into American living rooms on a nightly basis; and the lack of access to reliable, affordable and readily available mental services for those who need them. All of these are important and require pointed, sometimes uncomfortable discussion followed by thoughtful, specific remedies.

But we cannot continue to ignore the easy availability of firearms and its effect on the murderous violence we see day-in and day-out in our communities and our nation.

It’s not only the weapons of war, such as that used in the Buffalo attack or so many others, that must be addressed. Handguns are often used in the acts of violence seen on streets in communities across this nation. Yes, we should make it harder to obtain firearms, such as the AR-15, and high-capacity magazines, which should be restricted. But we must also find ways to reduce the guns more commonly used to kill and maim thousands of Americans each year.

It’s often said that tragedies like the one in Buffalo don’t happen in other countries, but that’s not the case. They do happen in third-world nations with alarming frequency, though Americans would like to think this nation has evolved beyond such brutality. When mass-casualty violence happens in first-world nations, those countries have often taken swift, decisive action to reduce access to firearms.

Consider the 2019 mosque attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, in which a man motivated by polluted, white-supremacist ideology killed 51 worshipers in a mosque. The country quickly passed two sets of sweeping gun laws which, among other measures, banned the sale of military style semi-automatic firearms, strengthened regulations on sellers and created a national gun registry.

Obviously some of those measures would run afoul of the U.S. Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Second Amendment, but to do nothing at all about the weapons being used to slaughter thousands of Americans each year is to express contentment with the horror playing out daily on our streets.

Yes, there is a lot to talk about and to do after what happened this weekend, in Buffalo and elsewhere. But to exclude guns means we’re resigned to it happening over and over and over again.