American carnage
3 deaths by firearms at Lamar High School reveal the reality of our gun culture.
Seventeen-year-old Hollis Gasper wasn’t surprised that his school was put on lockdown Tuesday after shots fired from a four-door black Subaru killed a Lamar High School student within sight of his campus.
“At this school, I'm expecting stuff like this,” Gasper told Chronicle reporter Massarah Mikati on Tuesday afternoon. “It’s an easy target. Big school, lots of people.”
That’s a painfully low set of expectations for young people in this city and in this country. But it’s a reminder that deadly gun violence has become far too routine a part of life in America.
In just five days, Houston has seen three students at Lamar High School, one of the city’s best, shot to death. First two 15-yearold best friends died in an apparent murder-suicide and then, on Tuesday, another Lamar student was gunned down in what appears to have been a drive-by shooting.
All of us ought to be ashamed that this has become so routine.
It doesn’t have to be this way. We could stem the overwhelming tide of firearms that seems to saturate every corner of American life — if only we had to will to do so.
We could reinstate a nationwide ban on firearms built for war, limit the capacity of magazine clips, prohibit “bump stock” devices, require background checks for every gun purchase — including those at gun shows and between individual parties.
None of these things would unduly infringe on the constitutional right to buy and keep firearms. What they would do is push back at a pervasive culture that insists there must be no barrier to owning a machine designed to kill.
Yet every time our public leaders propose new restrictions aimed at keeping guns out of the hands of criminals or away from the mentally ill, those with vested interest in selling more and more guns respond with a perverse twist on a defiant Texas battle cry of independence: Come and take it.
Independence and smart gun laws are not mutually exclusive. No one is trying to ban hunting rifles or come door to door and seize your handguns. In between all and nothing, there is something. It’s called a solution.
It’s time we start looking for solutions. And that will mean listening to and looking for good ideas.
Even the expertise of emergency room doctors, who deal in stakes of life and death with each bullet wound and tend to the lifelong injuries borne by survivors, is dismissed by the gun lobby as little more than the opinion of outside interlopers.
“Someone should tell self-important anti-gun doctors to stay in their lane,” the NRA posted on its Twitter account last week.
The bluster goes quiet when tragedy strikes, whether at Thousand Oaks or River Oaks. The gun rights lobby ducks out just as law enforcement, EMS workers and grieving parents rush to the scene, and public officials call us all to mourning.
This silence represents a reckless disregard for personal responsibility. If lifesaving surgeons and concerned families have no ground to critique the culture and policy surrounding firearms, then who does? Why not the NRA and the politicians in its thrall?
When a terror attack occurs involving an extremist purporting to be Muslim, many in this country demand apologies and condemnations from Muslims who had nothing to do with the violence. After mass shootings — after any shooting — we should make similar demands of people who, even if figuratively, have blood on their hands. That includes people in the gun lobby, people who take money from the gun lobby, people who could, if only they would, make it just a little harder for bad people to get the weapons they need to kill innocents with such efficiency.
Firearm advocates who claim to stand for safe gun ownership must explain why things have gone so wrong. A weapons industry that profits from each sale must articulate what can be done to keep students safe. Congress members who block federal funds to study the gun violence epidemic should explain why they’re afraid of the truth.
The NRA must answer for the culture of death it has forced upon the nation.
The framers certainly didn’t intend for the Second Amendment to shield killers and kill innocents. Yet, this is the reality today. The NRA — and all who enable them — must explain why.