Let gun violence be empowering
Take inspiration from our nation’s many shooting victims and relentlessly advocate for change.
It might be comforting to think that the three young people shot this week in apparent misunderstandings were simply in the wrong places at the wrong time.
If only Ralph Yarl, a 16-year-old from Kansas City, had double-checked the address to pick up his siblings, he would not have gotten shot in the head by a homeowner.
If 20-year-old Kaylin Gillis and her friends had thought twice before mistakenly driving up the wrong driveway in upstate New York, she would not have been shot and killed.
And if Heather Roth had not accidently opened the wrong car door in an H-E-B parking, she and Payton Washington, two Woodlands Elite cheerleaders from Round Rock, would simply have gone on to compete in the Cheerleading Worlds 2023.
The problem is: In a nation awash with guns and hair-trigger fear, a “right place and right time” no longer exists.
These weren’t even mass shootings of a deranged gunman armed with an AR-15 and a bloody grudge. They don’t appear to be premeditated. What the shooters intended, perhaps, was to protect themselves from perceived dangers. Why they shot first, and presumably asked questions later, is still another question.
What’s not a question? What’s not in dispute? If each shooter hadn’t had a gun at his fingertip, no innocent lives would have been lost or endangered. A teenager and a young woman would have gotten directions to the right houses. In the H-E-B parking lot, the cheerleaders might have shared a laugh with the startled occupant of the other vehicle.
No, this isn’t an editorial about banning guns.
What we wish we could ban, banish, defeat, erase and cure is an absolutist gun culture that prevails in America, and only America, that insists more guns are the answer.
More guns will keep us safe, we’re told. Even if the people wielding them have no training. Or they’re enraged in a traffic dispute. Or they’re mentally unstable. Or they’re so frightened they can’t think straight and their perceptions are skewed by surging hormones.
You’ve seen the bumper sticker. Guns don’t kill people. People do. It’s true. What guns do, however, is leave no room for innocuous mistakes. Gunshots are uncompromisingly final, even for those lucky enough to survive. As Ralph Yarl’s aunt, Faith Spoonmore, told CNN: “The way in which he’s gonna walk through this world, it’s gonna be totally different because of what happened.”
What Spoonmore likely realizes is that she won’t walk through the world the same way again either. That goes for nearly every family member, friend, classmate and co-worker of a victim.
If there’s any hope for this twisted reality we live in where gun violence has become numbingly routine, it’s that those affected by these sudden tragic losses become so tenacious in their advocacy that they shake lawmakers out of their stupor. We admit that this is an unsettling kind of hope.
Day by day, more survivors and family members fill the halls of the state Capitol, as those from Uvalde did Tuesday evening. They were made to wait 13 hours to advocate for sensible gun regulations in the face of unbending political inertia. How many family members of the victims of the Robb Elementary School mass shooting last year thought they would be spending a random Tuesday in April begging and pleading with lawmakers to make it just a tiny bit harder for an 18-year-old to buy a semi-automatic rifle? The bill in question stands virtually no chance of becoming law, and yet, in the words of Kimberly Mata-Rubio, whose 10year-old daughter, Lexi, was killed in the shooting: “Our resolve has never been stronger.”
As hard as it is to imagine right now, one day a critical mass of people demanding reform will push Congress and state houses into taking action. Last year, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn negotiated a bipartisan bill that cracked open the door with the smallest of reforms. That door, one day, will be thrown open by survivors who will drown out an unscrupulous gun lobby that wants every man, woman and child to have a pistol on their hip, just in case.
If we succumb to fear, whether that means arming ourselves to the teeth or simply resigning ourselves to the relentless “Breaking News” flashing the latest mass shooting numbers across our cable news screens, we become unwitting contributors to a vicious cycle of violence. Instead, let fear be empowering. We must continue to protest, to argue, over and over again, with those standing in the way of basic respect for human life until we break through.