School shootings cannot be the price of ‘freedom’
WASHINGTON – Tate Myre, 16, was a star athlete who had been good enough to play on Oxford High’s varsity football team as a freshman. Madisyn Baldwin, 17, was a senior who loved art and literature and already had been accepted by several colleges. Hana St. Juliana, 14, was a budding basketball player who was just starting her high school career. Justin Shilling, 17, was a senior who captained the bowling team and worked at a popular local Lebanese restaurant called Anita’s Kitchen.
They are all dead, killed this week in the latest of the school shootings our society accepts as routine. To four families suffering unimaginable grief, to the hundreds of other students who are traumatized for life, to a community that will never be the same, we say: Tough.
We say: Unlucky you.
We say: Too bad about your loss, but that’s the price of freedom.
I wonder if the people of Oxford, Mich., feel they have more freedom today than they did before Tuesday, when a 15-year-old sophomore allegedly brought a 9mm SIG Sauer pistol to the Oxford High School campus and fired more than 30 rounds at students and teachers – killing Myre, Baldwin, St. Juliana and Shilling, and wounding seven others.
Where have we heard this before? According to reports, the alleged killer, Ethan Crumbley, once was a happy kid who seemed to have undergone a change. He was troubled. Seemed alienated. Didn’t quite fit in. Kept to himself. Dressed all in black.
There are kids like that in high schools around the world. But only in the United States do we enable them to express their angst by bringing guns to school and opening fire on the students, teachers and administrators. Only here do we make it easier for youths to get an assault rifle than to work up the courage to ask a classmate out on a date.
“If the incident yesterday with four children being murdered and multiple kids being injured is not enough to revisit our gun laws, I don’t know what is,” Oakland County prosecutor Karen Mcdonald said Wednesday. She has charged Crumbley as an adult with murder, terrorism and other crimes.
But Mcdonald must know in her heart that no, it’s not enough. . The 2018 high school shooting in Parkland, Fla., that killed 14 students and three adults was not enough. The 1999 Columbine shooting, with its 13 innocent victims, was not enough. Even the 2012 massacre at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., in which 20 first- and secondgraders were killed, was not enough.
At this point, it looks safe to assume that no atrocity will be enough for our elected officials – in Congress, state legislatures, city councils – to pass laws that actually keep guns and ammunition out of the hands of would-be school shooters.
If all we can do is scream, we must scream at the top of our lungs: Guns are not making us safe. They are killing us, and they are killing our children.
Contact Eugene Robinson: eugenerobinson@washpost.com.