Pandemic has supercharged state's crisis of gun violence

Father Michael O'Reilly stood on the steps of the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament in his long, purple robes, looking at a crime scene just feet away where more than a dozen evidence markers were laid out.

It was surreal, he told me, and he felt bad that one of his first thoughts was whether the church would be able to welcome parishioners that morning, with a mass shooting shutting down streets for blocks around us.

But people were already wandering into this grand cathedral that lies within sight of the state Capitol, unaware of the shooting or maybe needing comfort because of it. Life goes on, even with six bodies still on the pavement. We accept the unacceptable, or at least endure it.

This is, after all, the 12th mass shooting in California this year. We all know what happens next. The process has already started. We are horrified. Outraged. Saddened. I've got a stack of press releases from politicians across the state who want voters to know this is unacceptable.

I won't be quoting any of them. I think you know why.

It's all sound and fury for a gun violence crisis that has long eaten at the soul of this country. People die every day, shot by those who don't respect laws or lives, or who are so unstable they shouldn't have guns in the first place. All the while, the rest of us argue over the Second Amendment.

Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert, who is running for state attorney general on a gettough-on-crime platform, told me that since 2019, her office has seen a 45% increase in the number of cases filed for felons in possession of a firearm. It's not just Sacramento that's seeing that rise, she said. It's happening across the country.

“I've been screaming about this for over a year, how many illegal guns there are on the streets,” she said. “You talk to any chief of a major city across the country, they will tell you the same thing.”

She thinks it's from a combination of factors: people afraid during the pandemic, rising economic inequity, organized unemployment fraud that left criminals with millions in ill-gotten funds.

It was, she said, inevitable that COVID-19 would make things worse.

So, California, that's where we are at. A crisis of guns that was devastating before the pandemic has now been supercharged, regardless of who you ask. We all know it.

There is going to be a 13th mass shooting, and a 14th and a 15th. Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg called America's position on guns “one of the greatest signs of irrationality and sickness in our country.”

If there's any way out of this very dark wormhole of gun violence, it's the possibility that an empowered majority of Americans are waking up to the truth. The truth is that the Second Amendment can be protected without enabling easy access to assault weapons.

These weapons have been mistaken as a fundamental value of our democracy, somehow enshrined in our Constitution and Bill of Rights, but they are not. Nobody needs a machine gun for self-defense or anything else. Nobody needs to fire 600 rounds in a minute.

Too often, these guns are about death, not selfprotection.

They are about taking away the most fundamental right: the right to exist, and to do it without fear.

As sunset turns downtown back to darkness, I am left with the image of Pamela Harris, whose son, Sergio, was killed Sunday night, yelling to no one, “Why did they do this to my baby?”

And I can't help but wonder, why do we do this to ourselves?