USA TODAY International Edition
Recipe for tragedy in Buffalo: Guns, hate and a disturbed mind
We can’t give up on trying to overcome racial hatred and break the GOP addiction to guns
Way back when Groupon and Living Social coupons were a thing, a discount for a shooting range crossed my inbox. I had never held a gun, much less owned or shot one, but a friend had been saying she wanted to try something like this, so I called her bluff.
This is how the two of us and our husbands ended up at a shooting range near Joint Base Andrews in Maryland. It was a Sunday, two days before our coupon expired on Dec. 14, 2011, and the place was packed with urban and suburban first- timers who had just realized they needed to use their coupon or lose it. The people running things were overwhelmed but trying to give everyone basic safety instructions before we all headed into the dark, concrete gallery and did something dumb or dangerous.
None of this was new for my husband, an Army veteran, or her husband, who had experience firing .22- caliber pistols and rifles. But for me and my friend, it was an unhappy revelation. The noise was piercing, even through ear muffs. The darkness seemed menacing. The smell was awful. And I kept forgetting to keep the gun pointed down, which seemed to unnerve my husband. ( Go figure.)
We had been treating this outing as a lark, or maybe a school field trip to learn the customs of others, but my friend and I found it deeply disturbing and cut our session short.
A year to the day after our coupon expired, a 20- year- old gunman would mow down 26 children and adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. This Saturday, an 18year- old gunman shot 13 people at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, in a predominantly Black neighborhood, and 10 of them died. Two mass shootings happened even as I wrote this column – at a Laguna Woods, California, church and at a Houston flea market.
The mood has become increasingly violent and frightening in the past few years, with inflammatory policies, language and attacks targeting immigrants and people of color from Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson and many others.
Hate crimes at a 12- year high
It should be no surprise that hate crimes are at a 12- year high, according to the FBI, or that Attorney General Merrick Garland says the two most lethal motivations for violent domestic extremists are racial and ethnic, “specifically those who advocated for the superiority of the white race.”
The suspected Buffalo shooter, from what we know, is a stereotype of our age. He threatened to shoot up his school last year at age 17, went for a mental health evaluation and then went home. Was there any follow- up? Did his parents know he lied to buy an assaultstyle rifle then modified it illegally? What good is New York’s red flag law if it couldn’t prevent this massacre?
Law enforcement and public officials have made clear that the accused shooter’s motive was racial. His writings repeatedly refer to the “great replacement” conspiracy theory advanced by Carlson – that Democrats are plotting to replace the electorate with “more obedient voters from the Third World.” This claptrap is accepted by 47% of the GOP.
It is tempting to give up. I almost did in 2017, when I realized I had written at least 17 columns on guns in seven years and nothing had changed. But of course, like the millions of survivors, victims, families and others who care desperately about this scourge, I kept prodding, kept hoping.
How can you not? Why can’t America fix its gun problem? Why won’t it even try?
Let me amend that: Why won’t most Republicans even try? And will voters ever punish them?
I have never seen a more tragic congressional vote than the Senate’s 5446 defeat of a bipartisan bill tightening gun background checks. It was such a minimal step, tailored by West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin and Pennsylvania Republican Pat Toomey to have broad appeal, yet it fell a few votes short of the 60 needed to end a filibuster and advance the bill.
It was April 2013, four months after the Sandy Hook rampage. “Shame on you,” Patricia Maisch, who survived a mass shooting in Tucson, Arizona, shouted from the Senate gallery.
The right to stay alive
It’s now nearly 10 years after Sandy Hook, and Manchin wants to revive that bill. But the dynamic hasn’t changed: The House tries when Democrats are in charge, then their bills die in the Senate. And while closing a few holes in the background check system would be helpful, there are more than 400 million guns in America, 98% of them owned by civilians.
We need a much larger scale national intervention: limits on how many and what kinds of guns people can own and how and where they can carry them, licenses and training requirements to own guns, voluntary buybacks of as many guns as possible and then, yes, confiscating guns if necessary to enforce new federal laws.
The prerequisites to even the most incremental progress are electing more Democrats and abolishing the filibuster that enables a 41- senator minority to stop almost any bill in its tracks. That would include President Joe Biden’s call Monday in Buffalo to “keep assault weapons off our streets.” But he’s also doing what he can by himself, such as banning “ghost guns.”
Meanwhile, only seven states require safety training to buy a gun. Based on my one personal encounter with a firearm, that’s a scary thought.
In Buffalo, we see the tragic intersection of vile rhetoric from political and media figures, a disturbed mind and gun “rights” advocates irrationally and immorally opposed to any restrictions on what they see as their absolute Second Amendment right to bear arms. They need to get over themselves. All rights are regulated, and some rights are much more important than that one – first and foremost, the right to stay alive.
Jill Lawrence is a columnist for USA TODAY and author of “The Art of the Political Deal: How Congress Beat the Odds and Broke Through Gridlock.”