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 | By Frank Bruni Opinion Columnist March 24, 2021 |
Eight dead in Atlanta. Ten dead in Boulder, Colo. |
Is this what returning to life as usual in America means? |
The Democratic majority leader of the Colorado State Senate, Stephen Fenberg, suggested as much, and I’m not taking issue with it or him. Quite the opposite. He’s gut-wrenchingly right, and his words, like every one of those 18 victims, should give us enormous pause and fill us with even more shame. |
Fenberg was sizing up the situation on Brian Williams’s show on MSNBC late Monday night. This is precisely what he said: “We have had a horrific year as a country, as a world. It has finally started to feel like things are getting back to ‘normal.’ And, unfortunately, I think that we are reminded — that includes mass shootings.” |
Normal includes mass shootings. Take that in. Mass shootings are normal. With normality comes a body count. |
That’s not political cant. That’s brutal truth. |
In America we pretty much expect periodic blood baths, and the dearth of them in the year before Atlanta has been chalked up to an atypical lull born of a once-in-a-generation pandemic. |
But are we going to keep surrendering to this macabre status quo? |
Most of us have now lived through enough of these shootings to know the script and be ready for these scenes: There will be a call among sensible Americans for more stringent firearm restrictions, not just the modest ones that were recently passed by the House — and will probably be stymied in the Senate — but also bolder measures. That call will meet resistance from less sensible Americans. |
There will be an ever intensifying examination of how and where the perpetrators of these recent shootings acquired their firearms and an argument from gun enthusiasts that tougher restrictions wouldn’t have made a difference. The Second Amendment will be bandied about. |
But here’s what that argument misses: There’s no separating these shootings in aggregate from a culture that celebrates guns, fetishizes them and scatters them in such ridiculous bounty across such ludicrously broad swaths of American life. That culture makes ownership of a gun for reasons other than sport utterly unremarkable, and it turns guns, with their special deadliness, into weapons of choice when anger swells and sanity ebbs. |
It must change. And federal legislation that significantly challenges the prevalence and primacy of guns — by making them harder to get, by making the wait for them longer, by prying them from people whose histories peg them as dangerous — is a necessary challenge of that culture. It’s at least a start. It’s something, and I can’t for the life of me see the rationale for nothing. |
As for the Second Amendment, I’ll point out what so many others have observed and what I’ve said before. It’s unoriginal but no less relevant for that. The Second Amendment did not envision assault rifles of the kind used in Boulder on Monday afternoon. It was the product of a certain time and mind-set, not the repository of eternal wisdom. That’s common sense. But the gun lobby has turned the Second Amendment into a binding creed. |
And here we are. In an article in The Times, a 25-year-old Boulder resident named Meredith Johnson described the massacre that had just occurred as “a common experience in America, and especially for our generation.” |
Johnson also said: “Atlanta was a week ago and now it’s Boulder. What is it going to be two weeks from now?” |
I’d like to write that “two weeks” is fantastical overstatement. But it’s perhaps no more than a slight exaggeration, now that we’re closing in on normal. |
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