I Can't Process These Shootings Anymore
Photo by Daiga Ellaby on Unsplash
Back in 2012, the Sandy Hook massacre broke my heart. Twenty-six people dead — twenty of whom were children. I had trouble wrapping my head around the cruelty of it all. I remember thinking at the time that if anything would spur America to action, it would be the faces of these young elementary students in a victim tally.
That didn't happen. The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting became politicized, with many on the right perpetuating the conspiracy theory that it never happened. Prompted by profiteers like Alex Jones, the parents of this tragedy were harassed by those believing the incident was part of some sinister government conspiracy.
Sandy Hook was followed by Navy Yard and then San Bernadino and Orlando and Las Vegas and Parkland and El Paso. And the list keeps growing. How many cities and neighborhoods do I have to list?
There have been over 200 mass shootings in the US in 2022 alone. We are talking about thousands of incidents since Sandy Hook. I was just processing the deaths in Buffalo, and now the clock is reset to Uvalde, and I know those readings this in the future will not just have one other shooting to reference, but dozens, possibly even hundreds.
I can't process it anymore. I see people being outraged by all this death, but all I do is feel numb to it. I should feel something, but I don't have it in me anymore. One tragedy bleeds into the next and then the next and the next and the next.
When will it end?
We are so used to pain, and a part of me almost wishes that this is part of some master plan to desensitize me to the misery around me, like a frog boiling alive in steadily hotter water. But it's worse than that — those who control things don't care. Our lives are not meaningful enough to them to be a part of the equation. These deaths are what systemic neglect looks like.
We've known how to stop mass shootings for some time: it involves limiting the guns people can have (who knew?). Countries such as Japan and Australia have placed limits on their population's gun usage and possession, and they have fewer mass shootings. Australia hasn't had a mass shooting since 1996. As far as I can tell, Japan has not had any in a while (though mass murders do occasionally still occur).
However, America doesn't pass gun reform because we don't pass reforms in general: healthcare, education, criminal justice. We haven't improved in these areas for decades and, in some cases, centuries. The campaign for Universal Healthcare is older in America than some countries (it started in the early 1900s, yall)
Why should guns be any different?
America has become so dysfunctional that now many leftists are sadly starting to reverse course on the notion of gun control, and I don't blame them. They see the right-wing militias growing in this country, and the many police officers involved with them and worry that gun control might not be enough. After all, would you trust the police —the people who are pretty trigger happy with the citizens they "protect and serve" — to appropriately disarm the white supremacist militias plaguing this country? I am not sure that I would.
In the end, we don't (just) need gun control. We need a different country. One that respects the lives of its citizens and that political project will require more than just shouting into the void, "GUN CONTROL NOW." It will require action.
If you, like me, want to be more than a husk of a person, unable to shed a tear for the lives you see falling all around you, then I encourage you to get involved with one of the groups below (I posted a diversity of groups, so pick the one that works for you). The lives being lost around us should mean something. Not just be yet another unfortunate statistic that causes us to feel nothing.