The good guy with a gun theory, tragically, didn’t work, again, in Uvalde, Texas, where a gunman was able to shoot himself past several police officers on his way inside an elementary school on Tuesday morning, before shooting and killing 21 people, including 19 students.
The gunman, Salvador Ramos, 18, was wearing body armor.
So was another teen mass shooter, Payton Gendron, who killed 10 people at a grocery store in Buffalo two weeks ago.
The good guy with a gun theory has its obvious flaws.
It’s all the NRA and its bought-and-paid-for lawmakers have to offer, unfortunately.
“As a nation, we have to ask: when in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby? When in God’s name will we do what we all know in our gut needs to be done?” President Biden said last night, after returning from an overseas trip to Asia, and learning on his flight back home about the latest mass shooting.
“What struck me on that 17-hour flight, what struck me was, these kinds of mass shootings rarely happen anywhere else in the world,” Biden said.
Rarely overstates how often these kinds of mass shootings happen anywhere else in the world.
Mass shootings are uniquely American.
“Something is dying inside the soul of this nation when we accept this as the new normal, when we just decide to become numb because it’s easier,” Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy said this morning on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
Except that this isn’t “the new normal.” Mass shootings are just normal, and have been since the mid-1990s.
We’ve long since gotten numb to what used to be shock and outrage that little kids in elementary schools, teens in high schools, people shopping for groceries on a Saturday afternoon, get mowed down by assault rifles, like deer in the woods in hunting season.
Actually, hunters don’t even use assault rifles when they’re out hunting deer in the fall.
“This is within our power to change,” Murphy said. “We are human beings with agency. This isn’t inevitable. None of it is. We are dying inside because too many Americans just throw up their hands and say it’s too hard, and the politics are too difficult. Not true.”
No, frustratingly, ‘tis true.
If you doubt that, consider the response to Tuesday’s mass shooting from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, whose bright idea, straight from the NRA playbook, is to arm teachers and administrators.
“We can’t stop bad people from doing bad things,” Paxton told, of course, Fox News. “We can potentially arm and prepare and train teachers and other administrators to respond quickly. That, in my opinion, is the best answer.”
Professional law enforcement couldn’t stop the shooter from getting inside the school in Uvalde or the grocery store in Buffalo, but if we had more people with guns, maybe, just maybe, they could prevent these things from happening.
There is another way.
We’ll never see it happen, of course.
By the way, Paxton, still under indictment on fraud charges, investigated on allegations of corruption from his own staff, easily beat back a primary challenge on Tuesday.
It’s Texas, so he will be re-elected in November to a third term.
This is America in 2022.
We’re all deer in the woods in hunting season.
Story by Chris Graham
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