Another school shooting has claimed at least 10 more innocent lives, this time in Santa Fe, Texas, south of Houston. We know what happens next, having been through these tragedies so many times over the past 20 years.
A group of survivors will emerge to lead an effort to make the case that these kinds of mass shootings can never happen again.
A fringe of crazies from dark corners of the Internet will claim that the survivors are actually crisis actors, as was the shooter, who they will labor to paint as being part of a leftist plot to disarm good, law-abidin’ ‘Muricans.
Fox News will have a guy on every half-hour to discuss the crisis-actor nonsense, shrug his shoulders, tell the viewers, you never know, probably not, but you never know.
The NRA will trot out a spokesperson to blast the kids and everybody else who thinks common-sense gun control could prevent the next shooting, while talking at the same time about this not being the time to talk public policy, out of respect for the victims.
We’ll hear talk about how the real issue is mental health, which is fine, except that Congress and the president are in the process of taking tens of millions of vulnerable people off the health-insurance rolls, in a healthcare system that is already pretty poor at dealing with mental health.
Or maybe it’s video games. Yeah, it’s definitely video games. As if the U.S. is the only country where teens play violent video games, right?
Or, no, it’s actually bullying. Again, as if bullying is something unique to the U.S. People have been getting bullied since ancient times. You can look it up.
Whatever it is, thoughts and prayers, which, at this stage, people must not be thinking or praying nearly hard enough, considering.
Fast forward to the end, and the script says that nothing will get done, because enough of us pretend that nothing can be done, even though ours is the only country on the globe with this problem, and we’re nowhere near the only country on the globe where people have guns, video games, bullies, mental-health issues.
The good news is the school year is coming to an end in the next couple of weeks, so we get the summer off before this happens again, probably sometime around Labor Day.
Column by Chris Graham
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Chris Graham
