May 18, 2018: Slaughter at Santé Fe High School in Texas

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE (6/6/2022): THIS POST WAS UPDATED SLIGHTLY, IN THE WAKE OF THE SLAUGHTER AT ROBB ELEMENTARY SCHOOL IN UVALDE, TEXAS. 

WE PRAY THAT THIS TIME, LAWMAKERS WILL ACT.

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5/18/18: Another school shooting. This one in Santé Fe, Texas leaves ten dead and thirteen wounded. 

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He used two guns purchased legally by his father

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Paige Curry, a teen survivor at Santé Fe High School, perfectly captures the world we inhabit. “Was there part of you that was like, ‘This isn’t real, this is – this this would not happen in my school?” a reporter asked. 

“No, there wasn’t,” Curry responded. 

“Why so?” 

“It’s been happening everywhere,” Curry explained. “I felt – I’ve always felt like eventually it was going to happen here too.” 

Naturally, President Trump promised swift action to keep America’s children safe – after making an identical promise in February after the slaughter in Parkland, Florida. This was before he backed away from a promise to raise the age at which an individual could purchase a rifle. 

This was before he gave a craven performance at the N.R.A. convention two weeks ago, where he essentially mocked the idea that guns were a problem. For some inscrutable reason, Trump decided to fall back on the argument, in front of the N.R.A., that…well… what about knives?

 

The president decided to focus on London, England, where knife attacks have been rising. “They don’t have guns,” he said of the British. “They have knives and instead there’s blood all over the floors of this hospital,” Trump said, without naming the place. “They say it’s as bad as a military war zone hospital...knives, knives, knives.” Trump added a stabbing motion to illustrate his point. 

“London hasn’t been used to that. They’re getting used to that. It’s pretty tough,” he continued. 

In other words, guns weren’t the problem and gun control laws would be futile in America, because bad guys could kill with knives. And then the only way to stop a bad guy with a knife would be a good guy with a knife, or maybe a bazooka. So, there you are. We should keep buying knives. 

Or: bazookas. 

This made perfect sense to the audience at an N.R.A. convention and they cheered in lusty fashion.

 

Now ten more teachers and teens lay dead in an art classroom at their school, and thirteen more had been bloodied. The shooter was a teen. He used two guns purchased legally by his father, and ready to hand. He entered school with a shotgun and a revolver hidden under a trench coat. A “good guy” with a chair to the back of his skull might have stopped his rampage if the killer had been armed with knives. The killer had guns. Two or three brave teens might have subdued him, if only he had knives. A girl with a book bag could have swung it in self-defense to parry a knife-wielding teen’s thrusts. A table tipped over by the teacher might have shielded her and a couple of students had the murderer not had a shotgun. 

But he did. 

We live in a country where almost any fool can get his or her hands on almost any kind of gun. 

And then some other fool will focus on knives. 

This is not the argument we need. Knives are beside the point. Briefly this year, London suffered more murders than New York City, a metropolis of similar size. Trump and his crew seized on that to make a false point. London has consistently suffered far fewer murders than New York City, and this even after New York City has had success, in part because of tough gun laws, in cutting the toll. In 2005 London had 181 murders. The number fell steadily to 93 in 2014, before rising again to 116 last year. 

That would include murders involving guns, knives, spoons, cars (a current terrorist trick), shovels, bricks, and frozen loaves of Pumpernickel. 

New York City would see 2,245 murders in 1990. The toll declined to 352 in 2015, 334 in 2016 and 290 in 2017. That means New York City is still more than twice as dangerous as London. 

The wider the perspective, the clearer our blood-soaked dilemma becomes. The British don’t track murder rates by calendar year, but total by 12-month periods. For Wales and England combined, you have the following death tolls: 

  

We’d have 13,246 fewer murders per year. 

England and Wales had a combined population of 58.4 million in 2016. (I think we can also assume almost every man, woman, and child had access to a knife.) The murder rate in England and Wales was 1 in every 80,775 people. 

The United States, with a population of 323.4 million, saw 17,250 murders in 2016. That would make our rate 1 in 18,748. 

Those numbers may not do justice to the difference. If we had the same murder rate as England and Wales, where knives are a problem, but guns are rare, the United States would have suffered 4,004 murders in 2016. That’s a difference of 13,246 in one year; and you can carry a similar difference back many years. 

Knives aren’t the issue and it’s glaring stupidity to argue that they are. We in America live in a gun-drenched society and if more guns made us safer, we’d already be the safest people on earth. 

In 2015, after a deranged white man in South Carolina walked into a black church and gunned down nine parishioners, President Obama brought up the question of gun violence in America. 

He had brought it up in 2012, after the slaughter at Sandy Hook. But every time he called for sensible steps to address gun violence in our schools and theaters and streets, the N.R.A. screamed that the Second Amendment was doomed. Obama was coming for all our guns, all 300 million. The only way to stop Obama from taking away every gun – not to mention every butter knife – was to rush out and buy all the assault rifles the gunmakers could produce.

 

The death toll in nearly every other advanced nation in the world remained starkly lower. These were nations like our own, where people had access to knives and, if not baseball bats, other wooden clubbing options. Also axes and garden tools and, in Japan, samurai swords. Somehow the gory calculus was never the same. Japan led the way in safety with only .029 murders for every 100,000 people. Fifteen other advanced nations had murder rates less than 1 per 100,000. Germany suffered murders at the rate of .70, South Korea, .84, Sweden, .92. Eleven countries, including Australia, 1.07, Canada, 1.44, and Israel, 1.75, had murder rates under 2 per 100,000. Hungary’s rate was 2.86. Chile’s was 3.14. Only Estonia, Turkey and Mexico suffered greater slaughter than the United States, with our rate of 3.82. 

Bringing up knives is intellectually lazy at best, dishonest at worst, which is to say, typical Trump. 

Imagine the outrage from the right-wing crowd if Islamic terrorists managed to kill 13,246 Americans on our streets in one year. They’d be demanding we load every Muslim American in the country on boats and send them back to the countries from which they came (including all those Muslim Americans born in this country). They’d insist we had to ban every Muslim from entering the United States for the next ten thousand years. 

Imagine Trump’s take on the need for a border wall if one Mexican who snuck across the border had murdered 10 Americans yesterday. 

Or 17 on February 14. 

The problem in the U.S. is guns. Not all guns, not all guns in all hands, not the Second Amendment. 

The problem is too many guns accessible to too many hands. 

You could pass sensible laws to curtail that ready access to too many people with too many potentially murderous hands. Or you could stand in front of yet another N.R.A. convention and talk like a clown.

  

BLOGGER’S NOTE (6/6/2022: This entry takes on new relevance after another teenager barges into Robb Elementary School, in Uvalde, Texas. Using an AR-15, he slaughters 19 poor grade school students and two of their teachers. 

This time, the former president tells an N.R.A. convention that the problem is still not guns. 

It’s f**king doors. What we need, he explains, is schools with fewer doors – maybe one, each. 

Other Republicans and right-wing types offer similarly stupid suggestions. Sen. Ted Cruz agrees. Doors are the problem. J.D. Vance, running for an open seat in the U.S. Senate, from Ohio, suggests what we need to do is ban pornography and bolster the family. Laura Ingraham says we need to stop people from smoking pot. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene suggested the problem was LGBTQ youths, and it turns out Blake Masters, a Trump-endorsed candidate running for a U.S. Senate seat in Arizona had previously offered up a brazenly racist explanation. 

“We do have a gun violence problem in this country, and it’s gang violence,” he explained during an appearance on “The Jeff Oravits Show” podcast in April. “It’s people in Chicago, St. Louis shooting each other. Very often, you know, Black people, frankly,” the candidate said.

May our lawmakers show wisdom in Amerie's name.