Less than a week after publishing Some Thoughts on Buffalo, another mass killing has taken place. This time in Uvalde, Texas where 19 children and two adults were murdered by a young man. The Uvalde event is a little different than the Buffalo tragedy in that the perpetrator appears to be hispanic with many of the victims also being hispanic. In this regard it it more reminiscent of other school shootings, like Columbine, where race wasn’t a factor. But the Buffalo and Uvalde events do share a commonality that should be examined.
Tucker Carlson is an analyst on Fox News whom I liked when he was coming up, but have grown to like much less as he became more popular. He speaks of being fired from his previous job due to poor ratings. Unfortunately, he learned that ratings are directly linked to the anger he can tap into with his audience. So he went from being a thoughtful analyst of current events to just another angry talking head. He has gained a large audience but I lost interest in his perspective when he sold out. But I’ll give him credit, he does have an interesting perspective on the shooting in Uvalde.
He points out that The only way to stop these killings is to figure out why American society is producing so many violent young men. There is a reason they are acting this way. What is that reason? And it’s not just mass shooters, by the way, the ones you see on television. It’s gang bangers and carjackers and armed robbers and indiscriminate haters who put strangers in front of subway trains. We have a lot of people like that in this country all of a sudden, more than you like to think about.
At a time when Fox News prefers to highlight urban crime trends that can be linked to the Democratic base and CNN and MSNBC prefer to highlight mass shootings perpetrated by a white guy that can be linked to the Republican base, it is refreshing for an analyst to attempt to look at both together.
I don’t pretend to know all the answers, but I am frustrated that neither party seems to take the growing violence seriously. Yes, I know they make impassioned speeches, but neither is willing to risk angering any part of their base, so after every incident, they just go back to their corners.
Republicans need to embrace some common sense gun control measures. While I am sympathetic to the 2nd Amendment supporter who is concerned that if they give an inch, they’ll lose a mile. I understand that the 2nd Amendment was not intended for home protection nor hunting. It was also not simply for preserving slavery and ending slave revolts as Elie Mystal of The Nation proclaims (this is more 1619 Narcissism). It was written so the government would always fear the populace, thus more likely to serve them rather than rule them.
That being said, as weaponry has evolved from flintlocks and cannons to automatic rifles and shoulder-fired rockets, we’ve always had a line that distinguished which weapons an individual can own and which are prohibited. Small militias are not going to be able to overthrow a tyrannical 21st century superpower armed only with AK-47s, so the 2nd Amendment supporters should consider giving some ground at this point.
Democrats need to acknowledge that this is not just a gun problem. Even if the NRA were to agree to lower magazine capacities and other compromises to make it more difficult to kill a bunch of people in just a few minutes, this will have limited impact on the potential for mass shootings and almost no impact on street crime. The Democratic platform over the past few elections has clearly been biased in favor of the criminal over the victim. Their obsession with racial equity leads them to demand irrational action. These include eliminating advanced educational programs, eliminating prisons altogether, and defunding the police. Alternative methods of helping people and rehabbing offenders is a legitimate line of debate. Increasing social service resources instead of investing in assault vehicles and more armed police officers, etc. might be a better community investment.
But we are a nation of laws and we formed governments, in part, to protect the weak from the strong. I’m looking for a voice who understands that violent street crime, violent domestic relationships, violent mass shooters with a political ideology (like Buffalo) or violent mass shooters who are just mentally ill (like Uvalde) all have some common denominators in American culture. We should raise our expectations on video game producers, hollywood, our schools and universities, the NRA and our elected officials to not see these tragedies as political opportunities to paint political adversaries as “the problem,” rather look for ways to make America an even better, safer place for all of us.