In his address from the White House, President Biden said that when he heard about the Texas school shootings during his 17-hour flight home from Asia, “What struck me was, these kinds of mass shootings rarely happen anywhere else in the world.”
“Why?” he asked.
“They have mental health problems. They have domestic disputes in other countries. They have people who are lost. But these kinds of mass shootings never happen with the kind of frequency that they happen in America.”
We know the answer, but too many American politicians, beholden to their benefactors and their base, won’t say it out loud.
So, for only the second time since writing on Substack, I’m turning over this page to someone else: my friend and former colleague Dan Rather. He has said everything I would say, but better, about our ceaseless cancer of gun violence. More than 140 mass shootings this year alone… and it’s only May.
Again.
Again.
Again.
The tears flow. Anger, a deep and pervasive anger, wracks the body, and the soul.
We knew there would be an “again,” but the pain is never lessened by the foreboding.
There is so much to say. And nothing left to say.
There is so much heartbreak and loss. So much loss. And trauma. And emptiness. And rage. And a knot of mixed emotions that propel us to a sadness that defies our attempts to rationalize these horrors. As they come, once again, in quick succession.
We like to think of ourselves as a “can-do” country. But we can’t do anything about this plague on our children? The fabric of communities torn apart?
We like to think we are a special country, and when it comes to gun violence we are— for all the wrong reasons. For reasons that can be measured in graves, and empty desks in classrooms, and lives that will not reach their promise. Then there are the hundreds of thousands of children who have witnessed school shootings. And the millions who have had to imagine and prepare for horrors like these. No other country that matches us in wealth or privilege has this problem. Not even close.
How can this be acceptable? How can we do nothing? How can we choose to make this horrific pain part of our national birthright?
There are answers to all of these questions. But they don’t add up to any semblance of sense.
This is senseless. And all who condone it, all who offer meaningless “thoughts and prayers,” all who say the answer is more guns and fewer restrictions, are complicit in the carnage.
I do not think that is a majority of Americans. Not by a long shot. There is a lot more common sense and empathy in the population at large than in the elected leaders who offer fealty to the most extreme interpretations of the Second Amendment. There are measures that can make us safer. There are steps we can take.
There are no perfect answers, but to accept the unacceptable must never be acceptable.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks, ABC News, then HDNet, where he worked with former CBS anchorman Dan Rather. He also has been a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
😢
Amen