(Dobbs) No End To The Shootings. No End In Sight.
"Don't Tread On Me" is behind the epidemic of mass shootings.
We hadn’t even finished hearing about last Friday night’s mass murder of five people in a home in Cleveland, Texas— and about the suspect, captured three days later a few miles from the murders, cowering under a pile of dirty laundry— when it was shoved from the headlines by another mass shooting, this one yesterday, with five victims in midtown Atlanta.
It became the 191st mass shooting in America this year, but I have to qualify that with the inescapable words, so far. That’s 191 mass shootings— defined as four victims or more— in only the first 93 days of 2023. It’s an average of slightly more than two every day.
This might surprise you because you probably don’t feel like you’ve heard about 191 mass shootings this year. Which most likely you haven’t.
Did you know, for example, that just in the past week, when you add in the massacre in Atlanta, there were 18 of them? Tuesday alone there were two, one with four deaths in Lake Wales, Florida, another with two deaths as well as injuries in Stone Mountain, Georgia. You might not even have heard about those. And on Sunday? Four people died in mass shootings in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, four more in Mojave, California, with more gun deaths in Lawrence Massachusetts, Lafayette Louisiana, Athens Georgia, and Oklahoma City Oklahoma. The biggest death toll on that bloody Sunday was in Henryetta Oklahoma. A gunman killed six innocent souls.
If we’re not numbed by the cascade of gun violence, we are surely inured.
Remember that Sweet 16 party only two weeks ago in Dadeville, Alabama, where four kids were shot dead and more than 30 hurt? Outside of Alabama itself, it’s probably all but forgotten. Or the week before at the bank in Louisville, Kentucky, where a gunman walked into his workplace, pulled out an AR-15 assault-style rifle, killing five and injuring eight? You’d have to search to find a news story about it any more. You’d have to search harder to find an answer to the question, “Why?”
In a way, the motives don’t really matter. A workplace gripe, a dispute with a neighbor, a romantic rift, gang rivalries. The suspect in Atlanta, captured hours after yesterday’s shooting, reportedly was in the waiting room at a medical office when he opened fire. Either he went in intent on violence, or something set him off. But five people, all women, were shot, no matter why. What matters is, there is no stop to the bloodshed.
I’ve written twice this year about America’s obsession with guns. In February the title of the piece was, “Setting New Records for Mass Shootings.” In March it was, “Message to Gun-Loving Politicians: Your Thoughts and Prayers Aren’t Working.” Now, this dispatch. The shocking thing is, given the gun culture in this country, there will be more. It’s horrible. But it’s inevitable.
The reaction of many Americans these days when there’s yet another mass shooting is to go out and buy yet another gun.
According to the National Institutes of Health, gun sales have picked up over the past ten years following both mass shootings and legislation passed in response to them. The University of Chicago’s “Nonpartisan and Objective Research Organization,” better known as NORC, says that in the past two years, one in five U.S. households bought a gun and out of every twenty buyers, one was making the buy for the first time.
I’m not naive enough to think that gun reform in the U.S.— what a lot of us call “reasonable” gun reform— would change that. The guns are out there— more than one for every person living in America. So are the NRA and a few other “gun rights” organizations that draw the line at the bloody bottom. And so are the politicians they pay to do their bidding. They have turned the American colonies’ revolutionary cry for liberty, “Don’t Tread On Me,” into a symbol of their resistance to any restrictions on guns. I even found this pistol for sale on the internet.
In states with open-carry or concealed-carry laws, you might have a gun like this right next to you at the stadium, in the market, at the doctor’s office, on the bus. Reasonable gun reform would reduce the kinds of guns out there in the marketplace, and in terms of age and personal history, the kinds of people who could get them.
Other western nations don’t suffer what we suffer, neither the intransigence of gun lovers nor the violence. Last month I was in New Zealand where four years ago, after a gunman killed 51 people in a mosque, their parliament did some soul-searching and made guns hard to get. Liberals and conservatives alike voted almost unanimously to prohibit the sale or ownership of virtually all semi-automatic weapons.
But in legislatures across America, the lapel pins on gun rights advocates tell the story: Don’t tread on me.
Back in the days of the Soviet Union, when I’d spend time in ABC News’s Moscow bureau, I’d turn on the TV with a Russian-speaking colleague beside me when the evening news came on. Each night they painted a dreadful picture of life in America. One night they’d show video of homeless people sleeping on a bench. Another night, unemployed people lined up at a soup kitchen. And on another, victims of gunfire, sprawled on the ground in their own blood.
It was not a pretty picture, but it was not an accurate portrayal of American life either.
Nowadays though, when it comes to the violence, I’m not so sure. Just look at Cleveland, Texas. Look at Henryetta, Oklahoma. Look at Louisville. Look at Atlanta.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, 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, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other 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, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
When our founding fathers wrote the 2nd amendment, people could arm themselves with a musket. Pour gun powder down the barrel, ramrod a bullet and piece of cloth, pour gun powder into a half-cocked trigger, aim and shoot. In the time it takes to do that, how many rounds can an assault gun shoot - 40, 50?
The shootings are just going to continue. Legislators pocket much too much money from the arms manufacturers and NRA and lobbyists. Millons of dollars. We’ve been awash in guns for decades. in the 1990s, the TV show Law and Order made fun of the proliferation of guns that came from Virginia up I-95 to NYC. And, nothing was done. I asked a guy at a gun shop in Woodbridge, VA, the hub of gun stores in northern Virginia, how many guns I could buy at one time in one day. He said, “two things… the limit of your credit card and the size of your car trunk.” As many guns as you want.