(Dobbs) Thoughts and Prayers and Mass Shootings
It’s what people say when they plan to do nothing.
We should be comforted to know that after last night’s slaughter at a Walmart in Virginia, right-wing politicians who do whatever they can to prevent gun reform once again are sending their thoughts and prayers. As they have in the past, and as they also will the next time a mass shooting ruins more people’s lives somewhere in America.
This time they came from Virginia’s governor and presidential aspirant Glenn Youngkin, who assured us, “Our hearts break with the community.” He went on in his tweet, “Heinous acts of violence have no place in our communities.”
But evidently laws to curb the proliferation of guns have no place in our communities either. For when he was running for governor last year and was asked what gun reform proposals he would support if elected, Youngkin said with zero ambivalence, “I think we need to be fully clear: none.”
But still, his heart breaks.
It’s shades of Colorado Congresswoman Lauren Boebert who, in the wake of the mass shooting at a nightclub in Colorado Springs only two nights earlier, had the temerity to tell us, “The victims & their families are in my prayers.”
This is a rabid gun rights fanatic who has packed a pistol into the United States Capitol, who calls gun reform part of the Democrats’ “radical political agenda,” and who advances the deceit that reform won’t work because “we cannot legislate evil.” Yet when she calls for lawless violence “to end and end quickly,” her solution is: more guns.
So the victims of the mass shooting in Colorado Springs are in Boebert’s prayers, but her 2021 family Christmas card rounds out the full picture of those prayers.
Broken hearts. Thoughts and prayers. As Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank wrote, “It’s what people say when they plan to do nothing.”
If mass shootings are defined by at least four victims in a single incident, then according to the non-profit Gun Violence Archive, we’ve had more than 600 mass shootings in this nation so far this year. Today’s New York Times published a partial list of those massacres, singling out just a relative handful, which I shall end with, since it paints a full enough picture of where “nothing” has gotten us.
• Last night, the Walmart in Chesapeake VA, 6 dead, 4 wounded
• Just two days earlier, the gay nightclub in Colorado Springs CO, 5 dead, 18 wounded
• Only a week before that, a parking garage at the University of Virginia, 3 dead, 2 wounded
• A month before that, a residential neighborhood in Raleigh NC, 5 dead
• September 7, several parts of Memphis TN, 4 dead
• July 17, a shopping mall in Greenwood IN, 3 dead, 2 wounded
• July 4, a parade in Highland Park IL, 7 dead, dozens wounded
• June 30, a convenience store in Newark NJ, 9 wounded
• June 20, a park in Harlem NY, 1 dead, 8 wounded
• June 4, downtown Philadelphia PA, 3 dead, 12 wounded
• June 1, a medical building in Tulsa, OK, 5 dead, several wounded
• May 24, an elementary school in Uvalde TX, 21 dead, 17 wounded
• May 15, a church in Laguna Woods CA, 1 dead, 4 wounded
• May 14, a supermarket in Buffalo NY, 10 dead, 3 wounded
• May 13, downtown Milwaukee WI, 16 wounded
• April 12, a subway in Brooklyn NY, 10 wounded
• April 3, downtown Sacramento CA, 6 dead, 12 wounded
• March 19, a car show in Dumas AR, 1 dead, 27 wounded
• January 23, a home in Milwaukee WI, 6 dead
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 36-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
Thank you, Greg, for your tireless efforts to ask us to consider our country’s politics more deeply. Not being afraid to voice truths that deepen over time.
I am so tired of "thoughts and prayers" rather than accountability and action. Much gratitude for your thoughtful writing.