Two weeks ago, in the wake of a mass shooting in Southern California, satirical online newspaper The Onion sadly, poignantly, strikingly summed up the United States’ gun culture. The headline: ” ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.” The truth of that statement would be humorous if it were not so painful. We have a problem in this country, and our failure to deal with it is shameful.
The latest example arrives from Reynolds High School in Troutdale, Ore., where a gunman killed a student Tuesday. This came two days after five people, including two police officers and the two perpetrators, were killed in Las Vegas. Which came three days after a student was shot to death at Seattle Pacific University. Which came weeks after the rampage that left seven dead in Isla Vista, Calif.
Aurora, Colo.; Minneapolis, Minn.; Newtown, Conn. … each of them has been the site of a mass shooting in just the past two years, leading to breathless debate over guns and gun control and the culture of violence in this country. Now, the issue has hit painfully close to home, with Reynolds High School sitting 15 miles from downtown Vancouver.
Not that everybody thinks this is a problem. Josh Blackman, in conservative publication The American Spectator, wrote Monday, “Contrary to what the zeitgeist may suggest, mass shootings are not on the rise. Prominent criminologist James Alan Fox has found ‘no upward trend in mass killings’ since the ’70s.” Therein lies the problem. If we as a culture are willing to accept this as the norm, to consider mass shootings a part of life, to throw up our hands and say there’s “no way to prevent this,” then we truly are lost. Americans should be better than this, and we should demand more from our leaders.