In the week since the almost unthinkable tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown Connecticut, nearly every conversation I have had starts with a lamentation of that awful event. We talk about our own children, our own schools, our own experiences of violence. And that’s the thing, the shootings are almost unthinkable. Almost. Because in that same week, a young man open fired in a mall here in Oregon, killing two and terrifying thousands. A few days before that, an 11-year-old and a 7- year–old held up a woman at gun point in a church parking lot. We know that there have been mass shootings in high schools and temples and churches and movie theaters. And yesterday, Huffington Post detailed the shooting fatalities that have taken place in this country since Sandy Hook, and most certainly the death toll has climbed even since that article was published yesterday afternoon. These murders are tragedies. They are lives cut short, cures not found, symphonies not composed, inventions not patented, novels not written, buildings not built, gardens not grown, loves not consummated, children not born. These are individual souls, individual dreams dashed, individual heartbreaks.
But, there is another kind of tragedy, and travesty, lurking inside the wave of gun violence and death in this country—the poisoning and undermining of society itself. As we start to believe that we can not shop safely or go to the movies or—God forbid—send our six-year-olds to public schools, we start to retreat. We start to believe that we can not trust our fellow citizens even in the most innocent of public spaces, and we only feel truly safe and unguarded in our own homes, preferably with the door locked and the rifle loaded. That is the death knell for a functioning democracy, for a healthy society.
Yesterday, I spent most of the day running errands for the holidays. During those few hours, I bumped into no fewer than five friends, visited with strangers in line, exchanged a recipe with the clerk at the post office, opened the door for an elderly woman, petted an alpaca outside a shop in downtown Portland. Those easy interactions and pleasantries give us a sense of the world. They remind us that most people—even the ones we don’t know—are good-hearted and compassionate, that they are working to get by, worried about their kids and grandkids. It reminds us that we are in this together, that our fates are linked, and that we’d best look out for our neighbor both because it is the right thing to do and because we want them to do it for us and our kids.
But, as more and more random and inexplicable violence takes place, we are on edge, more vigilant when we are on the streets or even in church. And let us not choose a remedy that is nearly as fatal as the disease. Yesterday, the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre said: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” But it’s not really that simple, is it? Are the good guys and the bad guys really so easy to distinguish? Is anyone really “the bad guy” or “the good guy” in the Spaghetti Western way that LaPierre presents it?
Isn’t it more like this: We are a country made up of flawed human beings, most of us doing our best to do the right thing most of the time? Some of us struggle with mental illness and substance abuse. Some of us are damaged by childhood trauma or PTSD. Sometimes we get angry or blindly afraid. Sometimes we make mistakes and misunderstand what is happening before us.
And, if that’s the case, introducing more and more weapons—and more insidiously—feeding anxiety and mistrust and hyper-vigilance in the public square forever transforms the public square. It becomes no longer a place to make casual contact with strangers and offer tiny comforts, but a place to be feared and mistrusted, and strangers are to be eyeballed with suspicion and wariness. Is it any wonder then, as we watch and listen to cable news, we hear a steady patter of mistrust and questioning of not only other people’s statements, but also their motives and even their patriotism?
As we go into these next weeks and months of paying tribute to those 26 beautiful souls and debating the ways in which we hope to make our children safer, we had best call on our better angels. We’d better summon all the courage and imagination and good will we have because nothing less than the future of the nation is at stake.
