The mass shooting that refused to quietly drift away.
Beau Elliot
It’s been two weeks since the massacre at Stoneman Douglas, and the national debate over guns and gun violence remains, refusing, it seems, to be kicked off stage right.
That’s the usual drill in the aftermath of mass shootings. Dazed survivors, grieving families and friends, thoughts and prayers from political types, hand-wringing commentators, some guest appearances by the “guns don’t kill people, people do” crowd (you wish just once they’d substitute the word “reptiles” for “people,” but no), some more thoughts and prayers, some more hand-wringing, and then the whole show moves on into dim memory and the next national moment takes the stage.
It’s like a grotesque variety show.
But this time around, the grief, the anger, the knee-jerk from the alt-right, the mumblings from the West Wing linger. As does the debate. It’s a bit odd for a country that boasts more firearms than people. Probably, this is a country that has more guns than reptiles.
Not to juxtapose him with reptiles or anything, but Our Great Leader has kind of been all over the landscape about guns. Especially when it comes to teachers and school shootings. He wants to arm some teachers. Except when he doesn’t. Here he is addressing CPAC this past weekend (blow-by-blow from the Toronto Star):
“10:58 — Trump promotes his idea to arm the 10 per cent or 20 per cent of teachers he claims are good with guns. Then he says, confusingly, ‘I’m not talking about teachers.’ ”
Then he goes back to talking about arming teachers. Yes. Teachers again, even though he’s not talking about them. Teachers are better than armed law-enforcement types. “They love their students,” he proclaims.
Meanwhile, his buddies in arms, the NRA, of course did not remain silent. In fact, the spokeswoman for the group went right to the heart of the school-shootings problem: the news media.
It turns out, Dana Loesch of the NRA said, journalists love mass killings.
Well, yes, of course. We journalists just can’t wait till the next mass killing. The waiting is the worst part; the tense impatience gets so thick you could cut it with an RPG.
That’s why we all rushed hand over bottle to Rwanda during the genocide. Good Lord — enough blood and gore andw torn bodies and muck and pink mist like the sea and heartbreaking stories for everyone. Talk about Nirvana for journalists. The grizzled veterans among us still talk about it, in measured, almost plaintive tones. Those were the days, they say.
Ah, yes. Of course, no school shooting would be complete without the alt-right coming out of who knows where to blame the students. Yeah, you know — all those so-called survivors are professional crisis-actors. They criss-cross the country, from shooting to shooting, to play-act survivors. It’s a liberal plot to take away our guns.
No, really. If only the liberal side of the universe could indeed be as organized as the right wing seems to believe that the lefties are. But no.
As the great activist and organizer Saul Alinsky once said about the American left, “They couldn’t organize a successful luncheon.”
Alinsky also believed a liberal was a person “who puts his foot down firmly on thin air.”
So, yeah, the notion that liberals could somehow organize a bunch of teenagers to follow a script and cry on demand could only have sprung full-blown from the mind of a person who also puts her or his foot down firmly on thin air.
Besides, organize teenagers? You should try something easier first, such as herding cats or negotiating an end to the Syrian civil war.
Meanwhile, the Florida House voted 71-36 to kill a ban on assault rifles and big magazines. The Stoneman Douglas survivors watched them.
You want to tell the Florida legislators: Hey, don’t bother sugarcoating it like that. Tell the kids how you really feel.
I’m sure down the road, the kids will be thankful for the lesson you just taught them about real-life sausage-making. And the beast goes on.