Like the names of bloody battles embroidered on a tattered regimental flag, Uvalde now takes its place alongside Sandy Hook, Parkland and Columbine. In the annual charnel house of over 45,000 gun-related deaths, this American flag can’t memorialise the now daily mass shootings, but thankfully a true slaughter of the innocents is still jarring enough to capture national attention.
With each new tragedy, the ritualistic call and response cycle accelerates. On one side, an anguished but powerless President grips the sides of his lectern and channels his own parental grief, while Senators literally beg their colleagues to act. Late night TV monologues are filled with anger rather than laughter and small-town mayors stand stunned before the media saying they never thought it could happen in their town. On the other side, the incantation of ‘thoughts and prayers’, ‘the real problem is mental health’ and ‘let’s arm the teachers and harden the schools’ is solemnly regurgitated before the bodies of the victims are even cold.
With each new tableau of ambulances encircling a school and dazed parents waiting hours to hear if their child survived the carnage, there’s always the hope that this time it will be different. That the towering emotional waves crashing on America’s shores will undercut the arguments of the gun lobby and cause them to collapse beneath a swell of righteous anger. But if the last decade has taught us anything, it’s that America will not have its Dunblane moment that catalyses transformative gun reform.
For all its horror, Uvalde is only the second worst school shooting in American history, yet in the decade since Sandy Hook, rather than new restrictions, we’ve seen the competitive liberalisation of state gun laws with Texas proudly in the vanguard.
In the Trump era, the political fissure of gun reform has widened, because for some, being armed has become a necessary precondition for being able to resist and overthrow a tyrannical government. The drumbeat that you need a gun for self-protection in turbulent times and to be prepared to fight a civil war has magnified the paranoia around the slippery slope to confiscation and hardened resistance to even the smallest restrictions. Although financial scandals have weakened the NRA as a political force, fundamentalist gun ideology has never been stronger in America. Driven by a fear of societal collapse during the pandemic, the last two years have each seen record gun sales, pushing the stock of privately-owned firearms to over 400 million.
The harsh reality is that mass shootings in schools, churches, grocery stores and workplaces are now a feature not a bug of American life. I don’t believe that the typical NRA member, Mitch McConnell, or Republican Governors want to see classrooms full of dead children. I’m sure they are genuinely horrified by elementary school kids being blown to bits by high velocity bullets. But it’s also clear that the leaders of the gun lobby and their political puppets are willing to accept rows of dead kids, African Americans and postal workers as a price worth paying for the unfettered right to bear arms.
Despite guns overtaking car crashes as the leading cause of death among American children, these lost sons and daughters are treated as just regrettable collateral damage. Just like the young women who will die of sepsis after a botched backstreet abortion, they are just casualties in the larger war to create and sustain a particular vision of America.
The fact that 90% of Americans now support common sense gun reforms like enhanced background checks is frequently cited as a catalyst for change. But pinning your hopes on public opinion mistakes America for a democracy in which politicians still feel compelled to reflect the will of the people. Public opinion will no more force a federal assault rifle ban than it will protect a woman’s right to an abortion.
We now live in a country in which the majority is being held hostage by a party that controls no branch of the federal government but can still block and even reverse broadly supported societal change through legislative intransigence and a Republican-dominated Supreme Court. We also live in a country in which Ted Cruz and Donald Trump have no shame genuflecting before the NRA faithful only days after Uvalde.
As Youth Poet Laureate, Amanda Gorman, said last week: ‘It takes a monster to kill children. But to watch monsters kill children again and again and do nothing isn’t just insanity it’s inhumanity’. Doing nothing is indeed callous and cold-hearted, but unfortunately that is very much on brand for the current Republican Party.
As the weeks pass and the waves of outrage recede, I fear the likely outcome is that yet again nothing much will change. There will be no Damascene moments for Republican Senators or Governors because the body count is already baked into their political calculus. They know that whether it be abortion or gun rights, single issue voters are rarely prevalent enough to tip the political scales, whereas being branded an apostate by the gun lobby could be political suicide in a primary. So, they will go right back to hammering the Democrats on pocketbook issues like inflation and culture war staples like immigration and ‘woke schools’ because they know that is what could win them control of Congress in November.
Two years ago in these pages, I predicted that America would be willing to tolerate a far higher level of Covid deaths than any other developed country, because many states would prioritise individual liberties over sensible public health measures. With now two years of data, living in a Republican state has clearly increased your chances of dying from Covid, but there’s no evidence that it’s hurting Republicans at the ballot box. To paraphrase Founding Father, Patrick Henry, ‘give me liberty and give me death’ seems to have become a winning electoral slogan in much of America.
Angry daydreamers will talk about removing the Senate filibuster to allow a simple majority vote on federal gun reform, but Democratic Senator Joe Manchin has pre-emptively said he won’t support that change, so any reform will still need the support of 10 Republican Senators. Also, let’s remember that in Obama’s first two years in office (admittedly pre-Sandy Hook), the Democrats had a working super majority in the Senate that allowed them to pass healthcare reform, but they didn’t use it to reauthorise the federal assault weapon ban that expired in 2004. Scarred by the backlash against Obama’s characterisation of the white working class as ‘bitter people clinging to their guns’ in the 2008 campaign, gun reform wasn’t a priority. When Sandy Hook did force the federal assault weapon ban back onto the agenda in 2013, there weren’t the votes to pass it, even in the shadow of 20 dead kids.
For this time to be truly different, one of two things needs to happen. First, maybe I’m wrong and Uvalde can in fact exert enough political pressure to influence the shrinking number of moderate Republican Senators to vote for changes like background checks, red flag laws, restrictions on high-capacity magazines and raising the legal age to buy a gun to the age you can buy a drink. But history suggests that creating enough leverage to pass even incremental reforms might need a catalyst in the form of an ‘Emmet Till’ moment. In 1955, Till’s mother insisted on an open casket to show the face of her son who had been shot in the head in Mississippi for daring to speak to a white woman. That unflinching portrayal of his torture and execution was seen with hindsight as a moment that energised the modern civil rights moment.
Because the pictures of grieving parents at mass school shootings have become interchangeable, maybe a defibrillation moment for gun reform would be a high-resolution colour photo of the Robb Elementary School classroom when police officers finally opened the door. Bullets from an AR-15 are designed to destroy the bodies of adults never mind small children. The systematic murder of 19 kids and two teachers in a confined space and the wounding of many others will have created a truly gruesome slaughterhouse, the horror of which is beyond the imagination of most Americans. The faces of kids that were still recognisable could be blurred out but being forced to confront the true physical and emotional trauma of that scene might finally trigger a reassessment of the cost of allowing mentally ill teenagers to buy automatic weapons.
The second path to change is for Democrats to simply ignore federal legislation and enact tougher gun laws at the state level and then lawyer up for the inevitable Supreme Court battles. This would mirror the approach that Republicans have taken on a slew of culture war issues. Of course, the challenge is that, while the leaked opinion of Justice Alito sees no federal right to an abortion and therefore the court is willing to make it a state-level decision, this Supreme Court will surely point to the 2nd Amendment and uphold the federal right to bear arms. However, the question is how much state level discretion they will permit under the words ‘well regulated’ in that Amendment.
This issue of the right of states to regulate gun ownership may already be coming to a head in an important test case. The shooter in Uvalde would not have been able to purchase his AR-15s in the seven US states with assault weapon bans, including my home state of Connecticut. For many years the Supreme Court has refused to take up lawsuits against these bans, but in June last year a federal court overturned California’s prohibition. The Appeals Court issued a stay to allow the ban to remain in place, but that could mean the Supreme Court choosing to hear the case next year. If the Justices deem state-level assault weapon bans unconstitutional, then that would undoubtedly re-galvanise the political movements around both gun reform and minority rule.
But even if the Supreme Court bows to public pressure and permits greater divergence in state gun laws, it will just be another contribution to the ongoing political sorting of America. Rather than a melting point, America is drifting towards two increasingly homogenous ideological camps – one of which is heavily armed – glaring at each other across state lines. That is sadly not the America that I moved to 30 years ago, but at least when I send my sons off to high school each morning I won’t be quite as worried about them coming home in body bags.
Alan McIntyre is a Trustee and Patron of the Institute of Contemporary Scotland
By Alan McIntyre | 1 June 2022