It’s started. The unconscionable and cruel “if only’s.” Especially about the police.
The Uvalde, Texas massacre and others like it can be blamed for but one reason: our gun laws are immoral and insane. By assigning any blame to the police, we distract from that dispositive and ugly fact.
If police departments around the country can learn better tactics from what happened at Uvalde or Buffalo or Parkland or Sandy Hook, I’m all for it.
But by turning our attention to mistakes the police may have made, we change nothing except to sap attention and energy away from the insanity of our gun laws and the cowardice of those who support them.
This morning I read a piece by David French in the Dispatch. His point was that when you put on a uniform you have to be prepared to die in the line of duty. He accused the police at the Uvalde massacre scene of cowardice. (His words were “failure of courage” and “no other moral choice,” as he danced around the word “cowardice,” when that was what he plainly meant.)
But how do you expect the police to act when they are severely outmatched by the lethality of the weaponry used by the criminals?
Blaming the police also seems like a terrible way to attract people to serve in our police forces. They are already underpaid for a dangerous and essential job.
Our gun laws have placed us in a more twisted version of Shirly Jackson’s famed dystopian short story, “The Lottery.” In that story, villagers gather once a year to select at random one person to be stoned to death by the community. At least in Jackson’s village, the blood lust and the killing is controlled to one person per year.
In America now, we live in “The Lottery” every day of the year.
We both agree and disagree. I read the French piece a little differently than you. I thought he was addressing, writ small and admittedly with great anger, the Uvalde’s police departments own training manual’s explicit demand for courage and immediate action from its officers. But he/we should all take a breath.
It’s easy to blame cowardice, but it’s also not necessarily true that the officers at the scene acted in a cowardly way. What if they had a legitimate reason to believe that they would be endangering the lives of more children by charging in blindly? We don’t know for sure what happened and we shouldn’t label people as cowards until we do.
The murder of children is a heart wrenching tragedy. It makes us angry at the inexplicable and unchangeable – so we do what humans do. We lash out. We blame the doctor. We blame the lawyer. We blame ourselves. We blame God. All of whom may bear a degree of responsibility.
Where I do agree with you, fully, is that anything that distracts us from ending horrific tragedies such as the one in Uvalde is a horribly wrong-headed thing – including blaming the police, who did not cause the tragedy, but may/may not have responded to it improperly. Gun reform might help, so let’s do it. Now. But it’s wrong to focus with such singularity on gun reform as if this relatively simple idea would cure what is a complex and horrible disease - as wrong as it is to focus on police performance. Even meaningful gun law reform alone won’t stop these tragedies - disobeying the law is not an impenetrable barrier for those intent on their evil. Neither will red flag laws alone nor focusing on alienated men alone stop the tragedies - just as anti- bulling campaigns, as important and widespread as they are, didn’t stop the tragedies. But collectively, all of these things together, might help. Maybe there are other solutions we haven’t considered. I don’t know. It’s a highly complex problem that does not loan itself to one solution answers. And we shouldn’t deal with our anger by allowing ourselves to believe that it does – “If only”. We should face these horrors with a sense of seriousness and purpose that is not distracted either by the fury of our own anger (calling others cowards) or are own desperate desire to believe that if we just did one thing differently we will be able to cast out the demon within us.
Australia, New Zealand, and Great Britain managed to deal with the issue after school shootings.
There is no good reason guns of mass destruction should be legally available in America.