Note: This post talks about guns, and some of my experiences with them and opinions about them, some of which are, let’s say, charged. This post may not be appropriate for everyone. Reader discretion is advised.
I have a few different stories about guns. The first come from Australia. Most Americans are vaguely aware that Australia has adopted fairly tight regulations around guns as a consequence of a mass shooting several years ago. It does indeed have tight restrictions, but it is indeed still quite possible to own guns in Australia. I know this because my mother shot competitively while we lived there. She applied and was granted a license to own and shoot pistols for sport. She was actually quite good at it.
The process involved plenty of paperwork and questions. It also involved having a new safe installed in our house under close supervision to make sure it was properly bolted to the wall, and couldn’t be accessed improperly. But even as a foreign immigrant and a mere amateur, her permit was granted. Of course, after she got her license, she had to use it often enough to prove that she was in fact shooting for sport. As a child I spent time at pistol clubs and shooting arenas watching my mother compete.
Occasionally we would be subject to police inspections to see that my mother’s pistols were being stored according to regulation. The officers were perfectly courteous about the whole affair, and often gave me and my brother tokens, like coloring pages and trading cards featuring glossy color photographs of police helicopters, and the off-road vehicles they used in the outback.
Not everyone was satisfied with the way things worked. Many of the people we met a the various pistol clubs grumbled about the restrictions, and more broadly, the vilification of their hobby. Several others, mostly schoolmates and friends of schoolmates, thought that the restrictions weren’t enough; that there was no reason for anyone outside of the military to have a gun (our local police, when they carried weapons, mostly used tasers when on ordinary patrol, and even this was widely seen as too intimidating for police), and certainly no reason to keep one at home.
The balance struck by the law was a compromise. Very few were completely happy, but almost everyone agreed that it was preferable to one extreme or the other. Those who would shoot for sport could still do so, albeit with some safety precautions, and checks to prevent the notion of sport from becoming a loophole. Those who lived in the outback, and were in danger from wildlife, or too far away from settlements to rely on police, were still permitted arms to defend themselves. However, one could not simply decide to purchase a gun on a mere whim.
My second story, which is quite a bit longer, was several years later, on an unassuming Friday in December, almost four years after moving back to the United States. Like most days, I was sick, more reeling than recovering from a recurrent sinus infection that had knocked me off my feet for most of the first semester. I had slept through most of the morning, but after a hearty brunch felt well enough to try my hand going into school for the afternoon. My first sign that something might be amiss was a news alert; a national headline flagged for my attention because it was local. Police were responding to an incident at an elementary school in neighboring Newtown. There were no details to be had at that exact moment, so I shuffled out the door towards school.
My second sign that something was wrong were the police cars parked around the school building. I was stopped getting out of the car, by the police officer I knew from middle school DARE sessions. He shouted from where he stood behind the squad car, which was positioned between the curb and the school doors, as if to barricade the entrance, and told me that the school was on lockdown.
I hesitated, car door still open, and asked if it was about whatever was going on in Newtown. His face stiffened, and he asked what I knew. I explained the vague news alert. After a moment’s hesitation, he said that there had been an attack, and it was possible that there was a second gunman. Hence the lockdown. So far there had been no reports from our town, but we were close enough that even if the suspect had fled on foot, as was suspected, we were still potentially a target. Classes were still going on inside, but the school buildings were all sealed, and police had been dispatched to secure key sites around town.
I looked back to the car, then at my schoolbag, then at the school. I asked if I should go home, if he school was on lockdown. The officer hesitated for a long moment, looking me over, and then looking at the building. In a low, almost conspiratorial voice, he told me to go ahead in. He knew me, after all. He cracked a halfhearted joke, saying that I wasn’t the suspect they were looking for, and that I should move along. I chuckled politely.
Class was never so quiet and so disorderly at the same time. Any pretense of productive work had disappeared. Despite classes still nominally occurring, the bell schedule had been suspended; either because they wanted to minimize the number of students in the halls in the event that a full lockdown had to be initiated, or because students were already so distracted and distraught that it didn’t particularly matter if they wasted time in their classrooms for period six or period seven.
My teacher kept a slide up on the smart board with all of the key points from the lesson we had been supposed to cover, just in case anyone wanted to distract themselves with schoolwork. In the back of the room, students paced anxiously, awaiting phone calls or messages from friends and loved ones with news. In the corner, a girl I was tangentially friends with wept, trying every few moments to regain her composure, only to lose it anew in a fresh wave of sobbing. Someone she knew had lost a sibling. A few other girls, who were better friends with her than I, sat with her.
In the center of the room, a handful of students had pulled chairs together in a loose circle, and were trying to scrape together all the information they could between themselves, exchanging screenshots and headlines on cell phones and laptops. The idea, I think, was that if we knew what was going on, that it would make the news easier to take. That, and the idea that doing something, applying this familiar method or coordination and research, gave us back some small modicum of power over this thing being wrought upon us.
The teacher sent us home without any homework, and waived the assignments that would have been due soon. In a moment that reflected why he was one of my favorite teachers, he took a moment to urge all of us to look after ourselves first, to take time off or see the guidance office if we felt we needed to. The next day back, the guidance office brought in extra counselors and therapy dogs. Several dark jokes circulated that this level of tragedy was the only thing that could cause the teachers of AP classes to let up on homework.
The mood in the hallways over the next several days was so heavy it was palpable. It seemed that students moved slowly, as though physically wading through grief, staring either at the floor, or at some invisible point a thousand yards off. You would see students at lunch tables weeping silently alone or in groups. I remember in one instance, a girl who was walking down the hallway suddenly halted, and broke down right there. Her books fell out of her hands and her head and shoulders slumped forward as she started crying. One of the extra counselors wove his way through the stopped crowd and silently put a protective arm around her, and walked her to the counseling office.
Several days later, the unthinkable happened as, without any kind of instruction or official sanction, our school dressed up in the colors of our rival, Newtown High School. Even the cheerleaders and football players, those dual bastions of school tribalism, donned the uniforms of their enemies, not as a prank, but in solidarity. It was a bold statement covered in all the papers, and captured on local TV news.
Despite having memories of the period, it’s a bit of a stretch to say that I actually remember the attacks of September 11th. Certainly I took note of the marines stationed at the consulate, and the way they regarded even my infant brother with the kind of paranoid suspicion that is learned from loss. I recall how in the days after, people would recognize our American accents on the street, and stop us to offer condolences, solidarity, and hugs. But I don’t have enough memories from before that to form a meaningful context, at least not from my own experiences. Some bad people had done a bad thing, and people were sad and angry and scared, but I didn’t know enough to feel those things myself except as a reflection of the adults around me.
I imagine that people felt on September 11th the way we felt on the day of Sandy Hook. For that matter, I imagine that is roughly how those who lived through it felt after Pearl Harbor. We had been attacked. Our community had been attacked, savagely and deliberately, without warning, and without any apparent reason other than the unknowable agenda of a probable lunatic. A bad person did a bad thing, and now children and teachers were dead, and our whole community was grieving and looking for answers.
There was a caveat to our shared grief. Not a silver lining; it was an unadulterated tragedy, without qualification. But a footnote. We saw the media attention that this local tragedy was getting. We saw the world grieving with us. For my part, I had old friends half a world away, who didn’t didn’t know anything about US geography, but who knew I lived in the same general area as the places suddenly mentioned on the news calling me. We saw the massive reverberations, and we were comforted in the fact that we were not alone.
There was no silver lining. But the caveat was that the same tragedy that had touched us personally had set things in motion on a larger scale. Our world had been shaken up, but things were righting themselves, and in doing so it seemed like there would have to be consequences. The adults seemed to agree that this was a tragedy, and that it could not be allowed to happen again. The outcry seemed to demand change, which we took to mean that those who had lost would not have lost in vain, and that there would be new laws so that we could put this incident behind us, and feel safe again.
We waited for the change that seemed so inevitable that most hardly even bothered advocating for it. It seemed so blatantly obvious that we needed to update our laws to keep guns out of the hands of madmen. Perhaps because we were children, we took it as given that all those adults who had sent their hopes and prayers would realize what was painfully, tearfully obvious to us: that the current balance on gun control had failed miserably, and needed to be renegotiated. As the police and then the media dug in to the details of which loopholes and lapses had been exploited to create this tragedy, we assumed, perhaps naively, that our leaders would take note, and close them.
We waited in vain. The promised reforms never came. As the immediate sting faded for those who hadn’t been close enough to see any kind of firsthand, or even, as in my case, secondhand, consequences, people stopped asking questions. And those who did, instead of focusing on questions like why a madman could access unsecured weapons of war, or why such weapons exist in abundance among civilians in the first places, focused on other questions, like why a school isn’t build to withstand a literal siege, and whether the people who are stricken by grief because of this are even real people at all.
Instead of a safer society with fewer possibilities for mass murder, our government helped to fortify our school, replacing the windows and glass doors we passed through each day on the way to our classrooms with bulletproof glass and reinforced steel, under supervision of increased police and armed security. More dark jokes circulated through the student body, comparing our building to a prison, or a Maginot fortress. A handful of brave students and other adults did speak out, gathering signatures and organizing demonstrations, but they faced fierce backlash, and in some instances, came under attack from conspiracy theorists who accused them of orchestrating the whole tragedy.
For many people I knew, who were motivated by grief and a need for closure, this broke them. To have the worst day of their life scrutinized, torn apart, twisted, perverted, and then thrown back in their face with hostility and accusation was simply too much. The toxicity of conspiracy theorists and professional pundits, coupled with the deafening silence of our leaders, broke their resolve. And so the tragedy at Newtown became just another event in a long list of tragedies mentioned occasionally in passing on anniversaries or during political debates. The camera crews left, and life went on, indifferent to those of us still grieving or looking for answers.
Many of the people I knew who were most passionate about seeing change in the immediate aftermath eventually let up, not because their opinions changed, but because they lost hope. New mass shootings, even school shootings, happened, pushing our local tragedy further and further into distant memory. Nothing happened, or at least, nothing large enough on a large enough scale to shift the balance from the current decidedly pro-gun stance, happened. Those of us who waited after Newtown, or whatever other tragedy touched them personally, as there have been so many, still wait, while those of us who have seen other systems work, possibly even work better, silently lament.
It is perhaps worth reiterating explicitly what has been mentioned previously: any conclusion on gun regulation will be a compromise. This is not merely a realistic view of politics, but a matter of reality. No country, even those cited as having overly draconian laws, has completely outlawed firearms, for essentially the same reasons that no country has completely outlawed painkillers. Every country wants to ensure that sportsmen (and women) can hone their craft, that serious hunters can enjoy their hobby, and citizens can defend themselves, even if they disagree to what extent these activities themselves ought be regulated.
Every solution is a compromise; a tradeoff. And naturally, the balance which is best suited to one country may not be as effective in another. I do not suppose that the Australian system, which despite its ample criticisms, did mostly work for Australia, could be copied wholesale for the United States, at least not without serious teething issues. Yet I also think it is obvious to all that the current balance is untenable. With so many unsecured weapons in so many untrained hands, there are simply too many points of failure.
Perhaps the solution is to focus not on restricting firearms purchases, but on training and storage. Maybe this is an issue of better an more consistent enforcement of existing laws. There is also certainly a pressing need for improvements in mental health, though the kind of comprehensive system that might conceivably be able to counterbalance the inordinate ease of access to weapons; the kind of system that can identify, intervene, and treat a sick person, possibly before they have any symptoms, probably against their will, would require not only enormous year to year funding, but the kind of governmental machinery that is fundamentally inimical to the American zeitgeist (see: American attitudes towards socialized medicine).
Every solution is a tradeoff. Some are better than others, but none are perfect. But one thing is clear: the current solution is unacceptable. Scores of children murdered is not an acceptable tradeoff for being legally permitted to buy firearms at Walmart. If ensuring that students of the future do not have to cower in ad-hoc shelters means eliminating some weapons from a hobbyist’s arsenal, then so be it. If preventing the next soft target terrorist attack requires us to foot the bill for extra police to get out into the communities and enforce the laws before the next crisis, then so be it. And if preventing these tragedies which are unique to our country requires the erection of a unique and unprecedented mental health machinery, which will cost an inordinate amount as it tries to address a gun problem without touching guns, then so be it. But a new solution is needed, and urgently.
