We’re out of words because we’re out of thoughts because we said them all and spent them all after Columbine and Sandy Hook and Parkland. The shock was the lack of shock you felt when you heard. You indicted yourself: My heart has gotten cold. No, it hasn’t, but the past quarter century it’s been numbing up.
We underestimate how demoralizing these shootings are. They hurt our faith in America (why can’t we handle this?) and the future (what will it be like if this continues?). And there’s the new part of the story that is disturbing, this sense—we’ve had it before—that the police reliably come to the scene but they’ve got some kind of process or procedure that keeps them from fighting their way to the actual site of the shooting. Parents were massing at the school in Uvalde and screaming, “Go in, go in!” They themselves would have, and were possibly stopped. This aspect of the story is not yet clear but you can’t see the emerging videos and not think something went very wrong.
I love cops because I love John Wayne. (Joan Didion: “John Wayne was supposed to give the orders. ‘Let’s ride,’ he said . . . ‘Forward ho.’” ) If they’re not John Wayne—commonsensical, gutsy, quick, able to size up the situation—I don’t think I love them. I don’t think anyone else does, either.
* * *
Conservatives were quick to criticize President Joe Biden in his speech the night of the shootings, saying he didn’t “bring us together” and “heal the nation’s wounds.” But what exactly could he say, could any president say at this point, that will bring us together and heal the wounds? They were faulting him for the impossible. There isn’t a bag of magic-secret speechwriter words, you don’t pull them from a hat and throw the fairy dust on the listeners. A fair criticism is that Biden’s speech evoked a problem without offering a way through it.
He seems to have concluded the right response to the moment was to enact what he felt was the audience’s rage and indignation. So he emoted, demanding answers to questions. “When in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?” He is “sick and tired.” “Where in God’s name is our backbone?”
But, if I can generalize, it is people of the left whose immediate response to the shootings at Uvalde was indignation and rage. Everyone else was feeling something different, depression and anxiety. Because they don’t see a way out, and they’re worried, and don’t have an illusion that attacking someone will make it better. When the president enacts what one part of the spectrum feels, which he also no doubt feels, everyone else will feel to some degree excluded.
He doesn’t mean to be divisive, he just doesn’t get the other guys anymore. “We have to do more.” What, exactly? What people needed that night was a kindly grownup plan from someone above the fray. And many would have wanted to be enleagued—marshal the troops unleashed by the trauma, let them be part of something that might make things better.
Normal Americans are not fixated on policy and don’t know the exact state of play on gun law. What bill might help?
Democrats should stop using the manipulative, scare-quote phrase “gun lobby.” The gun lobby is a ghost of itself, done in by internal and external forces, and everyone in Washington knows this. The problem is Americans who feel immediate aversion to gun control because they don’t trust those who would do the controlling. The challenge isn’t “standing up,” it’s persuading.
Pretty much everyone knows we have too many guns in America, more than we have people. Everyone knows too many are in sick hands. If deeper background checks and a longer waiting period after purchase might help, move. I don’t have to be persuaded, I’m for them, not because I think they will solve the problem but they might get us an inch on the yardstick, and that’s something. I suspect a lot of people would see it like that.
But persuade, do the work. It is always the hard work of politics. And yes, move to ban assault weapons again, those sinister killing-machine weapons of war. We have about 400 million guns in America, do we have to keep adding these? Why don’t we just stop.
Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas said Wednesday that Texas has a long history of letting 18-year-olds have long guns. That is true. He also said cops, after the shooting, told him they’re seeing a crisis in mental health in young people. That’s true too, it’s all around them, all around all of us.
But Mr. Abbott should listen to himself more closely. It is one thing to let an 18-year-old have a rifle to shoot rattlers in 1962. It is another thing to allow an 18-year-old in the middle of a mental-health crisis to buy an AR-15, which is what the sick Uvalde shooter bought on his 18th birthday.
Republicans, you are saying every day that there’s a mental-health crisis and, at the same time, that we shouldn’t stop putting long guns in the hands of young men. Policies must evolve to meet circumstances. You must evolve.
I end here.
I continue in a kind of puzzled awe at my friends who proceed through life without faith, who get up and go forward without it. How do you do that? I tell the young: I have been alive for some years and this is the only true thing, that there is a God and he is good and you are here to know him, love him and show your feeling through your work and how you live. That it is the whole mysterious point. And the ridiculous story, the father, the virgin, the husband, the baby—it is all, amazingly, true, and the only true thing.
Uvalde is a town of about 16,000 people and if I’m counting right about 40 places of Christian worship, all kinds, Evangelical, Catholic, Mainline. I keep seeing the pictures—a group of four middle-aged men in jeans and T-shirts, standing near the school, arms around each other, heads bent in prayer. And the women sitting on the curb near the school and sobbing, a minister in a gray suit hunched down with them, ministering. And the local Catholic church the night of the shootings—people came that night, especially women, because they know it’s the only true thing and they know they are loved, regarded, part of something, not alone. I don’t mean here “the consolations of faith,” I mean the truth is its own support. Consolation is not why you believe but is a fact of belief and helps all who have it live in the world and withstand it. I am so glad for the people of Uvalde this weekend for only one thing, that so many have that.
Once I saw a painting—outsider art, crude, acrylic, made by some madman. There were splayed bodies and ghost-blots above each body, which depicted their souls. They were shooting upward—happy, free of gravity, rising toward Heaven.
Haven’t seen the painting since, think of it a lot, want it to be how it was in that classroom, all the children’s souls free to go home.