Two weeks that have reignited America's perennial conversation.
 | By Kristin Lin Opinion Editing Fellow |
Yet the vulnerability and fear so many Americans feel in the wake of these tragedies is not an aberration. It's a precondition of life in the United States, writes the columnist Frank Bruni. |
As the pandemic wanes, we are beginning to return to normal. "Normal includes mass shootings. Take that in," he says. "That's not political cant. That's brutal truth." |
The shootings prompt Americans to ask, yet again: When it comes to enacting basic gun safety reforms, why is America in a state of perpetual paralysis? |
For one, there are a lot of guns in the U.S. — more than one gun per American, he notes. But there are other variables too: the tyranny of the minority, the role of the Second Amendment and even the psychology behind how we think about guns. |
"Many Americans do not see gun violence in such black-and-white terms, because they do not see gun violence as having to do with guns at all," he writes. |
That's the number of years that have almost passed since the Columbine massacre, which happened in April 1999. I keep thinking about something the historian Kathleen Belew observed on Twitter this week: "The Boulder suspect was born three days before the Columbine shooting. That's how long we've failed to take action." |
The degree of inaction is perhaps reflected in the resounding relevance of Nick Kristof's now 4-year-old column, "How to Reduce Shootings," which takes stock of America's gun violence epidemic and makes creative recommendations for how the country can advance meaningful reforms. "We all agree on some kinds of curbs on guns," he writes. "So the question isn't whether we will restrict firearms, but where to draw the line and precisely which ones to restrict." |
Nick revisited that column this week. "This essay originally ran in 2017, after a shooter killed 26 people in a Texas church, but the issue is still tragically relevant — and will remain so until America tightens its gun safety policies," he writes in an updated introduction to the piece. |
There's a tidiness to these numbers that I find unsettling; they represent not just objects and years but also entire lives. I'm haunted by how the last conversation Hyun Jung Grant had with her son, Randy Park, was to ask whether he had eaten — how that's what my own mother has asked me in countless phone calls. Or how the daughter of one victim in the Boulder shooting tweeted photos of her father walking her down the aisle at her wedding last summer — and how the hope of that day was stolen so swiftly and arbitrarily. |
The only thing more haunting is how these numbers will continue to grow until something changes. In the meantime, the answers we must demand in response to each death will only become more urgent. |
Here's what we're focusing on today: |
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