I Didn't Want To Talk About Nashville
It's not just the guns, it's the gun lovers
I wasn’t going to write about the Nashville school shooting. What more is there to say?
We all know the drill by now. An unstable person—almost always a white cis male, usually with a history of domestic violence, often with a history of mental health issues—shoots up a school or a church or a grocery store or an office building with a machine gun of some kind—almost always an AR-15, usually obtained legally, often one of many—and half of the country cries out in agony and despair.
The other half immediately closes ranks, sends up thoughts and prayers, and blames, in no particular order: godlessness, fatherlessness, wokeness, transgenderism, drag queens, CRT, BLM, TikTok, Biden, Obama, the left, bad guys with guns, not enough good guys with guns, not enough teachers with guns, not enough guns, too many open doors, too many shield-less backpacks, too many pride flags, not enough God in school, not enough metal detectors in school, not enough steel doors or security guards in school, Satanism, Big Pharma, video games, movies, books they haven’t read, books they want to burn, the word “gay,” and on and on and on.
The only time they mentions guns is when they call for more of them, because we all know that when there are sharks in the water the best solution is obviously more sharks.
I wasn’t going to write about this shooting because I’ve written about shootings before. About how the NRA and their money have a stranglehold on too many politicians, about the absurdity of arming teachers, about the unexpected need for door stoppers, about the potential of leaving the country to protect my kids. It gets old, screaming into the void, so I was going to let other, smarter and more patient people tackle this one.
But I have a fair amount of followers, most of whom are parents like me, and I’ve always felt it was irresponsible to not use whatever meager platform I have to speak about the things that matter, and when you’re raising kids, almost everything matters. I couldn’t just ignore it, so instead of a long post lamenting yet another tragedy, I opted to post a video meme voicing my frustration with the constant excuses and finger pointing and rationalizing that conservatives (sorry, but it’s ALWAYS conservatives) and gun fetishists and second amendment devotees make every time there’s a shooting.
Then I saw the comments under my meme, an astonishing amount of which we’re doing the very thing my meme is mocking (I’ve embedded the meme down below), and here we are.
The comments are riddled with the exact same arguments mentioned above: it’s not guns, it’s people; it’s leftism; it’s wokeness; a good guy with a gun stopped the shooter!; guns can’t shoot by themselves; if we ban guns people will just use knives and bombs; people die in car accidents too but we don’t ban cars; criminals and evil people will always get their hands on guns; don’t be a sheep; once the government takes our guns they’ll never stop; this is America; come and get it, etc., etc., ad nauseum.
There is no penetrating that wall of resistance, the adamant, intractable refusal to consider that maybe fewer guns, maybe a more challenging path to acquire guns, might help reduce the number of shootings. Even if just by one (we’ll take it!). Despite the fact that it’s proven to help, that it’s helped in other countries that have many of the same problems we do, despite the fact that it is statistically irrefutable that broadening access to guns - and the Republicans allowance of the assault rifle ban to expire - has greatly increased the number of shooting incidents. None of that matters in the face of an archaic, probably misinterpreted, impossibly irrelevant line in the Constitution. (Never mind that most of the second amendment’s staunchest defenders have no problem bending every other, far more straightforward parts of the constitution to suit their beliefs.)
No one is pretending that harsher gun laws and stronger background checks and longer waiting periods will solve everything; this country has more than its share of problems. There is a lot of civil unrest, people are scared and depressed, mental health treatment is woefully lacking (partially because the same politicians ensuring less gun control are also voting against expanding mental healthcare or anything else that might actually address some of the roots of the problem that are always presented as their true priorities). But neither is anyone pretending that the solution is to eliminate all guns.
That’s what they always say. That’s the playbook: blanket the landscape with white noise via the perpetual recitation of the other problems we need to tackle (while they simultaneously refuse to tackle them) coupled with making straw-man arguments about the steady erosion of freedom and rights that will eventually lead to the government subjugating us all. The messaging starts with the politicians, its broadcast through the scarily effective right-wing propaganda machine, and its parroted by a huge swath of people who are so scared of one thing or another that they are blind to everything else.
It’s impossible to tell if they’re brainwashed or evil or simply stupid, but their position is so entrenched that they hardly need the politicians or FoxNews or OAN or the rest to tell them what do do anymore. They’ve got it covered. This is exactly what the NRA and the congressmen collecting the NRA’s lobbying money want - an army of acolytes to promote their messaging and fill their coffers, all at the expense of filling our coffins.
They are so worried that the government is trying to control them that they don’t realize they’re already being controlled.
They aren’t the well-regulated militia protecting us from tyranny, gun violence is the tyranny! These are the people our country needs protection from. The right to own a gun should not supersede the right to live and learn and love and pray without constantly being afraid of going shopping or going to school or going to a nightclub or going to a church.
It’s exhausting. And disheartening. And scary.
One of the reasons I started writing about parenting is because I wanted to find other people who felt the same way that I did, who were willing to skip the sentimentality and platitudes and maybe even step on some toes in the name of being honest about the trials and tribulations of raising kids. As I ranted and raved and complained and tried to be as humorously authentic as I could, I found that solidarity, and watching it grow makes me proud.
And then I post something like the meme below and watch it all go up in flames because an unfathomable amount of people are more comfortable with children dying than with adding a little bit of paperwork to the gun ownership process.
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Not really feeling this section today. But Succession is amazing and I’m so glad it’s back.
I'm a new paid subscriber to your Substack, so if this is a repeat comment, please excuse it! To me, it's not complicated. Republicans don't care. Period. Look at Congressman Ogles (the House member for the district in Nashville where the latest mass school shooting happened), who just for the 2022 holiday season posted a photo of himself and his family in front of their Christmas Tree, armed with assault rifles (if you want to find the image, it's very easy to do so, but I refuse to link to it). What says "Holiday Spirit" and "Peace, Love and Goodwill towards all" more than a bunch of people holding assault rifles??????
Again, to repeat, Republicans don't care (and yes, I know that I'm generalizing, but until/unless the national party demonstrates SOME will to stand against its NRA benefactor, I think that I'm well within my rights to do so). They profess to love the children and to want to protect them, but apparently that "love" doesn't extend to making sure that those kids come home from school alive, or at least without bullet holes. Their "solution", then, now and forevermore, is to offer trite, useless, meaningless "thoughts and prayers" and to then call for MORE guns. Because, the fact that this is the only so-called "advanced democracy" to have this type of carnage happen with mind-numbing regularity is just A-OK with them. It's vomit-inducing and infuriating.
As a mother and educator, I too decided as much as this is close to home and in the wheelhouse of my newsletter, I couldn't. I didn't know what more to offer to people so committed to ideals and policies that do more harm than good. I was in my classroom when Sandy Hook happened. I was in my classroom when Sante Fe happened less than 20 miles from my school. I was in my classroom when Uvalde took 20 more lives. I've had my building go on lockdown due to threats in our neighborhood. I've received school emails from my daughter's middle school saying there WAS yet ANOTHER lockdown on her campus, but hey, it's all good now, no worries. After 20 years of love and laughter in the classroom, I can say with sadness I retired, so I wouldn't be in my classroom when the next tragedy took more young lives, as happened in Nashville AGAIN this week. My heart is too big and the response of society too slow, or perhaps, NOT FORTH COMING AT ALL!!