American Skin

On the tragic gun clockwork

I hate guns. Every time a deranged kid decides to turn a school into a battlefield I forget how to breathe for a little while. The response below was written after the Uvalde mass shooting. My notebooks show that I have penned something after almost every gun tragedy, but I can’t do it anymore. There have been too many crimes and there will be many more. The names of the towns will simply be replaced, along with the type of public building and the number of victims. Winder, Georgia is the latest place to make the list. One day, I hope the full weight of shame cracks the gun spirt in America like an open sore, blistering with the sharp, crimson red heat from the mass of cretinous bullshit that sustained the daft desire to live in a country with such putrid violence.

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The following reflection was offered from Elizabeth Bruenig, a staff writer at The Atlantic, before trembling at the thought itself and unable to complete it.

“The fact that the shooter was apparently barricaded into a single classroom… means that there was a last child…”

The screams are coming from Uvalde this time, a small Texas town that now joins one of the most wicked and odious lists in existence. The paradox of the unpredictability and yet foreseeable essence of these heinous crimes has already taken its place in the familiar corner of our collective consciousness.

“It’s only a matter of time” — an expression that Americans are forced to accept to be dovetailed to mass shootings. It’s appropriate because everything about these tragedies feels like clockwork. The pang of heartbreak that permeates through households across the country, the subsequent and transient gun control discussion in the media, and the inevitable inaction by elected officials. All the while, a small band of parents have to attune their life with the fact that their child, the baby they once held in their arms not even a decade prior, has just been slaughtered.

For all its glory, for all its distinction, America has proven to be inept at passing gun legislation when the torso, limbs, and faces of innocent children are blown to bits. These were kids hunted like animals. The brutal nature of these atrocities makes one wonder: what would have to happen for change to occur? Is there something worse than this? Surely, that index is scant, and mentioning the acts that are worthy candidates would just add to the already omnipresent nausea.

Gun control debates used to be engaging. There used to be nuance, and there used to be significant weight to the consideration of a “good guy with a gun” and a “castle doctrine” versus the “duty to retreat”. Then, like the bodies they can’t defend or protect, the tautologies started to pile up. Arguments that say criminals will never obey the law, something that Tucker Carlson squealed into the camera last night, are just empty claims attempting to guard those precious AR-15’s. While law schools groan in disbelief, legislators are busy parroting the exact same lines. This callow line of reasonsing begs the idiotic question: why even have any laws at all?

But now, the proposals are less shadowy in their attempt to hide gun fetishization. Arm the teachers. Besiege the schools. And it’s the striking dedication to these militaristic solutions that has broken the script of gun apologists. It was never about the arguments. It was never about the lives lost. It was never about the idea of an ideal commonwealth. Instead, it is the desire for a society with violence. There’s an inherent risk in America, and perhaps it was engraved at the moment of victory of the Revolutionary War, when our freedom was born out of blood. And now the second amendment serves as a lapidary for the character of the United States. Advocates that side with the NRA — of no government encroachment on the right to bear arms — imagine a derivative world view. One that has kindergarten classes patrolled by armed guards. One that lives on the precipice of a threat from fellow citizens. Instead of trying to at least marginally extinguish the problem by subtracting the amount of firearms, which has been proven to work across the world (and even before Bill Clinton’s law met its sunset date), this kind of reply is to aggrandize the role and circulation of guns in daily life.

The blame of failed gun legislation is solely on Congress. The only description President Obama could muster was that it was a “shameful day” when laws to limit assault weapons, magazines, and expand background checks all failed in the Senate after the Sandy Hook massacre. A politician is necessarily responsive to the beliefs of their constituents, but they are elected to lead, not follow. To transfer the “reason” for collapsed gun laws to the American people is simply too reductionist and at cross purposes with the reality of the system in place. Every day the gun lobby places a price on the innocent lives of children and other future victims across the country with their contributions to bulwark gun regulation. The lust for power has won out every time, after every travesty.

The following is a haunting passage from an interview with a mom who lost her first-grade son at Sandy Hook, as she recalls looking down at her lifeless boy at his viewing. It embodies the sinister aftermath of her hell, and how its not just emotional, but political:

I remember looking at his hand, holding his hand, and seeing the little torn cuticle that he had from where he’d been picking at his hands, which was one of his habits. His very long lashes sitting on his cheeks. And some of the makeup that they put on — I remember looking at his lips and just being very conscious of the different color of them. And seeing that later on politicians and celebrities I would meet — that same kind of makeup — it always triggered me.

To notice the same kind of makeup on politicians is a particular kind of cruelty—a physical sign of mere performance and lack of sincerity. To apply a glow to a vacancy. It’s the complexion of a puppet. Of an empty shirt being prodded by external forces. And it’s the hue of an actor on stage playing a villain, where morality is warped to fit a narrative and unable to be directed elsewhere in a predetermined plot.

Regrettably, the clockwork subsists. Many of us are bereft of hope that posterity will be a safer civilization, and so we continue to grieve, the one function we have learned to do so well. The only thing left to do is vote. Meanwhile, we can daydream for future generations that all present gun owners will want to spend eternity with their beloved possessions, and will carry all of their treasured firearms with them into their own graves.