How many more have to die before we care enough to do something?
On Tuesday, May 24, an 18-year-old kid in Uvalde, Texas, shot his grandmother then got into his truck and drove over to Robb Elementary School where he proceeded to murder 19 fourth-graders and two teachers. The killer, who had barricaded himself inside two adjoining classrooms, was then shot to death by local and federal officers in a specialized tactical team who forced their way inside the classrooms he had barricaded himself inside.
It was the second-deadliest school shooting since shooting at Sandy Hook in 2012.
It was the third mass shooting in the U.S. in 10 days: On May 14, an 18-year-old kid drove some 200 miles from his home to a grocery store in a primarily Black neighborhood in Buffalo, N.Y., where he murdered 10 Black people and injured three others. The following day, a 68-year-old man opened fire on the congregants at Irvine Taiwanese Presbyterian Church in California, killing one and injuring five others.
Ten days. Three mass shootings. Thirty-two dead. Nine others injured.
Are we “great again” yet? Are we “free” yet?
Tuesday night, after reading about the shooting in Uvalde, I sat at my desk, fighting back the nausea and losing the battle against tears. I kept thinking about those helpless, terrified children, trapped in a classroom with a monster. I thought about what must have been going through their minds as they saw their classmates, their friends, dying around them, knowing they would be next.
I thought about the adults, the two teachers. Did they have time to even try to protect those children? I know that protecting their students would have been their immediate instinct. But how could they even begin to in the face of such brutality and evil?
What about the students and teachers in the other classrooms? You know they could hear the gunshots. You know they could hear the screams. They will live with that horror the rest of their lives.
I thought of all the teachers I know and love, in my family and among my friends. I wanted to call every one of them and beg them not to walk back into a classroom again. Not ever.
As I sat there, I logged onto Twitter to read updates, watching as the death toll rose higher and higher as the night wore on. I read how families were being asked to provide DNA samples so their dead children could be identified because some of the bodies were not recognizable.
“Not recognizable.” The words made my stomach literally clench and twist, made me dizzy.
As I was reading updates and statements from elected officials, I found the account of a journalist, a young woman, who was reporting from the community center in Uvalde where families were sent to wait for word on their children. The thread of her posts included photos of some of those families, people gathered outside the community center, bound together in unfathomable grief.
And then someone commented on her posts: “Did you get permission to post photos of those people?” And another, and another, demanding that she leave them alone, give them their privacy, stop intruding on their grief.
It made me angry. Maybe they actually were saying that out of sympathy for the families. But it seemed more likely to me that they were telling her to stop because they didn’t want to have to feel that grief themselves.
The fact is, that reporter was doing her job. In a time like this, it is the journalists’ job to bear witness, to stand in the middle of the horror, to let it wash over them and then to turn and show that horror to the world. It is the journalists’ job to bear witness and to create and keep a record of what happened, because there are people out there — like Alex Jones, for example — who will try to claim it never really happened and that even if it did happen, it wasn’t really that bad.
It is the journalists’ job because the rest of us need to feel that horror, too. We need to feel that grief that burns your very soul; we have to hear the hideous details, and we have to think, “What if that were my child — my parent or my sibling or my friend — who died so horribly there in that classroom. We have to know because we have to care.
We have to care enough to make it stop.
And the fact that it happened, again, proves we don’t care enough yet.
How many more people have to die before we do?
Tammye Nash is managing editor of Dallas Voice. The opinions expressed here are her own.
Brilliant analysis, Tammye. Trust me, most of us do feel that horror and grief – unbearable grief. I just wish those who support military style weapons on our streets could be forced to SEE those children’s bodies and to HEAR those screams. THIS is not a well-regulated militia. THIS is American exceptionalism at its very WORST. Thank you for writing this.
Where were the police assigned to the school?
Why was the door unlocked – or more likely – who let this guy in?
Where’s the video footage of that door? We’ll probably never get to see it.
Why did the entire police force just stand around outside for an hour while of this was taking place?
They should be fired and prosecuted for dereliction of duty.
Did the reporter bear witness to the fact that border patrol agents arrived earlier than initially reported, but Uvalde police tried to prevent them from going into the school? Why?
Did the reporter bare witness to the fact that Uvalde police – who had tactical gear, body armor, and weapons – didn’t want to go inside because “they could have been shot”?
I’m sorry, isn’t that their FUCKING JOB? Parents were willing (actually begging) to take weaponry and gear from the police and do it themselves, but were stopped. Why?
Did the reporter bear witness to the fact that Uvalde police got their own kids out of the building before border patrol stopped the shooter.
I’ll bet you anything we find out that this kid was already a “person of interest” to the FBI and/or local law enforcement.
I’ll also bet we find out that he was on (or coming off of) some type of anti-depressant or SSRI; an extremely common factor in mass shootings that no one ever talks about.
Isn’t it odd how these mass shootings seem to happen in schools, churches and other “gun-free” zones? How convenient.
If the teachers had been armed, this could have been stopped.
Interesting fact: The Uvalde school system is part of a new program that uses AI to monitor social media to root out potential mass shooters and other threats. How did it miss this dude, who posted pictures of himself online *with weapons* and was threatening to kill people? It just “missed” him.
It’s becoming pretty clear this was (yet another) false flag operation, where the police were ordered to stand down, in order to convince you that guns should be outlawed.
They never scrutinize the actual shooter and his problems. Instead, they always lay the blame on law abiding citizens who own guns.
It’s the “gun’s” fault.
NEWSFLASH: banning law-abiding citizens from owning guns will not stop criminals and lunatics from acquiring a gun. Criminals do not obey the law. I’ll say that again:
CRIMINALS DO NOT OBEY THE LAW. This is something far-left liberals just can’t seem to understand. If you think that’s actually a viable solution, you’re delusional.
How’s that been working out with the laws banning illegal drugs?
Annual deaths from drug overdoses now outnumber gun related deaths. Where’s your outrage?
Not coincidentally, a large percentage of those gun related deaths are committed by people on drugs – mostly illegal, but some *prescribed*. Gee, I wonder if there’s a correlation? Where’s your outrage?
Why are you only outraged when the media tells you to be outraged? Where was your article when a black man shot people up in a New York subway?
Where was your article when a black man mowed down 60+ people at a Christmas parade? What about the idiot who did the same thing at SXSW?
Shall we ban cars, too?
Why did the news drop those stories so quickly?
Did the perpetrators fail the media-approved profile? Not right-wing enough? Not Caucasian enough?
Or was it because the victims weren’t minorities?
It’s also pretty telling that the anti-gun wingnuts screaming “how many have to die?!”, are the same people running around advocating for after-birth abortion. That right there is some next-level insane.
They don’t actually care about kids. They care about an agenda; the agenda to disarm this country so that our tyrannical government can round us all up and put us in detention camps like their doing in China, Australia, and Canada. For God’s sake, WAKE UP.
Why don’t the politicians ditch *their* security? You know, lead by example. Hypocrites. They want themselves protected, but not you.
As someone of note said this weekend:
We defend our president………………………………with guns.
We defend out congressmen………………………..with guns
We defend our governors……………………………..with guns
We defend our celebrities…………………………….with guns
We defend our sporting events……………………with guns
We defend our banks……………………………………..with guns
We defend our courts…………………………………….with guns
We defend our airports………………………………….with guns
We defend gold and jewelry stores……………..with guns
We defend our children………………………………….with a sign that says:
“THIS IS A GUN FREE ZONE”
….and then call someone with a gun, after all hell breaks loose.