Dec. 19—Once again, the season when we sing about “peace on earth, good will to men” has been punctuated by a school shooting.
This time, the horror took place at a private, Christian school in Madison, Wisconsin. As I write, we know that at least three people—including the suspect—are dead and a minimum of five others were wounded.
Police say the suspected shooter was a student. They either don’t know or don’t want to say what a possible motive was—if there even was one that might make sense to the rest of us, that is.
It was at least the 488th mass shooting—using a minimum of four people being shot as the standard for inclusion on this tragic list—in the United States this year.
And, when the shooter opened fire, there still were two weeks of 2024 to go.
That number doubtless will grow before the new year begins.
It also was the 322nd school shooting in America this year. The only thing likely to keep that number from climbing much is the coming holiday break when students stop coming from class.
There is a numbing regularity to these horrors.
Mass shootings in other industrialized nations occur only rarely.
Here in the United States, though, they are, on average, a more than daily occurrence. We have become so accustomed to them that we think nothing of demanding that elementary school students still young enough to believe in Santa Claus take part in active-shooter drills and learn how to seek safe shelter should someone with a perfectly legal military-style weapon show up in their classroom doorway.
We somehow have come to think of this as normal.
It isn’t.
Other countries have figured out ways to balance personal freedom and public safety. They know how to accommodate the legitimate needs and rights of hunters and sportsmen without making students, churchgoers, concert attendees and grocery-store shoppers have to live in fear.
That is why people who live in other parts of the industrialized world are 20 times less likely to be killed in a gun-related incident than Americans are.
It isn’t that we can’t do the same.
It is that we won’t even try.
There are common-sense gun laws that would reduce the carnage in this country, but they never get a hearing.
The obstacle to consideration of even the mildest firearm-safety measures is the gun lobby, specifically the National Rifle Association.
The NRA long ago stopped even trying to pretend that the lobby’s interest in preventing sensible gun legislation was grounded in anything resembling principle. The organization continues to thwart even those gun laws, such as universal background checks, that—surveys show—the overwhelming majority of NRA members support.
The NRA’s flacks and legislative foot soldiers across the land used to contend that their opposition to making this nation less of a killing field was grounded in an adherence to the U.S. Constitution and its Second Amendment. It was an argument that made little sense historically or legally.
So, they shifted instead to asserting that the real problem wasn’t the easy availability of guns in this country, but instead was mental health.
When people asked, if that were true, why they insisted on making it so easy for unstable even dangerous people to get their hands on deadly weapons, the NRA’s mouthpieces would go silent.
The fact is that America’s life-threatening and, too often, life-ending gun policies always have been more about commerce than anything else. The gun industry doesn’t want anything to slow down sales—or even make transactions a slightly more protracted process.
For that reason, they refuse to engage in discussion about how to save lives unless any and all restrictions on access to guns are taken off the table first.
That’s like saying you’re going to figure out better ways to breathe by eliminating oxygen first.
There was another mass shooting—another school shooting—in Wisconsin. It wasn’t the first and it certainly won’t be the last.
As long as we Americans refuse to grapple with our gun problem, goodhearted adults and innocent children will continue dying by gun at 20 times the rate of people in other parts of the world.
But the cash registers in stores selling firearms will continue to ring.
From the NRA’s perspective, that’s the most important thing.
Peace on earth.
Good will to men.
John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students. The views expressed are those of the author only and should not be attributed to Franklin College.