Those two words.
Those two words invaded my newsfeed again this week and my stomach turned.
That now far-too-frequent breaking news about a school, always includes those same two horrible words:
Active shooter.
They’re words that steal your breath and freeze you where you’re standing if you’re a parent or if you love a teacher—words that tell you that children and those who teach them are once again in imminent threat by someone with a gun.
It is a sickening repetition here in America:
Another week.
Another active shooter.
Another round of bullets.
Another round of funerals for children and adults taken prematurely.
And we think we know who performed this unspeakable act this week—but it isn’t merely one person.
The lie we often believe in these brutal murders is that the shooter acted alone. That is not true. Shooters never act alone. They are almost always aided and abetted by a small army who placed that instrument of such rapid carnage in their trembling hands; people who sold it, profited from it, lobbied for it, legislated it, campaigned on it.
The shooters always have help—and those accessories to their murders cannot help but reveal themselves in the wake of the bloodshed.
Senator Ted Cruz did what men like him do in moments immediately following unspeakable horror: make themselves visible and they pretend to give a damn. They feign sadness, manufacture crocodile tears, and they serve up yet another warmed-over helping of the same thoughts and prayers to families of dead children.
Watching a man like Cruz with an A+ rating from the NRA, act as if he has a heart and that this theoretical heart is breaking following a mass murder with guns is the pinnacle of farce. That is like a wave lamenting the tiny shells being pulverized on the shore by the destruction it initiated.
There are two distinct dangers to our children right now, two specific threats to their safety, two groups assailing them in these moments.
One group’s impact is easy to see. It is louder and bloodier. It is the final movement in a long symphony of violence. Theirs is the very visible kill shot, and it is tempting to focus on this first group because they are easier to identify and to deal with. We can quickly point to a bad guy and place culpability and our outrage there.
But the other group’s contribution is no less deadly, no less a violation, no less an atrocity. They do not pull the trigger, but are complicit in the bullet’s damage.
When a terrified teenager or teacher or moviegoer or concert attendee finds themselves looking down the barrel of a military grade weapon that will soon rapidly violate their bodies—they’re not just seeing that a single person. They’re not only seeing one active shooter.
They’re really seeing a rogues’ gallery of hundreds of politicians and lobbyists whose presence and participation made that moment far easier and far more likely—and worst of all, whose present inaction will ensure more kids will soon die.
We need to admit that hallway and workplacewar zones don’t simply happen. (They surely don’t happen in other countries.) The path to a classroom execution is long and it is paved with green. It is the pay-it-forward violence of men and women selling their souls and paying the tab with the lives of other people’s children.
As long as we have political leaders like Ted Cruz who profit from a domestic terrorist organization like the NRA, we will continue to watch the body count rise.
This horror isn’t happenstance and it isn’t a mystery—it is simple cause-and-effect. It is the expected bloody yield, of a nation weened on gun lust and a political party now fully poisoned by the gunrunners.
As long as these supposed leaders make someone’s right to make, sell, and own a semi-automatic weapon, more pressing than the right of a young person to get out of high school alive—get used to this breaking news, America.
As long as NRA-beholden politicians make weapons less challenging to have and to use than automobiles, this same gruesome story will replay and replay and replay.
We may as well get used to us producing mass murderers at an exponentially higher rate than anywhere on the planet.
As long as we have inactive politicians we will have active shooters—and the former will always make the latter’s deadly work far easier.
The blood is on both of their hands right now.
And it’s on all our hands until we vote the accomplices out.
“Once again,” Cruz said, “Texas has seen the face of evil.”
You’re right, Senator, Texas has seen it.
We all have.
May your thoughts and prayers wipe the blood from your hands.
My guess is, they won’t.
Order John’s forthcoming book ‘HOPE AND OTHER SUPERPOWERS” here!
