By Brigitte L. Nacos
Not all of the ten victims of the Buffalo mass shooting were buried, when an 18-year-old gunman killed at least nineteen children and two of their teachers in an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. Since lethal incidents like those in Buffalo and Uvalde have become as American as apple pie, they are by now followed automatically by the same post-massacre playbook: Flags are flown at half-mast, solemn prayer are services are held, make-shift memorials are established and buried under mountains of flowers, calls to pray for the victims and their families are issued, prominent people visit the venues of grief, shock and anger are expressed.
While the last chapter of the playbook is still open in the aftermath of Buffalo, the first chapter is now devoted to the events in Uvalde. Yes, our hearts and souls hurt. Yes, we are praying for the victims and survivors. Yes, we are angry that within two weeks two 18-year-old adolescents killed a total of thirty-one human beings. And, yes, we are frustrated that both killed with assault weapons, weapons of war, semi-automatic rifles that allowed them to kill a multitude of persons in record time.
The gun lobby and their supporters have a standard slogan: Guns do not kill—people do. What a tragic joke! For the idea that reasonable people with guns can stop crazy people with guns was once again disproven in Buffalo and in Uvalde: In the first case, bullets from the gun of a guard in Tops Friendly Market could not stop the mass-shooter because the latter wore body armor. In the second case, two police officers encountered the shooter before he entered the school but, again, their shots were deflected by perpetrator’s body armor.
No other country in the world makes it as easy as this country to purchase assault weapons and magazines that guarantee the largest number of people killed in the shortest possible time. In the United States, the number of handguns is significantly larger than the total population size. And no other country has as many mass shootings and people killed by handguns than the United States.
Again and again, public figures and regular people will say in response to catastrophic shootings, “This is not what we are!”
Unfortunately, this is what we are.
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