IP Weekly #1
I spent part of my vacation this week in Southern California. The day I returned home a man walked into an office park in Orange, California, not far from where I was, locked the door behind him, shot and killed 4 people including a 9 year old boy before being subdued by police. Those 4 innocent people had no idea they were waking up that day for the last time.
This is the third shooting in recent weeks following the shootings in Colorado and Georgia where another 16 people lost their lives. We are accustomed to shooting deaths, they have become part of our lives and, it seems, we have moved to acceptance. Yes the news still reports them and yes the politicians still say what they are supposed to say as if they read off a script, but nothing is going to change, of that I am certain.
COVID-19 has been part of our lives for just over a year and taken far too many lives. In that time we have watched our nation, as fractured as it is, respond to this deadly virus. States and cities shut down in an attempt to limit the death toll, new rules were implemented, masks worn, hands washed and vaccines developed. It’s not as if the members of Congress suddenly all joined hands in agreement about how to handle the virus, they didn’t yet somehow we have managed to move forward. Somehow the gridlock that is our national government could not stop the progress needed to address this critical health issue. Perhaps gun deaths aren’t seen as a critical health issue.
Early in the first season of The West Wing, my favorite television show, there is an episode featuring a debate about a bill to ban assault weapons. Critics of the bill argued that it was too weak and wouldn’t remove enough guns from the streets. Politicians poised to vote against the bill feared they were already weak in their districts and with a vote against this bill would be targeted by the NRA and lose their next election. That episode first aired in 1999. Not much has changed. We are still stuck in the muck on gun control and people die as a result.
I think our COVID response is a good comparator to gun issues because we got to watch what could happen if we worked together to save lives. We don’t all have to agree about how to go about doing it, but certainly we can agree that innocent people don’t have to keep dying while we sort our petty differences out. Look around the country and you can see the responses to COVID and how they have differed. I won’t argue any as the perfect rollout or any as the cautionary tale. Deciding what to do and when to do it is undoubtedly challenging and critics are everywhere laying in the weeds to call out even the smallest of missteps. Still, neither side argued that we should keep COVID around longer. COVID-19 doesn’t have a constituency which may be the ultimate reason we are able to defeat it in the end.
We have been convinced that to deal with the gun violence around our country we must adopt an all or nothing approach — we must get all the guns or we can’t do anything. I have long believed that’s a fools argument meant for political sound bites and special interest groups. There simply must be a better way, a way to make this important. I would think first we would need to agree that this is a problem worth solving, that we should do something to stop the endless stream of people waking up for the last time to be killed by a shooter at an office park, a supermarket, a spa or any of the other places shootings have taken place over the last several decades.
On my flight home from California I listened to the instructions as the plane taxied to the runway. I couldn’t believe that airlines are still informing passengers that it’s illegal to smoke on airplanes. While I remember when it was still allowed it has been quite a while since the law changed and I cannot believe that any passenger still doesn’t know. I thought more deeply about the law and how many lives it might have saved over the decades. It’s easy to think of the smokers themselves, but also of the other innocent people breathing in the poisonous air. We have it in our capacity to care about others in an attempt to save lives. I am sure there was a protracted battle in Washington about changing the law making it illegal to smoke on planes. I am all for arguments. I believe disagreements lead to progress and we need progress now.
COVID-19 has occupied our time for the past 14 months or so. For many it was a source of fear. I admit I had only a moderate fear of contracting the virus and almost no fear at all of dying from it. I also admit that the prospect of being in the wrong place at the wrong time when a shooter walks in is something I fear far more.
