A Nation Inured to School Shootings

America's becoming desensitized to the worst kind of horror

At a certain point, Americans may just have to accept the fact that our politics have become so unhinged, and the right-wing so thoroughly deranged and simultaneously so powerful, that our democracy is all but unsalvageable. Unfortunately, we’ve been hovering near that point of failure for years, and every national election brings us one step closer to the right-wing dictatorship so many Republicans so clearly crave.

But nothing quite screams democratic disintegration like America’s ruinous addiction to guns, and the permanent political paralysis Republicans love to cultivate, and exploit. It’s the issue that overshadows all the others, a kind of grisly analogy for a country that’s eagerly killing itself, one bullet at a time, one massacre to the next.

In America, absolutely anyone can buy a gun. This is the pride and joy of elected Republicans, who believe there’s nothing higher than the freedom to own an assault rifle. 

The results are as predictable as day following night. Yet another school shooting claimed the lives of 6 people this week, maiming 3 survivors, in Nashville, Tennessee. The toll included three 9-year-old children and three adults, in a country that is quickly becoming desensitized to the murder of its own schoolchildren, an almost unbelievable reality. 

The party of school shooters

Luckily for Republican pundits, the female shooter may have been transgender, placing this particular school shooting at the ideological center of America’s political breakdown.

Regardless, politicians on the populist right already know exactly what to say by now, and they do it shamelessly, transgender shooter or not. They’ve honed their lies to an exact science. It’s all meticulously worked out, as America becomes a nation of massacres, and murdered kids.

There are the required “thoughts and prayers,” followed by a disingenuous discussion of America’s failure to address the unraveling mental health of its citizens, as if Republicans aren’t simultaneously doing everything in their power to strip Americans of their meager healthcare. 

Indeed, gun violence is about bad mental health, receding cultural values, a dire lack of religion, violent video games or social media, anything but the proliferation of guns in American neighborhoods, and the ease with which weapons of war are acquired by anyone at all in the United States. 

It’s not about that, they insist. Besides, you can’t stop violence; without a gun, criminals would use a knife; without a knife, they’d use a rock.

Case closed. Republicans say there’s no connection between America’s absurdly lax gun laws, and America’s astronomically high number of mass shootings, unique in the developed word.

No facts, no (extensive and convincing) research, no rational arguments, and no slaughtered 9-year-old children can possibly penetrate this wall of craven denial and bad faith; if the Republican Party were a human being, it would be a lying sociopath completely lacking in empathy, and this person certainly would have no problem buying plenty of guns.

This is all followed by the mind-numbing wait for the next macabre episode, and on and on it goes, ad infinitum, as tiny children learn to cower under their desks, while elected Republicans cower beneath political expediency, the NRA, groupthink, and moral cowardice, abetting their own complicity in mass murder.

The school shooter

The 28-year old female shooter was able to assemble a large arsenal, including multiple AR-15-style assault rifles, while undergoing treatment for what’s being described as an “emotional disorder.” Presumably, stricter gun laws would prevent those suffering from troubled mental health from being able to buy machine guns as easily as toothpaste.

In any case, Audrey Hale apparently purchased a total of 7 firearms, all while under the care of a doctor, in a state with some of the loosest gun laws in the nation. She brought 2 assault rifles and a single pistol into the Covenant School, a small evangelical campus in an affluent Nashville neighborhood, and which Hale had attended years before.

She was quickly pursued and ultimately killed by Nashville’s Metro Police Department, which responded swiftly and decisively, unlike their paralyzed colleagues in Uvalde, and elsewhere. This is perhaps the only reason the body count was not much higher. The police released a video of the harrowing body cam footage, as several cops armed with assault rifles, shotguns, and pistols run through a school, alarms screaming, searching for an active shooter. 

It’s tense. You can hear the shooter firing off rounds, as the police locate and close in on her, until they finally round a corner into what appears to be a lobby. There, an Officer Rex Engelbert shoots her with a gun very similar to the one she’s using, an AR-15 assault rifle, killing her.

It was a fitting end for her, but not for this traumatized country. Rather, we’ll simply be waiting for the next horror, even as we vainly attempt to process this one.

Audrey Hale left behind a lengthy manifesto, which police say they won’t be releasing. Apparently, she lived in an intolerant conservative Christian family, and her struggles with gender dysphoria, and her desire to become a man were not appreciated in the home. 

She was under the care of a doctor, and her parents say they were under the mistaken impression that she sold her weapons, despite walking around with a red bag filled with guns the morning of the shooting. 

In any case, I have to say I’m dead tired of writing about school shootings, about mass murder, about gun violence in America. It’s unbearable.

President Biden again called for a ban on assault rifles, much like he has during previous mass shootings, to no avail. It simply won’t happen.

It won’t happen because Republicans are immovable, fixed objects, and they have a congressional majority, and no desire to restrict access to guns.

In fact, they want to continue to relax access to firearms, even as America’s children are being slaughtered by those very same weapons. They’re apparently unbothered by these horrors that we’re learning to live and die with, as our nation buries it future.