Reflections on Why It Only Happens Here

We’re dulled to it. Not just school shootings but shootings of children outside of school and shootings of adults here, there, and everywhere.

Ours is a gun culture.

We can compare ourselves to other countries – European countries, Canada, Australia – and bemoan the hideous difference in gun deaths between us and them but that doesn’t take into account one central fact.

America isn’t like other countries.

People carry guns here. Even good people on their way to meetings about community safety carry guns. It’s not just the bad guys. It’s not just the folks one step away from prison, young men on their way to stick up the gas station. It’s social workers and pizza deliverers and grandmas.

Decades ago, I worked in a community agency with a lot of resident involvement. One very famous participant was a woman named Zella Nash. Zella was an older woman, always very flamboyantly dressed, and as opinionated as they make ’em. She also made no bones about the fact that she was ‘packin’ heat.’ We all thought it was cute, you know, old Zella with a pistol in her purse.

What we didn’t know was who else was packin’ heat. It might have been everyone for all we knew, we were so green.

We treated Zella as if she was an anomaly. Granny with a gun. What a joke.

Now, after every single school shooting (and we just had one here in Wisconsin), the question is: How did s/he get her hands on a gun? We ask this as if the shooter had somehow obtained a weapon that had been kept locked up at Fort Knox. It’s so dumb. The shooter got their hands on a gun because, in America, guns are everyfuckingwhere.

Being dulled to school shootings doesn’t mean I don’t care. I do. I’m just not going to get back on the treadmill of playing dumb about how this happens – over and over and over. It happens because it can.

That’s America for you.