Campaign Action
It happens nearly every day.
The horrifying events in Las Vegas on Sunday night mark the 273rd mass shooting in the U.S. in the 275 days that have passed so far in 2017, according to Gun Violence Archive. [...]
Including [this] massacre, the four deadliest U.S. mass shootings have occurred over the past 10 years. [...]
There have been more than 11,600 deaths linked to gun violence so far in 2017, which is roughly equivalent to nearly four 9/11 attacks in terms of the total number killed on September 11, 2001.
We do not hear about many of the others because they are not spectacular enough. That is also a simple fact of life now: Mass shootings in which a murderer succeeds in killing or murdering only a half-dozen work colleagues, strangers, enemies or family members, a now near-daily event, seldom even show up on our national radar. This mass shooting will become infamous, and it will be because the gunman was able to kill so many. Future gun conversations will include the phrase the Mandalay Bay shooting, and everyone will immediately know what they mean. It will usurp some more-distant murder spree; we will remember the new one and forget the old one.
I was a teen when a mentally ill gunman opened fire in a San Ysidro McDonald's for no other reason than his desire to do so. A friend was working her part-time job that day. She hid in the back as the he systemically killed 21 people and injured nearly the same number. The news played the video of her fleeing the building after a police sniper killed the gunman.
The building was never reopened. It was cleaned, and refurbished, and then razed; a small memorial was eventually built. Its prime impact on the national debate was, as often happens after a new escalation of gun violence results in dramatic videotape and another memorial on another nondescript street, a conversation on whether our police departments were truly equipped to handle an event that had previously been considered unthinkable. Whether they were outgunned. Whether they should be better trained in the military tactics of street battles. But the memorial was built, eventually.
Another mass murder took place killed more, and another one after that, and another. To this day typing San Ysidro into Google will suggest the autocompleted phrase: shooting. And the memorial was built, though it took a long time. It features hexagonal pillars, arranged to represent the age of each victim. Some are very small.
This mass murder will not be forgotten for a while. The hotel will not be razed. The concerts will go on. The land is too expensive for anything but a small memorial. The stock prices of gun manufacturers are spiking again, as they do after each incident. The weapons used will be identified, and sales will soar. The hotel windows will be quickly replaced. The room will be renovated. It may remain as a rentable suite, and certain Americans will request the room when booking reservations, just to sleep in the place made famous by one man and his guns, and the hotel will accommodate them. It may be torn down to its frame, and from now on be used as a nondescript closet with a nondescript name on the door.
And eventually, it too will be supplanted by a new mass shooting that kills still more.
But it happens nearly every day, in one town or another. A man buys a gun and kills his family. A man buys a gun and kills his coworkers. A man loses his job and wanders until he finds some group, somewhere, to kill. A man is fed up with this or that government agency or elected official or ideological opponent and goes to wherever he believes they are to kill whoever is working there on the day he decides to do it. And hardly any of them even register, at this point, and nobody cares.
We now have a new standard for what will gain our attention, in the future. A mentally ill man who straps on as many guns as he can carry will have to murder more than 20, if a memorial is to be built. Just as the summary executions of Americans inside restaurants and bars and small classrooms with too-small chairs moved from unthinkable to the expected price of some still-nebulous freedom, it will become a given that you may die at a concert, as well, alongside fifty others, or sixty, or a hundred. Those that drive off in their cars to murder their coworkers or estranged families after selecting the proper gun to do the task, or the proper two or three, will pull up to the building and park their cars and murder four or five at a time—and nobody will care.
It happens nearly every day, and we celebrate it as the new, steeper price for the nebulous freedom, forever protected and sacrosanct, declaring that other murderers be allowed the tools for other murders on the off chance that someday, a murderer will have a damn good reason and we will celebrate his act. That is the very core of the gun "debate": the notion among men that someday they, too, will shout I will save you all and murder some receptionist, or security guard, or doctor in a local clinic, or land management specialist, or black churchgoer or local sheriff or petty street thugs or grocery-store looters or low-level government inspector and receive the adoration of a future grateful crowd. There will someday be a need to shoot twenty people, or fifty, or a hundred, and it will be Good and Right and you will thank us when it happens, the man stands behind a podium to say. It was not right this time, but it may be right the next.
And nobody cares. Not enough. The men that look over their guns and decide which of them would be best for the new task at hand will choose one, and load it, and drive to a chosen location that will be on the local news the next day but will have no memorial, if he only kills five or six or eight. The carpets will be pulled out, and the walls patched, and nobody will care because it is the price of the nebulous freedom that says sometimes our fellow Americans need to be killed, and it is the right of every one of us to buy a gun and decide who it will be.
The land is too expensive on the Las Vegas strip for more than even a small memorial. It will be something narrow, and short. It will be a plaque and a small piece of art from an artist tasked with taking the final minutes of our friends or colleagues or sons or daughters and compressing them into a stone shape meant to represent every day not lived. And people will walk by, and nobody will care, and the sharp-featured man banging on a podium a thousand miles away will tell his crowds that someday there will be a murderer who will be in the right, and who will save us from ourselves, and a man in the crowd will nod his head and wonder if he will someday be that hero.