The day after a 14-year-old boy in Georgia shot and killed two classmates and two teachers at his Georgia high school with his father’s military-style assault weapon in September, GOP vice presidential nominee JD Vance decided to speak up about the atrocity.
But he wasn’t announcing his support for banning AR-15s or instituting universal violent criminal background checks. He wasn’t mobilizing support for red flag laws.
Vance simply wanted to share his reflection that mass shootings are a “fact of life” in America. This passive observation seems designed to lull the American people back into political complacency and resignation.
Although the senator depicts mass shootings in schools, churches, synagogues, grocery stores, and town malls as a “fact of life” in America, they are better described as a fact of death in America. Gun violence is a constant and ubiquitous threat to human life.
Whether it arrives in the form of mass shootings or the more common one-on-one firearm attack, gun violence destroys the lives of tens of thousands of Americans every year. It is now the leading cause of death for children and teens under 18 years old in our country. Americans represent 97 percent of all youth firearm deaths among peer nations, where people regard American politicians’ blithe acceptance of gun violence death for children as something freakish and macabre.
Despite what the NRA and MAGA politicians invite us to believe, we do not have to treat the ceaseless flood of gun casualties in American morgues and hospital emergency rooms as an inescapable, “tragic” part of human existence on earth. In fact, gun violence in our society is eminently preventable because experts agree that the easy availability of unrestricted guns is the chief cause of the colossal loss of life we face from guns every year.
But instead of acting on popular gun sense bills to create a universal violent felon background check or to remove weapons of war from school communities, GOP leaders like Vance and Lindsey Graham strike the pose of Marie Antoinette. After every massacre, we are invited to share their blasé attitude that “c’est la vie,” and “Let them eat thoughts and prayers.” As Donald Trump bluntly urged Americans after a recent mass shooting, we “have to get over it, we have to move forward.”
But contrast this passive-aggressive response to an assault weapon mass shooting at a public school with the GOP’s muscular response to an assault weapon mass shooting involving Trump himself. After the attempted assassination at Trump’s July 13 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, Republicans did not throw up their hands and bemoan AR-15 gun violence as a sorrowful “fact of life.” They joined Democrats not only in aggressively condemning this appalling act of violence but in demanding a thorough federal investigation, insisting upon both House and Senate hearings. When those hearings uncovered myriad failures in the Secret Service’s preparations and response, the then-director of the Secret Service, Kimberly Cheatle, promptly resigned, making way for refocused leadership to improve security at presidential campaign events. Republicans seem to know how to act aggressively to protect Donald Trump and his rallygoers from mass shootings and AR-15 gun violence.
But when it comes to schoolchildren, churchgoers, and Walmart shoppers, Americans are invited to accept mass shootings as an immutable fact of life.
The terrible violence at Trump’s rally in Butler is in fact just a small piece of America’s broader gun violence epidemic. The lethal chaos in Butler wasn’t even the worst mass shooting in America that took place that day: On the evening of July 13, 2024, mass gunfire claimed the lives of four other Americans and wounded 10 others in Birmingham, Alabama. Each day in America, firearms take the lives and livelihoods of people from communities all over the country.
The Constitution defines our government’s purposes to be to form a more perfect Union, to establish justice, to ensure domestic tranquility, to provide for the common defense, to promote the general welfare, and to perpetuate the blessings of liberty. These imperatives are fundamental to our social contract. But all of them are undone and crushed by gun violence.
I’m heartened that Democrats and Republicans came together after the Butler attack to chart a new course for the Secret Service to better protect our presidents and candidates. Now we must summon the same shared resolve to protect America’s young people and all our communities from gun violence. Let’s make mass shootings a fact of American history and not a continuing fact of American life.
