Summer of Soul Searching
Today was supposed to be the first day of Summer for 19 kids from Uvalde. Instead it’s the beginning of an unthinkable period of mourning for their parents. Elaine Godfrey in The Atlantic: What It Feels Like to Lose Your Child in a Mass Shooting. “I wasn’t sure I could go back to that house anyway. I didn’t want to see Dylan’s bed. I just wasn’t prepared for that. So our neighbors from, like, three or four houses down—Jake’s best friend is their son, and they had taken Jake from the firehouse, so we went and met them there. I couldn’t form words at the time. So my husband had to tell Jake that Dylan had been killed. And Jake just howled like an animal. It was horrible.”
+ Maybe nothing explains the pain of losing someone to sick, senseless gun violence more accurately than the way Joe Garcia reacted to losing his wife who was one of the teachers killed. “He ‘pretty much just fell over’ after returning home and died of a heart attack.” The couple had four kids.
+ Amid the mourning and outrage, the NRA will still hold its annual conference starting today in the same state where Joe Martinez died of a broken heart. Don’t be surprised. The NRA held its conference in Denver a few days after Columbine. At least four musicians have canceled their appearances at the conferences, which is nice, but one wonders why no one told them about the other school mass murders that have been happening for decades. Of course, the NRA wouldn’t have any power unless politicians were willing to trade lives for dollars. Here’s a look at The U.S. Lawmakers Who Have Received the Most Funding from the NRA. The bet the NRA and these politicians are making is that this will all just blow over. And history suggests that’s not a bad bet. FiveThirtyEight: Support For Gun Control Will Likely Rise After Uvalde. But History Suggests It Will Fade.
+ Today, there are a lot of stories suggesting that the police waited too long before confronting the shooter. That’s an issue. But it’s not the issue. And, as much as Ted Cruz tries to convince you otherwise, the issue sure as hell isn’t that we need fewer doors at schools so the bad guys can’t get in as easily. Graeme Wood in The Atlantic: “Resist the temptation to make bad choices about infrastructure. After events like this, schools and worried parents call for more locks and for fewer doors. In Uvalde, the locks seem to have kept the rescuers out and the killer in. Instead: fewer locks, and doors everywhere. Everyone should have a way out, as fast as possible. (Making schools less like prisons might have other benefits too.) And finally, you can’t count on anyone to be a hero, or to make the right call in a situation so horrifying that no imagination or training could have realistically simulated it. That is why you must teach your kids to run.”
