Enough Excuses

America's solution to gun violence is excuses rather than action.

I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality of American politics. If you received this email - or you are a free subscriber - and you’d like to subscribe: you can sign up below.

I’ll be Zoom Chatting tomorrow at 12:30. We’ll discuss gun violence, some of the recent primary elections in Pennsylvania and Georgia, and anything else on your mind. Here’s the link.

Associated Press/Manuel Valdes

I have a piece up at MSNBC about the horrific school shooting in Uvalde, Texas — and these paragraphs capture so much of what I’m feeling right now:

Every needless firearm death is tragic. But when children are involved — 2nd graders, 3rd graders and 4th graders — it’s different.

Once the pain has subsided there is the gnawing feeling of anger and frustration because you know … nothing will change.

It’s awful enough that people die senselessly, but it’s all the more frustrating that it will keep happening, day after day after day after day. Earlier this month it was Buffalo. Before that Biloxi, Mississippi; Chicago; Duluth, Minnesota. Last year it was Oxford, Michigan; Indianapolis, Boulder and Atlanta. And hundreds of shootings in between that have long since been forgotten, except by those directly affected. It’s the powerlessness to make it stop that is so uniquely devastating.

Last night, someone on Twitter commented that in all the years of following me, they’d never seen me so angry … and it is entirely accurate. I have written so many pieces about gun violence over the years. I’ve written about school shootings, accidental shootings, children killed, and even toddlers shooting their parents. I was in Las Vegas the night of the worst mass shooting in American history, and I interviewed the survivors. The next time I went back to Vegas, 23 people were shot down in a Wal-Mart in El Paso, and nine were murdered in Dayton, Ohio, the same day. As I said yesterday on Twitter, “I’m so fucking tired of writing about gun violence in America.”

That is perhaps what is different about this latest tragedy — the anger. I sense it on social media, and I sense it in talking to my friends. The powerlessness to stop these tragedies isn’t leading to apathy; it’s leading to mind-numbing fury. “When are we going to do something?” screamed Steve Kerr in a post that quickly went viral. “When, in God’s name, are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?” a weary President Biden practically shouted.

The fury is not just a product of our collective national failure to do anything about gun violence in America … but it’s the steady drumbeat of excuses for why we should continue to have to live with these tragedies.

“We can't stop bad people from doing bad things,” said Ken Paxton, the Republican Attorney General of Texas. “You cannot legislate away evil,” said Rep. Lauren Boebert. By that notion, why even have laws? Why have the death penalty, which is carried out in Texas more than any other state in the country, if you don’t think deterrence works to stop crime? If you don’t believe that public policy can be a tool for change and a way to improve people’s lives (like protecting them from violence), why the hell are you in public service?

Every other country in the world has bad people — and they are stopped from committing mass shootings because no other country provides their citizens with near-unfettered access to firearms.

"We have to harden these targets,” says Texas Lt. Gov Dan Patrick. Station armed guards at schools, says Texas Senator Ted Cruz. Meanwhile, an armed security guard was at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde. There was an armed guard at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida. He hid for cover as a mass shooter killed 17 students and teachers.

In the Dayton shooting I mentioned above, the gunman was shot dead by police just 32 seconds after he opened fire. By then, he had already killed nine people and wounded seventeen. Are we supposed to take solace in that he didn’t kill more?

Patrick also went on Fox News to declare that the scourge of gun violence results from declining religious faith and “you just cannot change character without changing a heart, and you can’t do that without turning to God.”

Here are two maps — one that shows the percentage of adults in each state who are highly religious, and the other shows firearm mortality by state. Notice the overlap between religiosity and gun deaths.

Pew Research Center

Centers for Disease Control

Greg Abbott and countless Republican politicians blame mental illness whenever there is another mass shooting. But, of course, every country in the world has people with mental illnesses. Yet, America is the only country where mass shootings regularly occur.

This Onion headline so poignantly captures the disconnect:

And there is also this little factoid about Republicans and mental illness:

Gov. Greg Abbott said Wednesday that the Uvalde school shooter had a "mental health challenge" and the state needed to "do a better job with mental health" — yet in April he slashed $211 million from the department that oversees mental health programs.

In addition, Texas ranked last out of all 50 states and the District of Columbia for overall access to mental health care, according to the 2021 State of Mental Health in America report.

The hypocrisy is sickening. People like Abbott and all the Republicans shedding fake tears over the country’s “mental health crisis” don’t care about mental health and they clearly don’t care about stopping gun violence. They are content to pander to mouth-breathing gun nuts and tell them lies like “the Democrats want to take your guns.” It’s easier, I suppose than patiently explaining to them that living in a humane and decent society means excepting limits on the right to gun ownership. There is blood on the hands of every one of them.

Now, with 19 sets of parents preparing to lay their children to rest, they will trot out more excuses for why we should continue to do nothing to curb gun violence in America. They’ll keep passing bills in red states that expand gun access. On the federal level, they’ll block legislation to create universal background checks for gun purchases. Or, in the case of Joe Manchin, they’ll piously declare that they want to do anything they can to pass gun control legislation …except the one thing that would actually enable it to become law: ending the filibuster.

And when the next mass shooting does occur, they’ll trot out the same excuses for inaction. It’s always an excuse, and never a solution. People keep dying from gun violence, and Republicans would rather protect the guns than the people. Tell me how I have this wrong?

If children dying and national leaders blocking change rather than supporting it doesn’t make you angry, then you’re simply a stronger person than I am.

I Can’t …

This video is so utterly heartbreaking:

Kaitlan Collins @kaitlancollins

Amerie Jo Garza's father, a med aide, says he found out she was one of the victims when he arrived on the scene and was helping another little girl covered in blood. She told him her best friend had been shot. When he asked her name, she said his daughter's. There aren't words.

I continue to believe that it is incredibly important to watch videos like this — to be a witness to the pain and trauma that comes from gun violence in America. A life has been lost, but for many of the living, their lives are ruined too. The kids who attended Robb elementary school will take the experience of May 24, 2022, with them for the rest of their lives. Hopefully, they can get past it. I don’t know how a parent moves on from something like this.

But for me, while I can watch this video, what I can’t do is look at the beautiful smiling faces of those who died. As a parent, it is simply too much. I quickly scroll past them when they pop up on my Twitter or Facebook feed. I turned the other way when I saw them on the cover of the New York Times this morning. I can write countless stories about gun violence, but looking at the faces of children who died makes me physically recoil. I can’t do it. We should all be witnesses, in some way, to the trauma of American gun violence — but we all have our limits too.

If you’re up for it, please feel free to leave any thoughts about this latest gun violence tragedy in the comment section below. It is open today to paid and free subscribers. I want Truth and Consequences to be a community where people feel comfortable sharing their feelings, venting their anger, and seeking solace and comfort.

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