No, the United States Will Never Change Its Gun Laws
Another familiar tale out of America yesterday: twenty-one people, nineteen of them children, dead in another mass shooting.
Many people waking up in the US are probably feeling a lot like I do: incredibly sad about the senseless waste of life and grieving for the families of victims, and angry because they are convinced that something has to change.
For the sake of your mental health, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, I think it’s better to finally accept the sad reality that meaningful change to gun laws will never happen in the United States. Your anger is no less justified, but the truth is that too many of your fellow Americans have accepted that these massacres are a normal part of daily life.
I saw a TikTok last year in which an American schoolteacher was truly shocked to find out that the US is the only country in the world that teaches active shooter drills. At one point she asked something along the lines of “but how will students know how to protect themselves?” And that right there is the problem.
Rather than considering whether these mass shootings happen elsewhere in the world, the US worldview has adapted around the idea that these events are inevitable and, indeed, normal. A foregone conclusion that little kids will be gunned down in schools and that it’s an underpaid teacher’s job to protect them or that the solution is more guns.
As shocked as this teacher was to learn that this doesn’t happen in other countries, other countries shake their heads at the insane political gridlock preventing anything from changing in the US.
Here in Scotland, the people I talk to are especially baffled. Scotland is no stranger to a school shooting. Twenty-six years ago, the deadliest mass shooting in the history of the United Kingdom happened in a little town up the road called Dunblane. Sixteen children, most of them just five years old, and one teacher were slaughtered.
The only difference is that rather than sending useless “thoughts and prayers,” the UK government took the matter seriously and responded by banning most gun ownership and heavily regulating the use of remaining weapons for certain activities. Unsurprisingly, we don’t have school shootings anymore.
Most Americans believe nothing can be done, either because they’re too dim-witted to think critically beyond gun lobby soundbites that have been spoonfed to them for 30 years, or because they just like guns.
The sad reality that all Americans and the rest of the world need to accept is that the US just doesn’t have the willpower to do anything about mass shootings and gun deaths. This is normal to them and to gun advocates there is no body count that won’t be considered acceptable. If 200,000 or 2,000,000 children were shot dead in schools next year, it would still be “an inevitable tragedy” because the American people continue to willfully accept it.
