Tired of tragedy

On Monday of last week there was another mass shooting in the United States.

What a dreadful sentence to write, that is. It sounds so nonchalant, like something that just "is"; like saying "it snowed yesterday." It's fundamentally wrong and yet that is our reality.

I'd like to say that I remember a time when things weren't like this, but I don't. I was 4 years old when the Columbine shooting happened. What I can remember are the victims of that tragedy being regarded with the same reverence as those of the 9/11 terrorist attack. The nation was shaken by it. And then it happened again. And again. And again.

So anyways, here we are yet again. This time it was a 28-year-old allegedly transgender person who shot and killed six people at a school in Nashville, Tennessee: three school staff and three children, using two assault rifles and a pistol.

Our first thought after reading this should not be consideration into how dangerous or radical the transgender community is. Cherry-picking this incident as representative of an entire group of people is harmful and will get us nowhere; the actions of one should not speak for the many.

In the spirit of not cherry-picking, let's take into consideration some statistics:

According to the Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as an incident of gun violence with at least four people injured and/or killed not including the shooter, in any setting with no exclusions, there were 2,836 mass shootings in the United States since 2018.

According to The Violence Project, there have been 188 mass shootings since 1966 by much stricter metrics. They define a mass shooting as an incident of gun violence with at least four people killed not including the shooter, in public, excluding incidents where family or friends were involved or incidents that are gang or crime related.

Of these shooters, four of them identified as transgender. That number drops to three if you disqualify the shooter who killed five people at an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado last year, who possibly claimed a non-binary identity to avoid hate crime charges.

Every available survey I have found identifies the vast majority of mass shooting perpetrators as white cisgender males.

Although there could be some value from an anthropological perspective in looking into such statistics, that's not what I'm interested in. If you ask me, the demographics of people who commit such atrocities don't matter much and their names should be forgotten. What matters are the lives they both took and affected with their actions.

I could care less about how these people would fill out a survey.

Now that I've made myself clear on that front, it's time to take a look at what can actually be done about all of this. It is not radical minorities. It is not mental health. It's not anything like that; as long as humanity exists, so too will these things.

I'll come out and say it: it's the guns. I know that it isn't realistic to take away everyone's guns; I'm a hunter, I wouldn't like that either. To focus my argument and be realistic, I'll focus on one kind of gun: assault rifles.

It is absurd how easy it is to obtain a killing machine in this country. The average person should not be able to walk around with a rifle that can shoot 30 bullets as fast as you can pull the trigger at several thousand feet per second and is capable of leaving a crater in organic matter from 600 yards away.

What scenario could you imagine that you need that? Will you defend your family from the military when the government turns on us? Are you going to protect yourself from the zombie apocalypse? Are you preparing for the occasion that you get mauled by a grizzly bear, a polar bear and a panda bear at the same time?

There are two reasons to own a weapon like this: One is for fun, and the other is to kill people. Is the value provided by the former enough reason to tolerate the latter? I do not believe so.

If your first response to this is to say that assault weapons are not the only ones used to commit mass shootings, you would be absolutely right. Does that mean we should just not do anything then? I am so frustrated with hearing the same arguments made for and against this issue every time this happens, only for nothing to get done about the tools people are using to carry out these killings.

The assault rifle is the mascot of mass shootings. I strongly believe that if we want to see a decrease in the number of mass shootings, tighter restrictions, if not an outright ban on assault rifles is a good start.

I write this as a person who has grown up seeing tragic gun violence on the news for as long as I can remember, living through a year on pace to have more mass shootings than days; I'm sick of it. What's more, I'm not hopeful that anything is going to change as I see so many states fighting to loosen their gun restrictions. Not tighten, loosen. We are going the wrong way.

Tennessee, the state that this school shooting took place in, has not required a permit to carry a handgun since 2021 and they have pushed further deregulation every year since. There's something wrong with this picture and I don't know what it will take for things to change. Until then, it will continue to happen again.

Something could be done. Something should be done, but until then, it will happen again.