No one is coming to save us
If you have to live in fear of being shot on the off chance someone with a gun will fend off tyranny, the tyrants have already won.
When you live in Texas you hear a lot about how bad the federal government is. The feds shouldn’t be relied on for anything, the state’s entire id demands. Self-reliance, abundant firearms and Come and Take It flags seem to be the means by which many Texans ensure their freedoms.
But it was indeed the federal government that finally stopped the slaughter of children at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas last week. While local law enforcement waited in a hallway, children called 911 from inside the classroom where the shooter had locked himself. The chief of police for the school district had made a catastrophically wrong decision: he believed that all the kids inside were already dead, so the police could hang back, assess what they thought had shifted from an active shooter to a barricaded subject situation, and wait for the reinforcements to arrive.
When the reinforcements from Border Patrol — with their apparently superior, federal government training — did arrive, they broke through the door and took down the shooter. Depending on your reading of the timeline offered by authorities, the killer had been in the room with those kids for anywhere from 38 minutes to more than an hour.
Because of this stunning failure by local police, Republicans have been given a gift. The righteous anger at the slaughter of children by a madman with an AR-15 and 1,657 rounds of ammunition provided a brief feeling that the momentum had finally shifted. It felt like Republicans might have to actually do something about gun control. It doesn’t feel like that now. Now, the GOP has the local police to blame.
Following the Uvalde massacre, Republicans have engaged in their usual post-mass shooting tactic of blaming just about anything they can think of on the latest spectacle of American death — everything but guns. Unlocked doors, back doors, were the problem in Uvalde, Ted Cruz and many others said. There should only be one door, they shouted, ignoring what everyone on the planet who has ever read an emergency exit route knows about how to get out of a burning building. These “soft targets” need to be “hardened,” the GOP’s policy arm — Fox News — began pushing immediately following the massacre. Now, they have the gift of extreme incompetence by unprepared local police to blame for the murder of 19 children and two teachers.
As nonsensical as these things are — only one door for every school in America! — they are logistical solutions that could be addressed by introducing a bill banning back doors on schools, or more training (money) for police. But what Republicans have also blamed for Uvalde are the deeper, more philosophical reasons that an 18–year-old kid murdered 21 people for no apparent reason other than that he could because he had a certified killing machine in his hands. This country has lost its moral foundation because fewer people are going to church, Fox’s Jesse Watters argued. “Wokeness” and critical race theory — two of the Right’s current favorite bogeymen — are being taught in schools, Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson said. Social media, video games, music, America’s celebrity and influencer-obsessed culture — all have been trotted out to explain why the Uvalde killer carried out his atrocity.
On one of these points, I agree. America has lost its morality. When a country fails to protect innocents in the name of an ill-fated and misconstrued belief that we all should get to arm ourselves with as many firearms as possible everywhere we go, there is no conclusion to reach other than that we are an immoral people.
With each passing week we hurtle ever closer to the complete breakdown of democratic order. There will almost surely be no substantive movement on gun control, so Americans will continue to kill each other with firearms at a steady pace in every conceivable place where we carry out our daily lives — grocery stores, churches, schools, concerts — the list is as endless as the stream of bullets that mark the passing of our days and weeks. When a radical minority of gun rights extremists dictate that every aspect of life must come with the sacrifice that each of us could be shot and killed so we can all arm ourselves in a fantasy of fending off tyranny, we have already succumbed to tyrants.
P.S. The photo on this post is mine, taken somewhere in Georgia or Tennessee. Thanks as always for subscribing to Where Do We Go From Here. Soon, I’ll be diving into weekly coverage of all things chaos, corruption, and conspiracies, including more digging into threats to democracy here in Georgia and elsewhere. If you like what you’ve read today, tell a friend.