25 May 2022 — 0245 mdt

Mass shootings will continue as long as millions of Americans are willing to pay that price for easy access to firearms.

By James Conner

Too much happened yesterday for me to sleep tonight. Usually when situational insomnia keeps me awake, I open an interesting book, listen to music, and wait for the blazing sunrise of a brighter day.

Tonight, however, I’m going to write about yesterday’s horror in Uvalde, Texas.

MY INFORMATION on the shootings comes from the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, the Texas Tribune, various mainstream news media outlets in Texas, governments, and sometimes reputable experts. I do not use information from social media such as Facebook and Twitter unless I can verify those reports via the mainstream media.

A mostly Hispanic town of 15,200, Uvalde sits west of San Antonio by 80 miles and east of Mexico by 50. It's known for producing golden honey. Now, it will be known for 18-year-old Salvatore Ramos’ murders yesterday of 19 second, third, and fourth graders, and two adults, at Uvalde’s Robb Elementary School. Lawmen killed Ramos. Several students and two law enforcement officers were wounded. Before heading to the school, Ramos reportedly shot his grandmother, who was airlifted to San Antonio and may be alive.

The casualty figures may be revised in the next few days. At this point, news reports are being updated by the minute and hour, and are still chaotic, sometimes contradictory, usually incomplete, and sometimes wrong.

All of us are sickened, shocked, angry. We want to know what set off Ramos’ rampage, whether it could or should have been prevented, and how we can prevent another such shooting.

We may never obtain satisfactory answers to these questions. We certainly won’t obtain them soon, for we’re still learning what happened — and finding that initial reports were incomplete or wrong.

At this stage in an investigation, I prefer to collect and organize information, but to defer analysis until I’m sure I have enough data to draw reasonable conclusions. That takes considerable conscious self-discipline, as our species is hard-wired as a survival mechanism to connect the dots as they emerge, filling in the missing dots with what we consider reasonable assumptions that we treat as facts. That’s our action mode and it saves lives. But in our analysis mode, substituting assumptions for facts can produce a false or distorted picture of an event, especially a complicated and emotional event. It’s not enough to think we know what happened: we must actually know what happened, and actually knowing takes patience, an open mind, and a conscious refusal to jump to conclusions.

But I do know — we all know — that it is far too easy for unstable young men — even if Ramos was not a classic paranoid schizophrenic, he was the product of demons that ruined his childhood, and most certainly deeply angry and suicidal (see Densley’s and Peterson’s oped in the 15 May 2022 Washington Post) — to obtain firearms. There is no avoiding the conclusion that if America does not make firearms more difficult to acquire, especially for criminal and emotionally unstable classes, more mass murders will occur.

I also know that Congress and state legislatures will not pass meaningful firearms control legislation any time soon. Yes,they’re under pressure from National Rifle Association and other gun lobbies, some more extreme than the NRA. But they’re also under pressure from tens of millions of Americans who hate these shootings, yet have concluded that mass murder is the price that must be paid for keeping firearms easily available for hunting, sport shooting, self protection, and so-called Second Amendment solutions to political differences.

Therefore, we can curse and damn our politicians from sundown to Sunday, curse and damn them from now to eternity, but nothing will change until tens of millions of our friends and neighbors change their minds about the price they’re willing to pay for access to firearms designed for killing their fellow human beings.