By David Cherry
May 14 – Ten Black shoppers are shot to death at a Buffalo, N.Y., supermarket.
May 24 – Nineteen children and two adults, most of them Latino, are gunned down at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.
Two mass shootings. Ten days apart.
In the nearly 10 years since the Sandy Hook massacre, we have seen 49 people from the LGBTQ community killed in Orlando in 2016; 60 people killed and 411 people wounded, most of them white, at a concert in Las Vegas; and 11 Jewish people killed at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018. The victims are diverse and include every race, ethnicity, religion and sexual orientation in America.
There are too many more mass shootings to list in this space. All of the mass shootings follow a similar pattern:
1. Shock and sadness at the first word of breaking news.
2. Live coverage from the media to present the accurate number of casualties to their viewers.
3. Calls for our elected officials to take action.
No. 3 never leads to action. Because it can’t. America’s politicians operate in a broken political system that rewards partisanship and punishes collaboration. Republicans running for office in closed Republican primaries can’t be “shamed” into changing their positions on gun safety legislation. In fact, supporting this type of legislation guarantees they will be defeated in a primary challenge.