25 May 2022 – What do you say when 19 children and 2 teachers have been murdered at school? Language is inadequate to the task of explaining the callousness of a country that does absolutely nothing to address rampant gun violence. There is no culture of life in the U.S. It is a culture of death, of money, of political control.
There’s no shortage of digital pixels today on the Uvalde, Texas massacre so I shall be brief. And this is a very visceral comment. But the anger – the deep, pervasive anger and hate – that wracks my body, and my soul, is something I have experienced over the 3 months covering the slaughter in the Ukraine War. And it blew through me last night when the details of the Uvalde shooting hit my screen.
Families in Uvalde had to get their DNA swabbed because the bodies of the dead children are so unrecognizable because of the military-style weaponry used by the shooter. A trauma surgeon in Uvalde said Congress should be forced to view the shooting scene and the hospital morgue scenes, to view the photos of these bodies. I remember after Sandy Hook that one of the trauma doctors said that if photos of the child victims had been seen by the public, the gun debate would have ended then and there. In Sandy Hook, parents were allowed to see the bodies of their children but with a doctor and police officer nearby who gently advised not to turn down the sheet covering their child.
I think it is important to detail the brutality because to say this was a “shooting” is sanitary. “Shooting” is too benign. Children that young were killed by a weapon that shatters. Young kids do not have identification; they may not be recognizable. And there are so many of them. Last night and into the morning school and police officials had to compare lists of names and descriptions by parents. One cop noted “we were trying to figure out which parents were left, but without reuniting them with a child that was unrecognizable. We had to do DNA testing”.
The killer used a AR-15, a semi-automatic rifle (the AR stands for “assault rifle”), which comes in many sizes and have many options, but his was military grade. I saw the results of these weapons during my war crimes investigation work, and I have seen the results of these guns in Ukraine. I had remembered reading an op-ed by an ER doctor at Sandy Hook who graphically explained the difference between what a “regular bullet” does versus what an AR-15 does to soft tissue. It is horrific.
These parents took their babies to school yesterday morning and last night they needed DNA to ID their destroyed bodies before taking them home.
Not a single one of those kids was able to be transported to a hospital, which tells me that they were not just dead, but really really really dead. 8, 9 and 10 year-old kids, riddled with bullets, dead as doornails. Some had their faces blown off.
We need to confront the physical reality of gun violence without the polite filters. The goddamn United States of America won’t be ready for it, but that’s what needs to happen. That’s the only chance at all for this to ever be reversed. There’s nothing that can prepare you for what bullets do to human bodies. And that’s true for pro-gun people also. If you read any of the post-Sandy Hook stories you’ll recall that many of the Sandy Hook early response officers could not return to the profession afterwards. They quit. That’s how horrific the scene was.
We live in a fantasy world. The main thing people get wrong when they imagine being shot is that they think the bullet itself is the problem. The lump of metal lodged in the body. The action-movie hero is shot in the stomach; he limps to a safe house; he takes off his shirt, removes the bullet with a tweezer, and now he is better. This is not trauma surgery. Trauma surgery is about fixing the damage the bullet causes as it rips through muscle and vessel and organ and bone. The bullet can stay in the body just fine. But the bleeding has to be contained, even if the patient is awake and screaming because a tube has just been pushed into his chest cavity through a deep incision without the aid of general anesthesia (no time; the patient gets an injection of lidocaine). And if the heart has stopped, it must be restarted before the brain dies from a lack of oxygen.
But, yeah, I know, I know. It falls on deaf ears. All of this public outrage will fade away. That’s America.
Ah, America. It likes to think it is a special country. Well, it is when it comes to gun violence – but for all the wrong reasons. For reasons that can be measured in graves, and empty desks in classrooms, and lives that will not reach their promise. Then there are the hundreds of thousands of children who have witnessed school shootings. And the millions who have had to imagine and prepare for horrors like these. No other country that matches it in wealth or privilege has this problem. Not even close.
How can this be acceptable? How can it do nothing? Is this horrific pain part of its national birthright?
Yeah, there are answers to all of these questions. But they don’t add up to any semblance of sense. This is senseless. And all who condone it, all who offer meaningless “thoughts and prayers,” all who say the answer is more guns and fewer restrictions, are complicit in the carnage.
My American friends have dwindled in number so my American conversations have dwindled, too. But I think there is a lot more common sense and empathy in the population at large than in the elected leaders who offer fealty to the most extreme interpretations of the Second Amendment. There are no perfect answers, but to accept the unacceptable must never be acceptable.