We have forgotten why those kids were protesting in the first place.
How a protest about yet another school shooting became about everything but guns.
In late march, a 28-year-old named Audrey Hale murdered three children and three adults at a Christian school in Nashville. Hale shot 126 rounds with a rifle and 26 with a 9-mm handgun. And because this, the 129th mass shooting of the year immediately preceded the annual National School Walkout that was started to protest another, especially horrifying school shooting in 2018, more than a thousand Nashville teenagers walked out of their high school classrooms, past two small, single-file security checkpoints with metal detectors installed after 9-11, and into the state capitol where the legislature was in session. State troopers had to make way so the lawmakers could get to the chambers as the students’ angry demand echoed off the high, marble ceiling and walls.
“Do something!”
The students could have demanded any number of actions that even most gun owners agree on, such as requiring criminal background checks on private gun sales and preventing people with mental health issues from buying guns. To that I would add requiring gun owners to carry liability insurance. I have to buy insurance to drive a car because of the harm I could cause. Same should apply to firearms, but the thing is, the kids just wanted the adults to do what adults should do when kids are in danger. Do something, man. You’re the adults! You’re already in the capitol. Go… make some laws. Just do something!
To these kids, the idea of adults doing something, anything, is asking for the moon. The only one going to school today who was alive for Columbine is a teacher. Those teenagers in the picture above were in middle school for Parkland. They are about the same age that some of the first-graders at Sandy Hook would be today. Tens of thousands of kids from coast to coast walked out on Wednesday carrying signs that said, “Our blood, your hands,” “Books, not bullets,” and “Hey, hey, NRA, how many kids did you kill today?” But chanting “Do something” in the impassive faces of Tennessee lawmakers best captures how we have failed this generation that has grown up with the certain knowledge that they could get shot to death at school, and there’s not a thing any adult is going to do about guns.
“Hey, hey, NRA, how many kids did you kill today?”
The politicians at least used to placate us with thoughts and prayers. Now, they don’t bother with pretense. Asked shortly after the Nashville shooting what Congress could do, a Tennessee congressman came right out and said it: “We’re not gonna fix it. Criminals are gonna be criminals. I don’t see any real role that we could do other than mess things up, honestly, because of the situation. I don’t think you’re gonna stop the gun violence. I think you gotta change peoples’ hearts.”
OK, but really, Congressman, what is to be done?
“Everybody jus’ needs to tone down the rhetoric a little bit, ‘cause all that does is gin it up on both sides, and then they point the finger, and nuthin’ happens, ‘cause if you think Washington’s gonna fix this problem, you’re wrong,” he said. “They’re not gonna fix this problem. They are the problem.”
Doesn’t it concern you that different countries don’t have this level of gun violence?
“Different countries don’t have our freedom, either,” he said. I’m going to give him the last word, because if I give him another one it might ruin my whole day.
Joe Biden did what Democratic presidents traditionally do after newsworthy school shootings, which is to ask Congress to do something with zero expectation that anything will happen. Senate Democrats, citing ample experience, said that universal background checks had no chance, so why bother. Some Democrats, though, suggested funding scientific research into gun violence might be a good thing. If that sounds pathetically modest, keep in mind that the 1996 Dickey Amendment outlawed the Center for Disease Control from studying gun violence.
The Nashville school shooting was the biggest/worst/most deadly/first one we noticed since Uvalde last May. And it’s not entirely fair to say that the adults did nothing. The House passed an assault weapons ban that no one thought had a fart’s chance in a gale of passing the senate.
And credit where credit’s due, Texas Senator John Cornyn got something done.
The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act provided funds for mental health treatment and school security, incentives for localities to set up red-flag laws that allow court orders to temporarily restrict access to weapons for people in crisis, and closed the “boyfriend loophole,” preventing convicted domestic abusers from accessing firearms. It passed with the support of 15 Senate Republicans and 14 House Republicans.
“Their message to us was do something,” said Biden, citing the families of victims of Uvalde, Parkland, Sandy Hook, and others. “How many times have you heard that? Just do something. For God’s sake, just do something. But today we did.”
“For God’s sake, just do something.”
In Texas, schools were given money to put bulletproof film on the glass around front doors, except we were told to call it “shatter resistant” because nothing’s bulletproof, really. And the state education agency started randomly auditing public school campuses by trying to break into them. Make sure all the doors are locked all the time, we were told. No school shooter has ever made it through a locked door.
The legislature also created something called the School Safety Allotment to pay for fixing locks, installing shatter resistant film, hiring police officers, replacing security cameras, and everything else we need to make schools “hard targets.” In the 2021 budget, the legislature funded it at $9.72 per student. In the current session, they are proposing to increase that to $10, plus $15,000 per campus, which for a larger high school works out to another $10 per kid. At the school district where I work we spend $210 per student on safety measures. Sometimes they say they do what they don’t really do.
The Governor also appointed a former Secret Service agent to the new post of Chief of School Safety and Security. At a gathering of superintendents and administrators from Texas’ largest school districts, this former agent, who had served on the protective detail of a Vice President, focused on that fact confidently, hoping we’d make the correlation that locked doors prevent school shootings. And even though he came from an agency that had no problem banning guns from the Republican Party convention, he didn’t once mention restricting access to guns as a possible way to prevent school shootings.
It seems normal that we needed a Secret Service agent to keep kids safe.
When he asked for questions, none of us asked about guns. What would be the point? And besides, I didn’t want to make waves for the sake of splashing around. Still, a colleague and I admitted to each other later that we were ashamed for sitting on our hands. But what I really should have asked is whether anyone thought it was extremely scary that everyone is treating it as normal that we needed a full-on Secret Service protective detail agent to keep kids safe in classrooms. The man’s job was to stop people from assassinating public officials, and now his job is to stop another mass murder of children.
To be fair, it would not be accurate to say that the Tennessee legislature has done nothing in response to the student protests. The House expelled two Democratic lawmakers for supporting the protest, even going so far as to accuse them of inciting an insurrection. Now the conversation has shifted. The adults are talking about creeping fascism, the racism of expelling two Black lawmakers but not a white woman, and, oh my god, the rancor and how both sides something something.
“Do something!” stopped echoing in the capitol as soon as the children left.
No one is talking about doing something. We’re better at politicizing a real-world tragedy and arguing about how we’re arguing and who gets to argue and what all this arguing means rather than doing anything at all. “Do something!” stopped echoing in the capitol as soon as the children left. I guess I can understand why people would rather talk about stifling dissent than doing something about guns. Nothing’s going to happen anyway. Why bother? We’re better at talking about talking anyway.
Since that school shooting in Nashville, there have been 13 other mass shootings in the United States, leaving seven dead and 45 injured. The teachers and administrators at those schools had probably all taken precautions against this happening. Maybe they even had bulletproof — I’m sorry, shatter resistant — film on the glass by the entryway. Maybe they’d even hid under their desks or practiced being quiet to convince a hypothetical shooter they were already dead, though I suppose in a way they already are because the adults have decided to do nothing about the one thing all school shootings have in common: the guns.
Do something.
Jason Stanford is the co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. Follow him on Twitter @JasStanford.
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