“Your kids are dying. Why don't you do something?”

The politicians who bray about invading Mexico are silent about school shootings

Sean wasn’t trying to have the worst possible conversation with his son. It just turned out that way. Sean was driving him to school the other day, asking about the big dance coming up, how next year he’ll be in the 5th grade and then middle school after that, and what he wanted to do in the future.

“I don't know if it’ll happen,” answered his son.

“Why not?” asked Sean.

“I don't even know if I’ll make it outta 5th grade.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Well, they haven't had a shooting at [my school] yet.”

Sean told his son that everybody was taking all the precautions and that he’d be OK, but there was that word.

Yet.

“What do you tell the kid? It happens every week. I mean, to come outta your kid’s mouth with the word ‘yet’ at the end of it, wow,” recalled Sean. “It’s a sad state for this country.”

Sean, a school administrator in Dallas, has been fed up to here since spring break in Mexico, and not because of anything that happened down there, but because of what happens every day up here.

It all began on March 3 when four Americans drove a white minivan from South Carolina into Matamoros, Mexico, a border town just south of Brownsville, Texas, for an elective cosmetic medical procedure. Gulf Cartel members fired on their white minivan and kidnapped them, reportedly mistaking the Americans for rival cartel members. They killed two, and the remaining two were rescued.

I’m sure you heard about it, because this country lost their ever-loving minds. Former Attorney General Bill Barr called Mexico “pretty close at this stage to a failed narco state.” Sen. Lindsey Graham promised to introduce legislation to classify Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations and “set the stage to use military force if necessary,” he said. “I would tell the Mexican government if you don’t clean up your act, we’re going to clean it up for you.” Rep. Dan Crenshaw introduced a similar bill in the House that was backed by Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Jewish Space Lasers). “We are at WAR with the Mexican cartels,” she tweeted, “which is why I’m cosponsoring legislation to authorize the full force of our military against these thugs and killers.”

OK, to be fair the entire country didn’t lose their minds, just the subset of our political culture powered by outrage and sustained by clicks. The rest of us can just tune them out, waving them away from our ears like annoying bugs, irritating but not to be taken seriously. The hard lessons of the past few years have taught us what matters — 1 million dead from the plague, getting pummeled by a changing climate, and ubiquitous school shootings — and what we can ignore. Not only did Mexico not pay for the wall, Donald Trump didn’t come close to completing it. His true legacy is all this yapping. That, and the Supreme Court.

But Mexico doesn’t know when not to take Americans seriously. The Mexican president actually had to hold a full-on, for-real press conference to denounce this fake chest-thumping, saying, “In addition to being irresponsible, it is an offense to the people of Mexico.” And even then he didn’t brush off the rhetoric of Graham, Greene, et al as errant nonsense. He had to seriously reassure his compatriots that he would keep the U.S. military out of Mexico.

That’s when Sean got the call from Rebecca, his girlfriend down in Monterrey. A TikTok making the rounds made it look like troops were massing on the border near El Paso. “Is this true?” she asked.

“The funny thing is they don't know,” said Sean, who explained that no one took these people — federal elected officials — seriously. “They just see people in high-level positions saying this kind of stuff, and they actually are worried. When it's translated, it’s very literal. Americans speak in half truths, mostly. But if it gets translated into Spanish, it’s very literally the Americans are gonna invade.”

Sean wasn’t worried about the talk about invasion or the U.S. government’s cautions about “crime and kidnapping” in the part of Mexico he was headed to. He was just amazed “the whole world hasn’t gone to war because of just dumb crap like this.” And he packed his duffel and backpack and drove six-plus hours down to Laredo where he parked his Mustang, and paid a dollar to walk across the border. And just like every other time he’s crossed the border, “ain't nothing going on. Nothing. Nada. Nunca,” he said, “just people walking across.” Rebecca picked him up, and they drove to Monterrey, a relatively short journey of two and a half hours.

Sean was expecting some questions about the invasion talk, but no. All he got were questions about school shootings. “Your kids are dying. Why don't you do something?” He’d explain about the Second Amendment, and they’d say, “but kids are dying. This doesn't make any sense. Help me understand.” And Sean couldn’t. He could only explain that some people believe that owning a gun is more important than preventing this kind of thing from happening. “But they just don’t get it.”

This might seem like I’m setting Sean’s spring break up to take a bad turn, but no. They had an idyllic time, hiking around Monterrey and visiting the beach town of Tulum where they toured Chichén Itzá, the Mayan ruins. Their guide, mindful of the news coverage of the kidnapping and murder, apologetically reassured the tourists that they were welcome and safe. The worst that happened to him is getting pulled over because his rented scooter had a busted headlight, but Rebecca talked the police officer out of asking for a bribe. He didn’t even get a ticket.

Meanwhile, while Sean and Rebecca felt completely safe in Mexico, there were nine mass shootings in the United States, including one here in Dallas where a custody dispute led to the mass murder of four people in an apartment. The week he was gone, 12 people in all died in Dallas from homicide. And the very first day he was back to work the next week a student died in a school shooting in Arlington, the suburb where the Dallas Cowboys and Texas Rangers play. The day after that, a student was injured in another shooting, this time at a Dallas high school.

Sean’s no innocent. He grew up in Louisiana where “you get a bottle and a gun,” and later the Marines taught him what he didn’t learn growing up, and he enjoys shooting an assault rifle as much as the next guy, “but I'll tell you what those things are made for. They're made for mass destruction.”

“Being in the military, having shot all of this stuff, I don't get people's fascination,” he said. “When I was in the military, I don't know, you always thought you help those that can’t help themselves. The whole point of all of this was to protect people. And I just don't get it because kids are dying now. It gets me really depressed and really sad and really frustrated that my generation’s failed the youth miserably. Kids are dying. And then not only that, my kid, a middle class kid in America… I never would've thought in fourth grade, Hey, is somebody gonna come in with a gun and shoot me up?”

Instead of a happy ending, I can offer finality, at least when it comes to the kidnapping and murder that started this whole story. The Gulf Cartel, realizing its mistake, killed the people it claimed committed the crimes and left their bodies tied up in the same spot where the kidnapping took place. They put a handwritten note on the windshield of the truck they left the bodies in.

But maybe this isn’t the finality we need from such an awful incident. The gun used to kill the Americans, it seems, came from the United States. I mean, of course it did. No one has guns in Mexico, but they’re working on that. They say 500,000 guns are illegally brought into Mexico every year. Before you know it, Mexico really will be as dangerous as politicians here say. Some day, Mexico might even be as dangerous as an American elementary school. But that’s not happening.

Yet.

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.

---

We set up a merch table in the back where you can get T-shirts, coffee mugs, and even tote bags now. Show the world that you’re part of The Experiment. 

We’ve also got a tip jar, and I promise to waste every cent you give me on having fun, because writing this newsletter for you is how I have fun.

Buy the book Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick banned from the Bullock Texas History Museum: Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of the American Myth by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and myself is out from Penguin Random House. The New York Times bestseller is 44% off and the same price as a paperback now!