Tulsa was the 20th mass shooting since Uvalde

There have been 231 mass shootings so far this year

The headline of this story should be enough all by itself.  I don’t need to write another sentence, even another syllable.  Twenty mass shootings in 14 days.  That figure comes from the Gun Violence Archive, which keeps track not only of mass shootings, but of all gun deaths.  That there have been 20 mass shootings in two weeks was reported today in the Washington Post, and just moments ago, I saw the same figure on MSNBC.  They could have a counter running on the Jumbotron at Times Square, a digital display projected on the front of the Capitol building in Washington D.C., a row of little white crosses in front of NRA headquarters in Fairfax, Virginia for all the good it would do.

It wouldn’t matter.  Every gun store that was open on the morning of May 24 when the shooting in Uvalde took place was open yesterday.  In fact, the shooter in Tulsa walked into one of those open gun stores and bought the AR-15 he used to kill four people and wound several others three hours beforehand.  That gun store, and the one in Uvalde, and Daniels Defense, the manufacturer who made the AR-15 used in Texas from which the shooter bought his weapon online – all of them will be open for business tomorrow.  Daniels Defense will manufacture more AR-15’s.  So will Smith and Wesson, so will Colt, so will some 500 other manufacturers that make AR style semiautomatic rifles.

It's a big business, folks, and it won’t stop just because 19 people – including 17 little children – got killed here, or four got killed there.  As long as there are people who will walk into a gun store and plonk down the average $1500 it costs to buy one of those things, there will be companies that will make them.  It’s supply and demand, it’s the American way – hell, it’s part of the culture.

Let me tell you something about what it’s like to hold one of those things.  It’s not fun.  It’s not fun at all.  I’ve written about this previously, but it bears repeating here.  I was in a small convoy in Iraq in 2003 when we were surrounded in a street market by a hostile crowd, at least some of whom we knew were armed.  There were only six of us in two military Humvees.  Because the vehicle I was riding in had a machine gun mounted on top, there was an extra M-16 belonging to the machine gunner, so the major in charge of the convoy handed it to me as five of us got out of the vehicles leaving the machine gunner at his post, swiveling his gun hoping it would intimidate anyone in the crowd who might be carrying a weapon.

The crowd closed in on us.  I was holding the M-16 with the fire selector set on single shot.  I knew if shooting broke out, I would have to fire that thing at a human being, and I knew if I did, it would kill that person and any other person I fired at.  This gave me no sense of security at all, no sense of power, no feeling of confidence that the weapon I held in my hands was capable of saving me or the soldiers I was with.  What it was capable of was killing people.  That’s the sum total of it.

The feeling was horrible.  Even though I was trained on that weapon and knew exactly what I was doing, I hated it.  Even if used for self-defense, as would have been the case with that hostile crowd, that M-16 was a terrible thing because it could take a life or lives.

Every one of us was shaken up when the crowd finally dispersed and it was over without bloodshed.  Nobody said a word all the way back to the brigade base camp.  The other five people in those vehicles were soldiers, but none of them wanted to fire their weapon.  None of them wanted to kill someone.  Later in the mess hall having dinner, one of the enlisted soldiers, a guy who was about 19 or 20 years old, told me how scared he had been.  “I’ll be glad when this is over,” he said.

It's never going to be over, not wars like the one in Iraq we caused, not the one in Ukraine that Russia caused, not the war in our streets that has no cause, only the dead bodies that testify to the ready availability of the weapons of war you can walk in and buy in every gun store in America.

People pull the triggers, but guns do the killing.  Without so many terrible guns there would not be terror in our schools and the dead bodies of children that are even now being buried as testaments to the imperfection of our presence on this earth as human beings.