Her chin is shaking a little, it’s only her second day at her new school… Bending down. Adjust his jacket. Run your hand through her curls. Kiss her. Let him go with his air-filled Spiderman backpack and his leg-beating lunch box. Watch him walk through the two glass doors. “Bulletproof”, insisted the director at length during the visit. Indeed, every morning, after the oath of allegiance to the flag, the two doors that swallow it have been designed to resist bullets.
It was ten years ago.
The year of Sandy Hook. The year we said “never again”.
A decade later, 948 shootings (in schools) later, the rate of killings has increased, and is accelerating even more on school grounds.
In the United States, this week, parents received a note from the school saying that security around the establishment will be tightened. Some have wondered if they should perhaps acquire armored backpacks or “ballistic blankets”, the advertisements of which can now be seen more frequently on social networks (capitalism never sleeps!). Proponents of the Second Amendment came up with their usual panoply of solutions: a single door on the school, armed teachers, armored windows.
Today, as after Sandy Hook, parents are even more aware that they leave their children every morning at the doors of establishments that are not the sanctuaries they should be. Today in the United States, the leading cause of pediatric death is, according to a study just published in the journal Pediatrics, by firearm. Just today, 12 children will die from gun violence. Like every day, 32 will be injured (according to the organization Sandy Hook Promise). And today, in the United States, being an African-American child quadruples all of those statistics (according to State of America’s Children 2021).
What society watches its children die without doing anything? What society accepts that each year, the equivalent of the population of Rouyn-Noranda disappears because of this armed violence? What society accepts, if we must cynically reduce the issue to its material dimension, to assume the astronomical cost of this violence – 280 billion dollars per year according to Everytown for gun safety?
The paradox is there and the cognitive dissonance is real: the majority of households do not have a weapon under their roof (44% do). But it is the majority of Americans (59%) who want greater control – just as, in a striking parallel, it is also a majority of Americans who aspire to the maintenance of Roe v. wade. Yet the country is at an impasse. If nothing changed after Sandy Hook in 2012, if nothing ever changed after Parkland in 2018 when these young survivors fought valiantly to try to alter the course of things, if – once again – nothing changes, it is because the debate has been confiscated.
It’s the heist of the decade. To be linked with a phenomenon described very well by Professors Mann and Ornstein when they published on this subject in 2012 (It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, Basic Books): if there is polarization in the United States, it is actually asymmetrical. In fact, they say, if one party is barely more to the left than it was before, the other, on the other hand, has become completely off-center, to drift away… to the point of losing contact with the reality.
A fringe of the Republican Party, electrified several decades ago by Newt Gingrich, has managed to permanently lock the legislative process in Congress. Dubbed by Trump, it now holds the keys to many checks and balances – the Senate, the Supreme Court, the federated and federal courts, the federated legislatures, the local executives, and defines, by this means, against the current, the terms of a society increasingly dystopian.
It’s the heist of the century. Public debate is locked in a restrictive and Manichean semantic bubble. On immigration, reproductive health, equal opportunities, the carrying of arms, the education of children… Whoever is not a republican but simply a humanist is by definition, if we are to believe Ted Cruz, by example, an apostle of open borders, a champion of critical race theory, confiscation of weapons, the misappropriation of women, and human sacrifice.
In return for this, with the backing of increasingly radical legislation, judgments from a Supreme Court now immersed in the political arena, the face of the country is changing — for the record, the governor of Oklahoma, Kevin Stitt, signed into law last Wednesday a law to ban all abortions in the state starting with fertilization. The distortion of what this imperfect republic has been produces an increasingly monstrous mutant. Under the rule of a Grand Old Party without complex. Shameless. Without remorse.
But not at any price. It was before an “unarmed” assembly that Trump spoke Friday at the National Rifle Association meeting in Houston. You have to believe that on that side of the chessboard, the value of life is variable.