This past April, while attending my brother’s wedding, I found myself speaking with a family friend. She moved to the United States from Scotland, and one of her daughters was in my brother’s year at school.
We discussed the Stoneman Douglas shooting in Parkland, Florida, and the March for Our Lives that followed, organized by now familiar names like Emma Gonzalez and David Hogg.
She told me a story about another shooting, one I’d never heard about before: the Dunblane massacre. In March 1996, a man entered a Scottish primary school and used four legally purchased handguns to murder 16 children and one educator before killing himself.
The family friend told me how when she heard about the shooting, she left work to go check on her daughters, even though intellectually she knew they were safe. The situation was so alien and terrifying, that she needed to physically see her children playing in the schoolyard to regain peace of mind.
I don’t know if my own parents ever had similar reactions in the wake of the shootings that have rocked America throughout my entire life, and there are too many to name. Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, and Parkland all spring to mind, but there are dozens more either forgotten or never known in the first place.
But there is one key difference between these shootings and the Dunblane massacre: after Dunblane, the United Kingdom enacted sweeping restrictions on handgun ownership. Australia followed suit, restricting rifle and shotgun ownership after the Port Arthur massacre, which saw 35 people gunned down in the Tasmanian city.
No equivalent national measures have ever been implemented in the United States. The 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban was watered down and doomed to fail (bans shouldn’t have sunset provisions). The only way to meaningfully reduce the amount of death and destruction sown by these deadly weapons is to ban them, remove any in circulation, and melt them down.
Barring a radically unlikely reinterpretation of the Second Amendment by the Supreme Court, these measures would require a new amendment. The constitution is not infallible, and neither were the men who wrote it, or else enslaved black people would be still counted as 3/5s of a person for purposes of legislative appropriation.
Now, listen closely and you should be able to hear advocates of the Second Amendment seething with rage.
I’m angry too. I’m angry because some people value their fetishized murder toys over human lives. I’m angry because America has watched innocent children be murdered in cold blood and have done nothing. I’m angry because the NRA and the gun lobby can buy politicians to vomit their propaganda about “a good guy with a gun.”
I’m writing this in response to the Tree of Life synagogue shooting that occurred on Oct. 27, where a white supremacist murdered 11 people, but this is only the latest drops in a sea of blood spilled over this issue.
It will happen again. In a school or a church or a workplace, but the specifics blur together at this point. What is known is that an incredibly deadly weapon will be legally purchased and used to end lives.
I’ll never know the feelings of a Scottish mother aghast at the reality of these events, because I, and everyone else at this school, has grown up knowing that we may be next. We also know nothing will be done by our government in response to our killings, except to faithlessly repeat “thoughts and prayers” while being propped up by the companies selling the guns in the first place.
Preventing our deaths would cut into their profits.