Mark Woods: New town, different school shooting, same headline

I had planned to write about other topics this week. But by Tuesday evening, as the death toll from a small Texas town kept rising, delivering one gut punch after another, it was hard to think about much else.

I’m sad, angry, exhausted. I’m American.

I don’t really feel like writing about another mass shooting, either. What new can I, or anyone, say?

Maybe by not even trying to say something new, The Onion said it best.

The satirical newspaper posted a story about the Uvalde shooting with a headline it has used in the past: “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”

It put this on its homepage, along with past stories from past shootings, each including the same quote — “It’s a shame, but what can we do?” — attributed to a fictitious resident who resides in a real nation “where half of the world’s deadliest mass shootings have occurred in the past 50 years and whose citizens are 20 times more likely to die of gun violence than those of other developed nations.“

The Onion covered its homepage with these stories. Just different datelines, photos and death tolls. And the same headline over and over.

It was more damning than anything I can say.

I feel like I’m writing the same column I wrote after Parkland and Pulse. A broken record, spinning in a broken country.

Just 10 days after a supermarket in Buffalo, an elementary school in Texas.

In between, a church in California.

Ten years since Newtown.

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Homegrown threats to public safety

Some of the details change, but there almost always are three common denominators. Male, guns, America.

Yes, sometimes this does happen elsewhere. After Uvalde, I thought about Paris in 2015. A series of attacks — suicide bombings outside a soccer stadium, followed by mass shootings in popular nightspots — killed 130 people. A Syrian passport, which turned out to be fake, was found near the body of one of the attackers.

After those shootings, it was remarkable how quickly American politicians reacted — including the relatively new mayor of Jacksonville, Florida.

Within days, Lenny Curry fired off a letter to the local congressional delegation, asking to halt a plan to accept refugees fleeing Vladimir Putin's scorched-earth destruction of Syrian cities.

“As mayor for the people of Jacksonville,” Curry’s letter began, “I make public safety my top priority. In the aftermath of this weekend’s horrific terrorist attacks in Paris, I am more committed than ever to do everything I can to eliminate threats to our city’s safety.”

After Paris terrorist attacks in 2015: Mayor Curry calls for Congress to stop Syrian refugees from coming to U.S.

Mark Woods: Some of our biggest threats are homegrown

To a degree, Curry was following the lead of then-Gov. Rick Scott and Sen. Marco Rubio, who said they were more committed than ever to do everything they could to eliminate threats to public safety. (Well, as long as it was in line with what the NRA wanted.)

It’s worth noting that this was just months after a white supremacist had killed nine Black churchgoers in Charleston, S.C.

I wrote then that I wasn’t worried as much about Syrian refugees as I was about my fellow Americans — that some of the biggest threats to public safety in America, and in Jacksonville, were homegrown.

In the years since, we have heard a steady drumbeat of local murders — including one of a high school student hours after his graduation — and we have seen mass shootings much closer to home than Paris.

A gay nightclub in Orlando.

A country music festival in Las Vegas.

A church in Sutherland Springs, Texas.

A high school in Parkland.

A synagogue in Pittsburgh.

A bar in Thousand Oaks, Calif.

A municipal building in Virginia Beach.

A Walmart in El Paso, Texas.

A newspaper in Maryland.

This, of course, is just a partial list. Right here in Jacksonville, during a 2018 video gaming tournament at the Landing, a gunman killed two and injured 11 more before killing himself.

We’re not even to the midpoint of 2022 and, according to the tracking done by the Gun Violence Archive, we’ve seen 213 mass shootings in America this year.

Throughout all of this, we have not seen Congress do much of anything.

And after Uvalde, we should not expect to see the mayor of Jacksonville firing off letters asking our congressional delegation to take action — even actions supported by the vast majority of Americans and also still upholding the 2nd Amendment.

Curry did tweet: “Horrific day in Texas. The pain of these parents and families is unimaginable.  Little kids/babies lost leaves us with no words to console. Cry today. Cry. Just a dad talking here.”

He added: “People of all political parties should be grieving today for lives lost.  Sadly, political ideologies are stirring emotions tonight. And that’s both sides. Just be fathers, mothers and sons and daughters right now. Just be human.”

He’s right. We all should be grieving. And while this is an example where there obviously are differences of opinions in America, I think it's one of those instances where we all want the same thing — to be able to hug our kids after school, to go to the supermarket or movie theater or concert and return home.

But if we have a problem — and the first step is simply admitting we have a problem, which I’m not even sure we’ve done yet — when is appropriate to discuss solutions? If we wait until a gap in our grieving, we could be waiting a very long time.

Wilder than the Wild West

Christina Pushaw, the press secretary for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, was among those who didn’t wait long to raise questions about school security in Uvalde. She tweeted: “Since when can an adult who has nothing to do with the school just walk into an elementary school like that. It would not be allowed in any school that I have seen.”

What actually happened still isn't exactly clear. According to Texas officials, the gunman crashed his truck near the school and climbed out wearing tactical gear, carrying an AR-style rifle, bought legally shortly after his 18th birthday.

Law enforcement officers arrived within minutes. And kept arriving. And while questions remain about what happened once they were there, we know one thing for sure. Nineteen children and two teachers are dead.

We also know that in Buffalo an armed security guard tried to stop the shooter, who was wearing an armor-plated ballistic vest and carrying an assault-style rifle, legally purchased shortly after he turned 18. That security guard, a retired police officer, died along with nine others.

So maybe the problem here isn’t just security? And maybe the broader answer isn’t simply more good guys with more guns?

It’s hard to imagine that our musket-carrying Founding Fathers envisioned today’s weapons when they put quill to parchment and wrote of "a well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State." But they certainly did envision changes in the future beyond their imagination.

If you go to Washington and walk around the Thomas Jefferson Memorial, in addition to inscriptions from the Declaration of Independence and a bill for religious freedom, you’ll find an excerpt from a letter Jefferson wrote in 1816.

"I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as a civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors."

Some have said that these days America is becoming as barbarous as the Wild West. Which is far from true.

Many Wild West towns had stricter gun laws than today’s Buffalo and Uvalde. And the cowboys didn’t walk around Dodge City with AR-15s. And the headlines in the Tombstone News didn’t say: “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”

mwoods@jacksonville.com, (904) 359-4212

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Uvalde school shooting just latest in familiar American story