Opinion: School shootings elicit empty words from right and left

The massacre of nineteen children and two teachers at the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas sounded horrifyingly familiar notes.

A journalist on the scene at the school reported that the agonized screams of family members were audible from the parking lot.

That chilling news was eerily reminiscent of reports from the Sandy Hook tragedy a decade ago, where parents who were waiting in a firehouse were gradually excused until it was announced that, if they were still present, their child was dead.

Then, too, well-wishers could hear the screaming from the street.

Over the past thirty years of mass shootings, it has also now become commonplace to express our rage and exasperation over the offering of “thoughts and prayers.”

It wasn’t always so. In the early years of mass shootings, directing such sentiments toward the effected families and community was a relatively uncontroversial gesture.

But the public quickly, and rightly, wearied of this formulaic response when it came from politicians who had done nothing to advance gun control policies and who were seen as beholden to the National Rifle Association. Thoughts and prayers became synonymous with a heartless and odious hypocrisy.

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In 2015, after eight college students and a professor were killed at Umpqua Community College in Oregon, President Barack Obama captured what many Americans were thinking when he declared: “Our thoughts and prayers are not enough. It’s time to take action.”

Hollow prayers, meaningless outrage

Over the years, our disapproval of thoughts and prayers has grown to the extent that no one can express them, at least in those terms. We have come to think of thoughts and prayers as empty words, hypocritical when uttered by feckless politicians, and meaningless when spoken by anyone at all.

The day after the Uvalde shooting, my social media feeds were filled with people yelling sentiments to that effect at no one in particular: “Shut up with your thoughts and prayers and do something!” These messages cascaded down my screen, each thick with outrage.

I’m sympathetic with the impulse behind those messages. We all need comfort in the face of unspeakable tragedy; doing something helpful would comfort us; and we’ve convinced ourselves that yelling for someone to do something helps.

In doing so, we delude ourselves.

In reality, we need all the thoughts and prayers we can get, provided they’re sincere. Indeed, we have in part failed to make progress on sensible firearm regulation precisely because we haven’t managed to keep these tragedies in our thoughts.

We rage for a day or two. We circulate memes on Facebook. And then the famously short attention span of Americans kicks in and we turn our attention elsewhere.

Make no mistake: The opponents of regulation count on us doing so. They think we have a loud but disorganized short game and no long game worth worrying after. For thirty years we’ve proved them right.

Furthermore, yelling that some unspecified someone needs to do some unspecified something about these tragedies has no more content than does “thoughts and prayers.” The painful truth is that we’ve not only failed to make progress on this issue as a nation; we’ve failed as individuals. After three decades, we’ve simply traded one hollow vocabulary for another.

The individual imperative

The uncomfortable fact is that we cannot outsource our moral responsibility for these tragedies. We cannot shout into the darkness, congratulate ourselves on our moral courage, and count it as a step forward. We’re still just dancing in place.

What happened in Uvalde will continue to happen until each and every one of us works for a different result. We need to support organizations that fight for sensible regulation. We need to put our heft behind political candidates who have worked to understand the problem and to develop concrete and workable policy solutions.

We can start by looking at Nicolas Kristof’s well-researched piece “How to Reduce Shootings,” first published in the New York Times in 2017 and recently updated. Then, with a better understanding of strategies that might help, we can look into the work being done by groups like the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, Everytown for Gun Safety, Sandy Hook Promise, and Brady.

Most importantly, we can find out where our elected representatives stand on this issue. We can write to them. And we can remind them that this is not a partisan matter: For example, polls show that the vast majority of Americans, including gun owners, want expanded background checks.

In short, we need to step up and speak up, to demand thoughtful and competent responses to the challenges before us, and to put muscle on our demands with our votes, our resources, and our vigilance.

Until every last one of us makes this our personal mission, it’s all just words, words, and words. Full of sound and fury. Signifying nothing. Our bloodied children buried under whole mountains of them.

Len Niehoff is a professor at the University of Michigan Law School and a practicing attorney.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Opinion: Right, left owe school shooting victims more than empty words