Quick! Does anyone remember what happened during the
first week of the new year? It wasn’t
another big winter storm or another actor or pop singer dying. It was big news – the man-bites-dog type, as
opposed to another dog biting a man.
Here’s a hint: it happened in Florida.
It should have been
big news, and it should still be big news. That is, if this country, if not the
world, made sense anymore. Instead, when
a man went on a shooting rampage and killed five people and injured eight
others at the Fort Lauderdale’s international airport, the Los Angeles Times
relegated the story to the bottom of the front page and called the incident
“the country’s first mass shooting of the new year.”
Think about
that. “The country’s first mass shooting
of the new year.” This was only the first mass shooting in America this
year. This means there’ll be more mass
shootings before long. This means that
there will be another mass shooting in the next several months and another one
not long afterwards. This means that
more mass shootings will no doubt happen, that more mass shootings are
inevitable – a matter of when and where, not if – that they will be no
surprise, not big news.
The other night, I
was watching the PBS Frontline documentary on how America became more divided
during Barrack Obama’s presidency, leading to Donald Trump’s rise and election,
and I was very much struck by one statistic: the rampage at Sandy Hook
Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in which 18 young children and seven
adults were slaughtered, was the fifteenth (and far from the last) mass
shooting during the eight years when Obama was president. No doubt the only reason it is still
remembered is that all those little kids were killed, and yet, as the
documentary pointed out, it didn’t result in stricter national gun safety
legislation.
Perhaps all this
shouldn’t be surprising. Perhaps mass
shootings no longer being big news shouldn’t be big news. As I post this, the inauguration of Donald
Trump as the 45th president of the United States is taking
place. I am doing this instead of
watching. Indeed, perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised.
