A mother's cry in Nashville
March 28, 2023
I wasn’t going to write, here, today. But I didn’t sleep well last night, and it’s important to say why.
It was an account I heard, on the radio, of the primal wail of a mother who was reacting to the news that she’d just lost her nine year-old child to the bullets from one of the two assault weapons used in the Covenant school massacre in Nashville yesterday.
You don’t have to be a parent to understand it. I’m the father of two children who survived to adulthood, but I remember me, and I remember them, when they were nine. The Nashville mother didn’t just have her heart broken. It was cleaved. She will never be the same. It is one thing to lose a child to a random event—what we might call an act of nature. The grief that attends that is hard to imagine. I’m much better off not to know it. But to a senseless act of violence? Where’s the bottom to such an abyss?
I’ve never owned a gun, and I don’t want to. It’s a personal choice. I lost two of my childhood friends to gun-inflicted suicides. Not that I needed social science to make that decision but the data show that a gun in the house is more likely to be used for suicide or murder than to be discharged in self-defense against an intruder.
That said, my argument is not with those who’ve reached a different decision about how best to protect themselves and their families. My argument is with American gun culture and the long trail of blood that stems from it, most notably through the headlock it has on our politics, evinced in our failure to permanently ban the private ownership of military-style assault weapons like the AR-15.
It fits in a picture. It’s the Christmas card of Rep. Andy Ogles, the Republican Congressman who represents the Nashville district that encompasses the Covenant school where yesterday’s shooting took place.
Congressman Ogles is not alone in his use and promotion of the AR-15 as a cultural symbol among GOP members of Congress. It’s not just a way to display the “freedom” to bear arms, but as a way to show the middle finger to the rest of us.
There have been so many of these mass shootings involving assault rifles since Columbine, nearly a quarter century ago, that I’ve lost count. I well remember how I felt on December 14, 2012, the sickness to my stomach, when we learned that twenty young children and six adults were murdered with an AR-15 style assault rifle at the Sandy Hook elementary school. Surely, this would be a turning point. At a minimum, it was compelling that the 1994 assault weapons ban—which expired in 2004—should be reinstated.
Not so. Nothing happened. The gun was bigger than the gun which, ironically, got welded onto the rise of the evangelical Christian right, somehow being carried along, like a trophy, in the same movement that was preaching the “sanctity” of life by working to repeal Roe v. Wade.
That’s the crude, cultural triumphalism I see in Congressman Ogles infamous Christmas card.
What madness. It’s hard to fathom how our politics can manifest such a dark strain of toxicity that—I still want to believe—is not reflective of the basic decency of a majority of Americans.
I could write more, but nothing could be more true to the moment than a mother’s piercing wail from Nashville yesterday. I’m not done losing sleep over it.
—tjc