When We Say 'Return to Normal,' We Can't Mean This
Last Monday, a 21-year-old man killed 10 people with a Ruger AR-556 pistol inside a Boulder, CO grocery store. Six days earlier, in Atlanta, a different 21-year-old man went into a gun store, purchased a handgun, and opened fire at three spas. Of the eight people killed, six were Asian and seven were women.
These men were both born in 1999, the same year two teens went on a shooting spree at Columbine High School, killing 13 people and wounding more than 20 others. In the 21 years it took for them to grow up, become filled with hatred, and accumulate enough firepower to cause mass suffering and chaos, Congress still hasn’t been able to pass a significant piece of federal gun safety legislation.
Our country’s weak gun laws continue to enable dangerous men to carry out deadly acts. While most of the gun violence that occurs every day hardly makes the headlines, seeing carnage from two mass shootings in one week was gut wrenching. And yet, there’s become an all-too familiar routine of grief: the messages we receive from loved ones, the community pain, and the trauma that surfaces for all those who have survived gun violence.
When we talk about “returning to normal” post-pandemic, this cannot be what we mean.
The tragedy in Boulder was the sixth mass shooting in 2021, but mass shootings are just the tip of the iceberg in our country’s gun violence crisis. More than 99 percent of gun deaths in the U.S. are from shootings other than mass shootings—and it is only getting worse. More than 100 people are shot and killed on an average day, and 230 more are shot and wounded.
Despite COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020, an estimated 19,300 people were killed in gun homicides or non-suicide-related shootings. That’s a 25 percent increase from 2019.
So while the number of mass shootings decreased last year during COVID, we should all be worried about the tragedies that may unfold this year given record gun sales during the pandemic, and an ever-strained background checks system filled with loopholes.
How can we keep our communities safe? If more guns and fewer gun laws were the answer, we'd be the safest country in the world. But we’re not, and it isn’t a mystery why gun violence continues to ravage our country. For decades, the NRA was lining lawmakers’ pockets, promoting the idea that everyone should be able to purchase a gun and carry it anywhere they want.
We’ve passed gun safety laws in states across America — with 22 states and Washington D.C. now requiring background checks on all handgun sales — and those states have lower firearm homicide rates, lower firearm suicide rates, and lower firearm trafficking than states without these laws. But we’re all only as safe as the closest state with the weakest laws. We need federal action.
I started Moms Demand Action the day after the shooting at Sandy Hook School in 2012. After the Senate failed to pass background checks the next year, we doubled down and have been helping to pass laws that keep our families safe.
With the gun safety movement stronger than ever, we are now focused on the Senate—and we will hold anyone who stands in our way accountable.
At the executive level, President Joe Biden could also take executive action to strengthen our background check system, shut down the market for ghost guns, and dramatically increase funding to the community violence intervention programs that address city gun violence. There’s not a corner of the administration that can’t be doing something to save lives.
In the last 15 years, I’ve called both Atlanta and Boulder home. My kids went to elementary school in Atlanta, and my youngest son went to high school in Boulder. My heart aches for the families and communities devastated by this violence.
But I’m also angry. We don’t have to live this way, and our loved ones sure as hell shouldn’t have to die this way.
Instead of simply celebrating the vaccination of hundreds of millions of people in America, we are now also wondering whether a bullet will end lives, rather than the virus. As a parent, the thing we fear most is losing our children, which is why I worry about what will happen when our kids return to classrooms in the fall — nearly 5 million children in this country live in a home with an unsecured firearm. Inaction is not an option. It’s time to pass significant gun safety legislation for the first time in a generation and halt the cycle of violence.
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