Bee Opinionated: It’s always been about the guns + If I die in a mass shooting
This is Robin Epley again with The Bee Editorial Board: Another weekend has come and gone with a third day ahead, just in time for a much-needed break. I hope you were able to relax and recharge after an extremely tough week for everyone in the country. Another mass shooting at an elementary school, another classroom of children who will never go home, another round of political infighting with no solutions.
In the aftermath of this tragedy, the whole board tried to do what we do best: Pour out our own humanity on paper.
The horrible news from Uvalde, Texas, broke in the early afternoon for us here in California, and dominated the rest of the week. I know I was still thinking about it for hours after work that first night, so I jumped on my computer to jot down some jumbling thoughts.
All I could think about was how I would feel in that situation. How scared I’d be, how angry, how hopeless. The words I composed were different than any others I had ever written in my newspaper career:
“If I die in a mass shooting, don’t question why I was present in the place I was killed. Whether it’s at 2 a.m. on downtown streets or in a movie theater — or at a school, a concert, in a grocery store, or in church — know that I was simply enjoying my life that day.
If I die in a mass shooting, know that I didn’t make a bad choice or turn down the wrong alley: This is simply life in America now. There’s nothing I could have done to stop it.”
A woman cries as she leaves the Uvalde Civic Center on May 24, 2022 in Uvalde, Texas where 19 students and two teachers were killed in a mass shooting at a South Texas elementary school. AP photo by William Luther.
I wasn’t the only one to take on the grim subject this week, either.
It’s Still The Guns
Deputy Opinion Editor Josh Gohlke — fresh off writing last week about mass shootings in Buffalo, NY, and Southern California — said what everyone is thinking: We’re so tired.
“Yes, it’s been a terrible few years in an America disrupted and decimated by the pandemic. Sure, we’re divided along racial, political and other lines. And of course we have our share, and probably more, of the sick and desperate, untreated and unaided.
All of this deserves dealing with, but it’s not why we have 19 more dead children. We have 19 more dead children because of a radical and relatively recent misinterpretation of the Constitution that keeps this country awash in so many deadly weapons that when the Sacramento police offered gas cards for guns, they ran out of gas cards. At both the state and national level, the correlation between the presence and accessibility of these weapons and the number of violent deaths is blindingly obvious.”
Seeing is Believing
Bee cartoonist Jack Ohman suggested that America needs to see the crime scene in Uvalde if we’re ever going to get serious about gun control. Jack said his early experiences hunting with his father taught him about the sanctity of life.
“I remember shooting a small bird in Brainerd, Minnesota, in 1972. I hit the bird in the eye, and it flopped to the ground, dead. Blood streamed out of the eye socket onto fallen leaves, and I wept and felt sick. I pretended to be interested in hunting for a few more years, but I wasn’t.
In the same sense, most people aren’t interested in images of people killed by gunshots. They don’t want to see them.”
Merchants of Death
Metro columnist Melinda Henneberger wrote an editorial for The Bee this week on a gun issue much closer to home: The same day as the mass shooting in Uvalde, a second-grader in a Meadowview elementary school brought a gun and a loaded clip to school.
“Our individualism has become so radical that wearing a mask to save granny, much less a stranger, has repeatedly been compared to an abridgment of rights and infliction of suffering on par with the Holocaust.
None of this is out of nowhere; it’s thanks to a sustained and well-financed campaign to convince us that those with whom we disagree are not just wrong, but evil, that lifelong friends no longer speak and displays of ideological othering get lots of likes.”
Opinion of the Week
“Somehow, the same people who say there’s no right to privacy because that’s not mentioned in the Constitution will also tell you that something never mentioned in the New Testament is more important than everything Jesus did say put together.” — Melinda Henneberger on San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone’s announcement that he would deny communion to Democratic Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi.
Got thoughts? What would you like to see in this newsletter every week? Got a story tip or an opinion to tell the world? Let us know what you think about this email and our work in general by emailing us at any time via opinion@sacbee.com.
Hold your loved ones close,
Robin Epley
