Sam Stein at The Bulwark: OF ALL THE REFLECTIONS offered by lawmakers on the school shooting that left four people dead at Apalachee High School this week, one from Sen. Rick Scott stood out.
“Our hearts break for the families of two students and two teachers in Winder, Georgia, who suffered an unimaginable loss today because of a deranged monster,” said the Florida Republican.
The senator’s heart may have been in the right place. But his words were wrong. There’s nothing “unimaginable” about what happened. It happens all the time.
Six-and-a-half years ago, seventeen people were killed in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Scott’s home state. Last year, three students and three staff members were killed in a shooting at the Covenant School in the Green Hills neighborhood in Tennessee. The 2023 Michigan State University shooting saw a man kill three and wound five before killing himself. The shooting in Uvalde, in May 2022, saw nineteen students and two teachers lose their lives. The 2021 Oxford High School shooting saw four students killed and seven others wounded. The May 2018 Santa Fe High School shooting resulted in ten deaths and thirteen injuries.
These are just the headline grabbers from the past few years. A database compiled by the gun control group Everytown for Gun Safety records 139 incidents of gunfire on school grounds (different from school shootings) just this year, resulting in 42 deaths and 93 injuries. Just since August 1, according to an official with the group, there have been thirteen such incidents.
It’s useful to bring up these numbers in the wake of the Apalachee High School shooting to remind people that while these are devastating events, they are not extraordinary ones. This is not a series of unique tragedies but an epidemic. We shouldn’t treat it as otherworldly or unimaginable because it’s not.
On Thursday, JD Vance described the shooting in Winder as an unfortunate “fact of life.” To a degree, the crux of what Vance said is true. School shootings are our grim, decidedly American reality.
But recognizing that reality is different than accepting it. And Vance’s suggestion that the only possible response is to fortify our schools and get used to the dystopia was not just defeatist and cynical; it ignored the fact we’ve already taken many of those steps. The bipartisan gun safety bill that Biden signed allocated billions of dollars to prevent school violence.
