The MSU Shooting Is Making Us See A New Kind Of Gun Tragedy

DETROIT – Toll road Monday night massacre at Michigan State Universitywhere three students died and five others sustained serious injuries, will be felt in the section for a long time.

Arielle Anderson, sophomore, wants to be a pediatrician. Brian Fraser, also a sophomore, is president of the fraternity. Alexandria Verner is a junior and three-sport athlete in high school.

that three lives In short, five others who carried around scars forever, plus countless others who will deal with emotional trauma that is not uncommon in American life.

But, mostly, the experience is novel. For some Mondays, no.

Among the students at MSU there are some who are in Oxford High Schoolnorth of Detroit, where a gunman killed four and wounded seven others end of 2021. One texted his mother, according to an account in the Detroit Free Press, and said “Mom, I just want to go home, I want to hold you.”

This is perhaps to be expected, as MSU’s student body includes graduates from nearly every public high school in Michigan. But it’s not just Oxford alumni who survive such trauma.

Among those currently attending MSU are: Jackie Matthews, a senior who lived through the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, 10 years ago. A little after midnight, in the room across the street from where it took place, he put his thoughts into a tiktok video.

“I’m 21 years old, and this is the second mass shooting that I’ve been involved in,” Matthews said. He continued to describe his memories of Sandy Hook – from crouching on the table with his classmates for so long that he actually fractured his vertebrae, an injury that to this day flares up when he is stressed.

“The fact that this is the second mass shooting I’ve ever been involved in is beyond me,” he added.

It’s incomprehensible – unless, again, it might be incomprehensible.

MSU has 50,000 students, many from outside of Michigan. It is not surprising to find some survivors previous school shootings, given how common they have become, to say nothing of the students whose lives gun violence has touched in some other way.

Every day in America, 22 children and teenagers become victims gun violenceaccording to The Brady Organization. The number includes murder and suicide, attempted and successful, sometimes in other crimes and sometimes as a single act.

Matthews ended TikTok with a call for action. “We can’t just give love and prayers,” he said. “It should be a law.”

The case for strong action. No other economically developed country has as many firearms victims or as many firearms in civilian hands. And it’s no mystery why guns are common here: It’s easier to get and own.

Whether that easy access was a factor in the MSU shooting remains to be seen, with details of the incident and the alleged perpetrator still emerging.

He was a 43-year-old man who died a few hours after the murder, apparently after shooting himself. He has a prior misdemeanor convictions that, accordingly Free PressThe lawyer asked to drop the charge of the gun more serious crime, which is also enough to make legal ownership in his case.

Neighbors described the man as a “distracted person” who had a difficult relationship with family members, according to several media accounts, and recalled the sound of him taking target practice with an automatic weapon in his yard.

The shooter’s father has told reporters that he asked his son if he had a gun at home, and the son denied it.

At complete accounting of what happened could end up strengthening the case for more aggressive prosecution of gun crimes. The story could also serve as another argument for more investment in mental health care.

But the inconsistent prosecution of crimes and the high prevalence of mental illness are not just American phenomena. Only a high number of guns and gun crimes.

There’s no reason MPs can’t tackle all of these at once – obviously, that doesn’t mean they will.

For almost a quarter of a century now, the demand for action has accompanied every take of the masses, back to The Columbine High School Massacre near Denver, Colorado, in 1999 and then Sandy Hook in 2012 – after President Barack Obama, said as a father like the president detach when he vowed to make new laws.

They unsuccessfuleven though it was only a month after he’d won a resounding reelection bid and even though polls show the public behind him – and even though, in the Senate, the compromise bill of Sens. Joe Manchin (DW.Va.) and Pat Toomey (R-Penn.) Support from most Democrats and some Republicans as well.

It’s a simple package focus on background checks, scaled way back from what Obama had originally proposed. But even those concessions aren’t enough to pick up the votes needed to win the chamber in rural, more conservative states with disproportionate power — and where, currently, a 60-vote majority is needed to pass legislation.

One of the few exceptions that happened last year, when there was outrage over the massacre of another child – this time in Uvalde, Texas – lead to a bipartisan gun bill The president said Joe Biden enter. The law strengthens the existing background check system and seeks to reduce so-called “straw shopping,” when it comes to spending money. mental health services.

The bill also provides state funding for “red flag laws,” which set up a legal process to take a gun from a loved one who may demonstrate a danger to others or themselves. (This is known as an “extreme protection order.”)

But the enactment of laws that take place in the background a landmark Supreme Court ruling striking down New York’s law restricting the ability to carry guns in public – and, with, critical the same law in the book throughout the country.

This is an extension of a previous decision protecting the constitutional right to private gun ownership, which the Supreme Court has so far ignored. 2008and just this month two separate federal judges have been cited that rule as a reason for throw out the law of the land banning the possession of firearms by persons subject to domestic violence orders.

Here Michiganpassing the gun law has also been a struggle.

After the Oxford shooting, Democrats in the state legislature proposed a series of measures – to create a more comprehensive background check system, to set new rules for gun storage and to set up a red flag system. Republican leaders in the legislature will not present proposals in committee.

This may be because he rejected previous efforts without political consequences, thanks to the support of gun-rights advocacy groups and partisan gerrymanders that gave Republicans an effective lock. But that gerrymander ended when Michigan voters approved an initiative to create a nonpartisan redistricting commission, and with that new district, Democrats. won control of the legislature for the first time since the 1980s.

Even before Monday’s shooting, Democratic leaders in the legislature had promised to make gun legislation a top priority. After the shootingthey made it clear they were meant to reach home – and they don’t mince words.

“Thoughts and prayers,” tweeted Rep. Ranjeev Puri, a Democrat whose district is in the western suburbs of Detroit.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat who won reelection in November, did not use the same colorful language at a press conference Tuesday morning. They don’t even mention the law clearly.

But he, too, has recognized that the gun proposals as top priority, and he alluded to them in an emotional display when, like Obama 10 years ago, he had to holding back tears.

“This is a uniquely American problem,” said Whitmer, whose children now attend school in Michigan. “Our children are afraid to go to school … words are not good enough.”

The difficult question about these measures is how much good they will do.

The number of guns now in circulation here in the US means that gun violence is a reality that will not go away easily. The most far-reaching response would be significant restrictions on gun ownership and ownership, coupled with the kind of buybacks that Australia launched after the high-profile massacre there.

But the act has no prospect of passing Congress now. Even if it does, it will not pass this Supreme Court.

That leaves modest regulation now on the agenda in Michigan, among other states.

Evidence of the more suggestive effectiveness of the dispositive, as Rand Corporation researchers has been found in a series of widely cited literature reviews. One reason is that, until recently, federal restrictions on gun violence research funding meant difficult to do the type of study that is necessary. These limitations are artificial from the National Rifle Association ally on Capitol Hill.

But there is enough research to suggest that a few steps can make a difference. And it doesn’t take a ton of imagination to think the red flag law might have deterred the MSU shooter or others like him, especially if people were aware of the law. (This is a major problem in countries that have adopted these laws: Not enough people know about them to use them.).

The main tradeoff of this system is the process and scrutiny that prospective gun owners must go through and whether they represent an unforgivable violation of freedom. The NRA and its supporters see it that way. Likewise, many elected officials, mostly Republicans, still serve in Congress and state legislatures.

But the majority of Americans seem to disagree. Ideas like background checks have consistently drawn high approval numbers in surveys, across partisan lines, including a poll of Michiganders whose company EPIC-MRC was released in September.

Voters who support the measures may change their minds as the debate progresses. This has happened before. But perhaps the majority of Americans think that freedom means the freedom to go to school without being caught up in genocide – and then having to experience it all over again.