Four More Children Dead, and a Nation Shrugs

Families in Michigan will set an empty place at the table this holiday season in the wake of the mass shooting at Oxford High School that left four children dead and seven more injured.

The deaths at Oxford this week came a little more than two weeks before the ninth anniversary of the Dec. 14, 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. That shooting left 20 children dead, and officially marked the start of our national acceptance of sacrificing innocents on the false altar of gun rights.

After every one of these shootings, we ask ourselves: How could this happen again? When the actual question we should be asking ourselves is why doesn’t this happen with more horrifying frequency than it already does? And it is our national shame that we have become as accepting of it as we have.

After a lull during the pandemic, school shootings are once again on the rise, the New York Times recently reported, citing numbers by Education Week. There have been 28 school shootings resulting in injury and death so far this year, with 20 reported since Aug. 1.

The teenage shooter in the Michigan case, his name won’t be printed here, has been charged as an adult on multiple counts that include terrorism and first-degree murder. As of this writing, prosecutors were considering charges against the suspect’s parents, according to the Washington Post. The accused shooter’s father purchased the weapon allegedly used in the deadly rampage.

It may be some time before we know how the 15-year-old accused shooter obtained the 9mm Sig Sauer SP2022 semi-automatic his father purchased on Black Friday. It may take equally as long to learn why he allegedly went on a homicidal spree that saw him shoot people “at close range, oftentimes toward the head or chest,” Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard said on CNN.

“It’s just absolutely cold-hearted, murderous,” Bouchard said.

But as a trio of public health experts wrote earlier this week, gun sales have shot up during the pandemic, often landing in homes with teenage children. Combine that prevalence with lax storage practices, and it creates the perfect storm of circumstances under which these tragedies can unfold.

“One clear action that parents can take to help reduce the likelihood of future tragic school shootings and to keep their teens safe is to ensure any firearms present in the home are secured safely, locked up and unloaded, and out of reach of teens,” Patrick Carter and Marc A. Zimmerman, of the University of Michigan, and Rebeccah Sokol, of Detroit-based Wayne State University, wrote in an analysis this week published by The Conversation.

Making sure that happens requires both legislative action and increased vigilance by gun owners.

...continued

swipe to next page