As we dissect the latest mass shooting at a school in America — this one in Nashville — WFAE’s Tommy Tomlinson, in his "On My Mind" commentary, finds himself out of words.
I am here this morning, as a professional giver of opinions, to tell you that I don’t know what to tell you.
Something about the Nashville school shooting broke me. Not just the shooting but what came after.
I don’t know what to say anymore about how easy it is for too many Americans to legally buy all the guns they can haul out of the store.
I don’t know how to make sense of what would drive someone to go to a school and kill three adults and three children. The adults were the head of the school, the custodian and a substitute teacher. The kids were 9, and 9, and 9.
I don’t know how to process the six dead from gun violence in Nashville on top of the three dead at Michigan State and the 11 dead in Monterey Park and the eight dead in Utah and the six dead in Chesapeake and the five dead in Colorado Springs and the three dead at U-Va. and the five dead in Raleigh and the seven dead in Highland Park and the 10 dead in Buffalo and the 21 dead in Uvalde, Texas, all in the last 12 months.
I don’t know how to describe how I felt when I looked up that list of shootings and realized I had already forgotten about most of them.
I don’t know what to do with the ghouls who always find something else to blame, like the Nashville shooter being trans, or the Uvalde police hesitating, or whatever excuse is necessary to pretend that it is not about the guns.
I don’t know the words for the Republican members of the North Carolina legislature who overrode Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto of a gun bill on Wednesday. The override means that handgun owners in the state no longer even have to get a permit from the local sheriff. It was the mildest, most moderate form of gun control imaginable. But the GOP legislators killed it. And they did so two days after the Nashville shootings.
I don’t know how they sleep.
I don’t know if I believe anymore that we will ever stop the slaughter. There are too many people who profit from it, either at the cash register or the ballot box. There are too many phony warriors who buy an arsenal to paper over their insecurities. There are too many hunters and other responsible gun owners who fail to speak up against the lunatics ruining their reputations.
I don’t know how we have let our country become the only place in the world where this happens over and over and over.
All I know right now is this: What happened in Nashville will happen again. And it won’t be long.
Tommy Tomlinson’s "On My Mind" column runs Mondays on WFAE and WFAE.org. It represents his opinion, not the opinion of WFAE. You can respond to this column in the comments section below. You can also email Tommy at ttomlinson@wfae.org.
