The shooting of a professor at UNC-Chapel Hill sent shockwaves through the campus and out into the wider world. But WFAE’s Tommy Tomlinson, in his "On My Mind" commentary, wonders how long we’ll remember.
The front page of the Daily Tar Heel on Wednesday was one of the most powerful newspaper pages I’ve ever seen.
It was stark and simple: a string of texts sent to and by students at UNC Chapel Hill while the school was on lockdown for more than three hours on Monday.
ARE YOU SAFE? WHERE ARE YOU? I’M IN CLASS EVERYONE IS LOSING IT. DO YOU HEAR SHOOTING? PLEASE PRAY FOR US.
The texts go on and on. And, in fact, there had been a shooting. Zijie Yan, an associate professor in the Department of Applied Physical Sciences, was killed in his office on campus. Tailei Qi, a graduate student who worked with Yan, was arrested and charged with first-degree murder.
Both the victim and the suspect were originally from China, and yet they wound up in that most American of tragedies, one of them dead from a gunshot, the other charged with pulling the trigger.
We all understand what will happen now, which is nothing. This shooting, like all the others, will be an earthquake in a barrel: Devastating and unforgettable to those in the middle of it, and causing barely a ripple to those on the outside.
Just a few days before Chapel Hill, a white man who left behind racist journal entries walked into a Dollar General in Jacksonville, Florida, and shot three Black people to death before killing himself. It’s possible you had already forgotten that one. Barely a ripple.
Back in March, a shooter killed six people — including three children — at a school in Nashville. Residents begged the Tennessee legislature to pass some sort of gun reform. The legislature adjourned a special session last week having achieved basically nothing.
Our system of government depends on the balance between the rights of an individual and the needs of society. The power of the gun lobby has tilted the field so completely in their favor that a majority of politicians are afraid to pass even the most modest gun laws. They have created a country where there are so many shootings that we can’t process them all without going numb. Which I suspect the gun lobby sees as not a bug, but a feature.
I know and love folks who hunt to feed their families and treat their firearms as tools to be treated with a healthy respect. I’m not worried about them. What worries me are all the people who buy guns to fill the holes of hate and fear inside themselves.
Those people are bound to pull the trigger. As we see over and over again, in Chapel Hill and Jacksonville and Nashville, and all those other places where the earthquakes of the recent past are now barely remembered.
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.
