It has turned into a guessing game. Where the next mass killing occurs is the great American unknown. What is known is that it’s coming. Mass shootings in America are predictable and schools are regularly the target. The latest, but likely not the last, was perhaps among the saddest. Its victims were children and their teachers whose last moments were spent as captives in their classroom facing their killer.
Last Tuesday, in Uvalde, Texas, a small, working-class town an hour east of San Antonio, nineteen fourth graders and two teachers, died when an 18-year-old high school dropout locked himself in their classroom and opened fire with an assault weapon. The gunman also died. His death remains under investigation.
When the Uvalde tragedy occurred last Tuesday, the memory of another gruesome mass shooting in an American city still fresh. Just ten days earlier, it was another 18-year-old gunman—this one imbued with a toxic racism—walked into a Buffalo, New York, grocery story and killed ten African American shoppers and a security guard.
As parents and families make funeral arrangements for the 21 victims of the Texas shooting, new fuel has been tossed on to the white-hot argument over guns and gun violence. Predictably, the debate begins anew with each mass shooting. It ignited after 1999’s Columbine school shooting and burns perhaps with even more intensity following Uvalde. The ages of the latest victims only add to the emotion. The embers will reignite when it happens next and, if past is prelude, it will.
Since Columbine, schools and colleges have been regular targets for mass killings, crimes in which four of more people, not including the assailant, are slain. Since Columbine, the Associated Press calculates that there have been 14 school or college killings with 169 victims. So far in 2022, there have been 27 school shootings resulting in injury or death, according to Education Week, an organization that tracks K-12 education.
“It’s just too common,” said retired Pueblo Chief Judge Dennis Maes. “There is almost an expectation when it’s going to hit again.” Maes, whose name is emblazoned on Pueblo’s judicial building, does not, as so many others suggest, think this senseless carnage is as simple as mental illness. “Politicians who want to blame it on mental health are missing the point,” said Maes. “There is no reason for more safeguards or who or who cannot have a gun.”
Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a gun proponent in a state with more than a million registered guns, has placed the blame for the Uvalde shooting not on gun availability but on mental illness and the lack of treatment programs.
But, say experts, mental illness may be a factor in some mass shootings, but not an explanation for most. In fact, says the American Psychiatric Association, people suffering with mental illness are more likely to be the victims of violence, including gun violence, and not the perpetrators.
Other arguments against Abbott’s fallback to mental illness and the nation’s plague of gun violence, chalk it up to availability of guns and ideology. The Uvalde shooter, for example, bought two military-like assault weapons only days after his 18th birthday. Ideology, said the Buffalo shooter, was his motivation. A self-authored manifesto stated his hate for African Americans. In the El Paso mass shooting in which 23 people were killed in 2019, the killer, a 21-year-old man, admitted his crime was hate-inspired and Mexicans were his target.
Elias Buenrostro, a father of four and an immigrant, was enjoying ice cream recently with his family, including two young boys. The Texas shooting hit close to home because one of his sons is the same age as the Uvalde victims. “The first thing that came into my head was, ‘it’s happening again,’ you know what I mean?”
As his boys played nearby, Buenrostro imagined what the Uvalde families are going through. “I don’t really like to think negative,” he said, “but it could happen. You know, déjà vu, it happened once, you always got the little bug in your head.” He also wondered why it was so simple for the Uvalde shooter to arm himself so quickly, so easy. “It’s just crazy.”
President Biden will soon be traveling to Uvalde to meet and try and provide a sliver of comfort into the lives of the grieving families. He may also be able to share his own experience on the sudden loss of a child. As a young senator, he lost his wife and young daughter in a car accident.
Just days ago, as he returned from a trip to the Far East, he was made aware of the Uvalde tragedy. Looking tired and exhausted from a nine-hour flight, he nonetheless addressed the nation on its latest mass casualty moment. Mincing no words and not conflating the shooting with mental illness, he placed blame where he thought it clearly belonged. “When in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?”
There may one day be an answer to Biden’s question, but that day is far away in a nation where gun ownership outpaces population. According to Reuters, Uvalde was not an aberration certainly as it pertains to the number of guns in the hands of Americans. The news agency says that while the U.S. makes up only 4 percent of the world’s population, it also owns “46 percent of the estimated 857 million weapons in civilian hands.”
