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Gone are the days of ‘It can’t happen here’
By MARY SANCHEZThe Kansas City Star
Omaha, Neb., will be the last city from which shocked citizens can honestly proclaim, “I never thought it could happen here.”
Oh, sure, the next time someone goes on a shooting rampage — in a mall, a church, a school — you can count on some shocked bystander to say, “I never thought…” But those are just the trite phrasings that come out when people don’t know what else to say.
Is there anybody left in America who really believes it couldn’t happen to them? Consider how, in the midst of the Omaha mall shooting, one department store employee reacted. “Well, you think, this is Von Maur, and Von Maur is a very upscale, classy department store,” a gift-wrapper told The New York Times. “I thought, that’s not gunshots, this is Von Maur.”
Then reality sunk in. She took cover and lived to tell her story.
We can’t feign shock anymore. But I doubt the event will move us to do something about mass, unwarranted violence. At best, it has sent us all the message that, oh, it can happen at the mall, too.
Police and corporate security officials may well have learned something new about how to prevent a “next time.” But we won’t, as a society, be any closer to protecting the innocent from this kind of random rampage in the future. To get there, it would be necessary to get beyond the same old editorializing that inevitably follows such events.
The “too many guns” refrain is usually the loudest. Ready access to guns, many proclaim, is the main culprit in these slayings. True, one has to wonder why the 19-year-old shooter’s stepfather had an AK-47 assault rifle in his possession. And how was a gun like that easily stolen by a teen, along with plenty of ammunition for killing?
Others maintain the reverse opinion — everyone must be armed! This side now has a heroine to point to, the volunteer security guard in Colorado whose swift and brave action stopped another mass murderer just days after the Omaha mall shooting. The guard had already been alerted that a shooter had gunned down two people in another church 65 miles away. Her training apparent, she shot the gunman after he had killed two more people, but thankfully before he could harm anyone else.
But pardon me if the idea of everyone packing heat does not put me at ease. Not everyone drawn to owning a gun is sensibly trained, nor can they all be counted on to pass the sensibility on to younger people.
Still others blame the media for holding out the promise of fame to murderers. Journalists counter that this is “blaming the messenger.” Perhaps, but irresponsible reporting is not a figment of the public’s imagination. Gratuitous news footage of the shooters, repetitive reporting of the minute details of their lives, all in a craven attempt to fill airtime, does not add much to the conversation.
A common, but not universal, trait among these gunmen (and, less commonly, gunwomen) is their hope for eternal notoriety. This, however, is less and less assured.
A few of these mass murders stick in people’s minds, but dozens have retreated into obscurity. Do you remember what happened at that Luby’s restaurant in Texas? How about at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal?
Can you name the shooters in either incident, or say how many they killed? I couldn’t without Google.
Only four days passed before the Omaha shooter was upstaged in headlines by the Colorado shooting spree. Three passed before the mall reopened. And about a week was necessary to bury the dead.
People move on. Human nature is like that, resilient. No doubt, Omaha will find ways to get through its grief. And the rest of us will more or less accept what happened there as an unlikely but still possible fact of life. The phenomenon itself no longer surprises us, only the new variations on the theme.
I tend to sympathize with the view that if people found it hard — or, better, impossible — to get their hands on automatic pistols and assault rifles, mass murder incidents would be much more rare. But I also recognize that America does not have the political will to disarm.
So the most lasting impact of Omaha will be our collective shrug and acceptance. The comforting stupor of “It can’t happen here,” is no longer an option.