The linguistic metaphor falls like a cruel joke.
After the devastating, demoralizing, horrifying, enraging Uvalde school shooting, elected officials in Texas referenced a law they passed in 2019 allowing districts to “harden” their schools.
Don’t these officials know any other way to serve the public than to make things harder?
That’s what Texas Republicans (and the rest of conservative America) have done, after all.
They’ve made it harder to register to vote and to cast ballots.
They’ve made it harder, soon to be impossible for many, for women to control their bodies and reproductive choices.
They’ve made life harder for transgender kids, and they’ve made the jobs of librarians and teachers harder, by banning books and making it illegal to talk about race, gender and sexuality.
About the only thing that isn’t harder is acquiring deadly weapons designed for war. That’s what Texas Republicans do in response to mass shootings: make it easier to get more guns.
Now it’s hard to go anywhere, a concert, a movie theater, a supermarket, a house of worship, a nightclub, a hospital (hospital??), an office or a school, without worrying you might get shot or killed.
For all this hardness, does it even work? When it comes to mass shootings and school safety, the answer is no.
As reported by the Texas Tribune (linked to above), “the majority of public schools in the United States already implement the security measures most often promoted by public officials, including locked doors to the outside and in classrooms, active-shooter plans and security cameras.”
However, “after a review of 18 years of school security measures,” researchers “did not find any evidence that such tactics or more armed teachers reduced gun violence in schools.”
America’s sick, demented relationship with guns feels intractable, making the bevy of possible solutions to reduce deaths and injuries by gun seem futile.
But regardless of the direction (or lack thereof) our leaders wind up taking on gun control, we as a society our losing ourselves to the hardness of the conservative way of thinking.
It’s a mode of thought void of empathy for other people, absent the vision or the imagining that things could be better for us all.
The instinct to counter bad guys with guns with good guys with guns is a hard response. It girds us for battle. It calls for reacting to insane violence with acceptable violence, instead of trying to limit all violence.
The ludicrousness of that approach was proved in Uvalde, when the people who we thought were there to protect us, the so-called good guys with guns, waited in a hallway as the shooter killed more kids while children repeatedly called 911 for help.
Turns out, cops don’t want to face an AR-15 anymore than the average person.
More guns, more people carrying those guns, “hardening” targets, which of course is now everywhere and every place — that is nothing more than the status quo, which is easy.
What’s Really Hard About Gun Control
To seriously address the scourge of gun violence, we’ll have to do something hard: erode the relationship of guns to a certain kind of masculinity that is killing us all.
There are plenty of well-known possible options to try to cap or roll back gun violence. Universal background checks. Eliminating the sale of bump stocks. Raising the age limit to buy guns. Banning the kinds of guns that are intended for war, not self-defense.
Maybe we’ll muster the political will to make those change. Or maybe the filibuster will prevent that from happening.
But to get at the root of the problem means acknowledging and addressing our culture’s escalating, violent misogyny and extremism — and how the gun industry is arming the worst kind of man.
It Starts With Cruelty to Women
The Uvalde shooter began his rampage by killing his grandmother. But his misogyny and abuse of women was on display well before. He had threatened to rape his female classmates. His threats on social media, which should have triggered a red flag, were ignored.
Abuse of women is one of the leading predictors of mass violence and shootings. Most mass shootings are perpetrated by men — and most of these men have a history of misogynistic, violent abuse.
Researchers have long made this connection, and it is indisputable. The link between violent misogyny and mass shootings is so strong, it should be used as the reddest of red flags and lead to the perpetrator losing all access to guns (not to mention punishment for that behavior in the first place).
As gross and disgusting and unnerving as it is, extreme misogyny is a warning sign of mass shootings. If someone is accused of physically abusing a woman, or making threats to women online, it should be an impetus to act against that person before it’s too late.
Women have been on the front lines of toxic masculinity for ages. Now, sadly, so too are six-year-old schoolchildren.
Extremism Is Killing Us
This all goes so far beyond the Second Amendment and gun control. We live in a culture and society where extremism is on the rise.
Hate crimes are at their highest levels in more than a decade.
Fueled by bigoted scapegoating of the pandemic, led by none other than our former president, the rate of discrimination and hate crimes against Asian Americans continues to increase.
LGBT people are four times as likely to be the victims of a violent crime.
And in the United States, there was a record amount of antisemitic incidents in 2021.
What makes this all even scarier is that the extremism on the far right, now at its highest levels in a quarter century, is being marketed to and armed with military-level weapons by the gun industry.
Those who oppose gun control regulations argue that guns don’t kill anybody, but people do.
I don’t buy that argument, but if taken at face value, we now know the people generally responsible for mass killings.
Mostly men, many of them young. Most of them accused of harassing, harming or attacking women. Many of them, like the murderers in Buffalo, Pittsburgh and at the African-American church in Charleston, spewers of hatred, racism and bigotry.
Gun control is a piece of cake compared to the underlying threats of toxic masculinity, white supremacy and far-right extremism.
What We’re Up Against
Sadly, what once was considered the far-right is now the middle of the road for the modern Republican party.
The forces that stand in the way of common-sense gun control are the same ones who want to impose forced birth after unintended pregnancies.
They are the same ones who have targeted transgender kids — and their parents and doctors.
They are the ones who, like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, will come away from the worst school shooting in his state and form a committee or two looking at social media and mental illness, but not gun regulations.
The majority of Texans and Americans want sensible gun regulation.
They want safe, legal access to abortion. They also want to vote by mail, or take part in early voting, or drop off a ballot at a secured location.
We want family leave and universal pre-K. We want to begin to address the climate and biodiversity crises with the thought and attention they deserve.
We want to feed our babies — and keep them safe when they grow up to go to school.
It’s easy to list all the things that need to be fixed, all the ways we wish things were different and better.
How do we accomplish those things? It feels too hard to ponder.
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Previously Published on Medium
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Lorie Shaull on Flickr under CC License