The sickening Déjà vu is here.
“How dare you politicize a tragedy like this!”
”This is not the time to talk about guns!”
”You can’t even wait until the bodies are in the ground!”
Predictably, I’m hearing these sentiments again today from Conservative gun lovers, in the wake of another mass execution, this time in the hallways of Silver Rail Elementary in Bend, Oregon.
I knew I would.
And honestly, normal grieving over these lives would be preferable to this.
I’d really like to have that option.
We all would.
I wish I could give every single one of those beautiful human beings the personal attention they deserve.
I want to spend time telling each of their stories in the greatest detail; to find out what they loved to do, their favorite foods, the movies they liked, the people they dreamed of being when they grew up, the people they were up until their final terrifying day.
I’d like to see the pictures they had on their bedroom walls, to learn the names of their dogs and secret crushes, to hear about the specific idiosyncrasies that only those who know them well understand.
I wish I could talk to their parents and their best friends and their favorite uncles, so that I could paint a fitting portrait of every one of their vibrant, priceless lives enough to eulogize them properly.
It would be healthy to pause and try to let us all catch our breath from something so terribly breathtaking.
But that’s the problem: there simply isn’t time.
There isn’t time to “wait until the bodies are in the ground,” because by the time that happens, there will be more shootings.
This is the stunning regularity of death by guns here.
Before we can properly mourn them, there will be more students or shoppers or church members or moviegoers or music fans or tourists to grieve over.
There will be more hallways riddled with bullets, more terrifying phone video taken by young people whose classrooms became war zones, more breaking news of an active shooter, more frantic texts from parents to their sons and daughters that will not be returned.
Before we’ve had a chance to grieve and bury the children and the adult killed today, there will be more dead people.
And on that terrible day, just like today, Conservative politicians and their boosters will tell us this isn’t the time.
They’ll again chastise us for being insensitive.
They’ll once more feign indignation and accuse us of politicizing a tragedy.
They’ll again pretend that they actually give a damn about the memories of these young people or the pain of their families, or the fact that someone’s children were once again huddled and terrified in storage closets, while they tell us it’s too soon to talk about how wrong this all is.
And every excruciating second they’ve scolded us to quietly endure, millions of dollars will flow directly from the NRA to the very conservative politicians charged with protecting these children who will die.
In that time of silent waiting, gun advocates will generate every false narrative to blame the carnage on mental health or Muslims or trans kids or immigrants or liberals; to place culpability somewhere else, on the media, the culture, on video games—anywhere else but where it belongs.
And during the moments they are expecting us to say nothing, people will be easily buying assault weapons and planning the next atrocity, while the people who love and sell and profit from guns try and wash the blood from their hands long enough to copy and paste thoughts and prayers platitudes.
And in the time it takes to properly grieve and mourn these children and the adult killed today in Bend, the Conservative politicians and their collaborators will have long forgotten about them.
They will have moved on.
These victims will be yesterday’s news.
The precise nightmares of this day will have been replaced by another round of terrified teachers, of distraught parents speeding toward schools, of hollow public mourning from politicians tone policing our outrage and doing nothing else.
By the time we bury these sons and daughters and parents, there will be another set of bodies awaiting the ground.
Before these wounds have healed, there will be more wounds inflicted.
And the gun lovers will be there again to tell us this isn’t the time.
To hell with that.
This is the time.
This is the time, because this isn’t normal.
This is the time, because kids aren’t supposed to die in school.
This is the time, because we have a gun problem.
This is the time, because half our Government is in bed with the gunrunners.
So yes, we agree.
These children and their teacher deserve to be properly eulogized.
They deserve to be rightly remembered.
They also deserved to live.
And the children and teachers who will die tomorrow deserve to live, too.
Until we stop choosing leaders with more reverence for weapons of rapid carnage than for the bodies, lives, and families torn apart by them, we will continue to endure a collective grief that is both unnatural and preventable.
If we want to stop mass shootings in America, if we want to honor the dead, and if we truly want to defend life—we need to stop electing Republicans.
Here are some organizations that are helping make this country safer:
Moms Demand Action
Everytown for Gun Safety
The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence
Violence Policy Center
Gabby Gifford’s Americans for Responsible Solutions
The Brady Campaign
