Are We All Complicit in School Shootings?

New Yorker magazine staff writer Adam Gopnik in his February 15, 2018, article “Four Truths About the Florida School Shooting” offers “four simple truths worth saying again, in the aftermath of the Florida massacre, about gun control and gun violence.” Yet for me, perhaps, the most compelling is the first truth (the boldface is mine):

1. The gun lobby, and the Republican Party it controls, have accepted as a matter of necessity the ongoing deaths of hundreds of children as the price that they are prepared to pay for the fetishization of weapons. The claim of this lobby’s complicity in murder is not exaggerated or hysterical but, by now, quite simple and precise: when you refuse to act to stop a social catastrophe from happening, you are responsible for the consequences of the social catastrophe. If you refuse to immunize your children and a measles epidemic breaks out, you are implicated in the measles. If you refuse to pay money for sewers and cholera breaks out, you are complicit in the cholera. Acts have consequences. This complicity includes all of the hand-wringers and the tut-tutters and the “nothing to be done”-ers as much as the N.R.A. hardcore. Many people have predicted, repeatedly, that one gun massacre would lead to the next—and that more gun massacres would probably take place in one year in America than in the rest of the civilized world combined—and they have been proved right, and then right again. Since everyone knew that this would happen again, those who did nothing to stop it happening again—and who did everything they could to see that no one else could do anything to stop it happening again—are complicit when it happens, again.

The power of this truth is undeniable in my opinion — and clearly undeniable in the opinion of all the students and others across the U.S. organizing protests and other actions to bring attention to this fact.

In reading Gopnik’s article I am reminded of the following quote attributed to German pastor Martin Niemöller regarding complicity and the Nazis:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

(Check out variations of this quote.)

Let us hope that sensible truths such as Adam Gopnik presented will be put into action rather than just put into words.

P.S. There have been many excellent articles on prevention strategies including ones about active shooter training in schools. For those people who think that such drills will unnecessarily scare children, it might be a good idea to study how Israel trains everyone, including small children, to respond to life-and-death situations.

Read Gopnik’s complete New Yorker article.