The Parkland Massacre & The Pressing Need for Gun Control

16 of the 17 fatal victims of the
Parkland school shooting
(From NBC News)

Another day, and extremely saddening and confounding to have to say, another school shooting, this one at Marjory Stoneman Douglas School in Parkland, Florida. Yesterday, on Valentine's Day, a 19-year-old expelled student, Nikolas Cruz, arrived on the school campus at 2:19 pm and, according to reports, began his terroristic assault  using a AR-15 assault rifle, ultimately killing 17 students and teachers, several of whom sacrificed their own lives to save others, and wounding over a dozen more. Cruz managed to escape with the fleeing students, walking to a nearby Walmart and then a Subway, but was later apprehended by police at 3:41 pm that same day as he strolled down a nearby residential street.

Reports suggest that despite Cruz's deeply troubled history at home and in school, the young man was able to purchase the AR-15 legally, in February of last year. Orphaned after the death of his adopted father, Roger Cruz, roughly ten years ago and his adoptive mother, Lynda, of pneumonia last November, he had been living at the home of a former schoolmate, whose parents apparently knew about the assault rifle and other weaponry he possessed. Cruz also had been working at a local dollar store at the time of the attack.

In addition to his expulsion, Cruz apparently was known for virulently racist and anti-Semitic postings online. Cruz has been pictured wearing a pro-Trump red cap, and a white supremacist leader also came forward to say that Cruz was linked to his group and had trained with them, though that assertion remains under scrutiny. One neighbor had videotaped Cruz firing off a BB pistol, and classmates stated that, before the murderous assault, they were concerned that Cruz might commit such an attack. Indeed, one teacher came forward to say that the school had been warned not to let Cruz bring a backpack onto campus. The FBI had received a warning about one of Cruz's disturbing social media posts on YouTube, in which he supposedly wrote that he wanted to "be a professional school shooter," but their followup produced no leads. The Bureau has since expressed regret for not being able to do more.

New York Times reporters Julie Turkiewicz, Patricia Mazzei and Audra D. S. Burch note in their roundup of news about the Parkland incident that "with this shooting, three of the 10 deadliest mass shootings in modern U.S. history have come within the last three months." Since Adam Lanza's 2012 mass murder of children and teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, 438 people--children, adults--have been wounded in over 200 school shootings, and 138 have died. Moreover, there have been eight school shootings through the first seven weeks of the new year; to put it another way, as the Guardian points out, "guns have been fired on school property in the US at least 18 times so far this year."

School shootings since Sandy Hook, in 2012
Gunshot victims in school shootings:
Red dots = killed; pink dots = injured
(from New York Times)

Under any measure, this is a horrifying and unacceptable situation, though the persistence of such attacks, going back decades (remember Columbine?), and the continued inaction of the US Congress in tightening a range of gun laws--or even severely restricting access to firearms--underlines why these mass tragedies have become almost routine. Indeed, Congress and many stage legislatures, in thrall to the National Rifle Association and similar groups, have moved in the opposite direction, to loosen gun laws, allowing concealed carry provisions, guns in college classrooms, and so on.

At the time of the time of the Newtown massacre, then President Barack Obama vowed to address the crisis with legislation, and received support from many Democrats in Congress. But Republican leaders and legislators in the House and Senate refuse to enact new strictures, or even reauthorize lapsed ones, like the assault weapons ban. Early last year, Donald Trump even signed away the gun check regulation President Obama had put in place to make it harder for mentally ill people to acquire firearms. I should note that while violent crimes have plummeted in the US since the 1990s, other forms of violence, ranging from police killings of suspects to these mass murder events have not slowed. The US remains more armed than some entire foreign militaries, and guns, especially ones than can kill large numbers of people, are too easy to sell and purchase.  One parallel I noted on Twitter was the US's barely discussed but extensive wars across the globe, which continue under Trump's watch as they did under Obama, who inherited a number of them from George W. Bush; these external, almost shadow wars mirror the ones occurring inside our borders, where certain kinds of violence and, as we witnessed yesterday, slaughter have essentially become normalized.

One difference this time may be the outspokenness of the young survivors, who have not been silence since this incident. From outraged parents to students calling out Congress, Florida's governor and legislators, and Trump and the GOP-controlled Congress, the outcry looks like it may have some effect. The key word, of course, is "may"; again and again after these unspeakable tragedies, which do not occur anywhere else in the world outside of wartime conditions with the frequency they do here, we have heard calls for regulation gun access, but the NRA and Republicans--and even some Democrats--stall meaningful legislation. Let's hope that this time is different, and that those slain and injured in Parkland receive at least one tribute they merit, which is to spur those in positions of power to do something, beginning with reinstituting sane gun laws and eventually going much further, to make it as difficult as possible for anyone to acquire a human-killing machine, in order to prevent any more massacres of this kind.

Racism, American Culture and the Massacre at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston

No sanctuary in this society, it seems, none. Not in our homes, not in the streets, not behind the wheel, not in a store, not in public swimming pools, not even in our churches. Nowhere in this country, it seems, can black people not live and breathe and simply be without fear of being hunted down, beaten, brutalized, killed.

Emanuel A.M.E. Church

On Wednesday the nation and world witnessed another example of this fact when a 21-year-old white terrorist massacred nine black people in the historic Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. The Rev. Clementa Pinckney, 41, a South Carolina state senator, who had welcomed the murderer into the church to participate in a Bible study session, was among the slain, as were Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, 45, a mother of three and a high school track coach; Cynthia Hurd, 54, a librarian at St. Andrews Regional Library of the Charleston County Public Library; Tywanza Sanders, 26, a recent graduate of Allen University and barber, who had attempted to shield his 87-year old aunt, Susie Jackson; Myra Thompson, 59, the wife of the vicar of the Holy Trinity Reformed Episcopal Church; Ethel Lee Lance, 70, a cousin of Susie Jackson and a longtime member of the church; Rev. Daniel L. Simmons, 74, a ministerial staff member at the church; and Rev. DePayne Middleton Doctor, 49, a minister, member of the church choir, and mother of four. Tywanza Sanders' mother and a 5-year-old child played dead to survive. 

The terrorist, Dylann Storm Roof, of Columbia, South Carolina, fled the scene and was on the loose before being taken into custody in Shelby, North Carolina, after a florist spotted his car and called authorities.

While it is unknown why Roof chose the Emanuel AME Church, the oldest AME congregation in the South, founded in 1816, the church does have a long and visible civil rights history dating back to the 19th century, and Roof specifically asked for Rev. Pinckney and sat next to him. Among its early members, who included enslaved and free blacks, was Denmark Vesey, who attempted a slave revolt in 1822 before being betrayed, after which the church was burnt to the ground, its rites thereafter being conducted in secret until after the US Civil War. Over the years the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had visited the church, which played an important role in civil rights organizing the city and state, to champion black South Carolinians' right to vote, and his widow, Coretta Scott King, addressed and then led participants in a march for hospital workers' rights. Its leader, Rev. Pinckney, had pushed for body cameras for police officers in the wake of the shooting of Walter Scott in North Charleston earlier this year. Before the shooting, Rev. Pinckney and the other Bible study participates openly welcomed Roof into their session, where he allegedly sat for an hour, disagreeing with the readings of Scripture, before opening fire and killing nearly everyone there in cold blood. According to a survivor, he also reportedly told those he massacred that, "I have to do it. You're raping our women and taking over the country. You have to go." Once apprehended, he confessed to the murders. 

Historical marker
(National Park Service)

After his arrest, journalists and online commentators pieced together clues showing the terrorist clearly had expressed anti-black racist, white supremacist sympathies and behavior. Roof's Facebook profile, which suggests he had a number of black "friends," shows him in one photo wearing a jacket with the flags of apartheid-era South Africa and Rhodesia, both of which are considered racist symbols, while in another he perches over an ornamental license plate featuring the Confederate flag. Friends of Roof, including former classmates, a childhood friend, and his roommate, have since told authorities that he was known to make racist comments in high school, was ranting about Trayvon Martin and Freddie Gray, believed black people "were taking over the world" and sought racial segregation, was involved with "racist groups," wanted to launch a "race war," and yelled a racial epithet at and threatened to kill a black woman on the street. Despite all of this, no one felt the need to alert authorities. His friend Joseph Meek Jr. even removed Roof's gun, but returned it at his girlfriend's suggestion because he, Meek, was on probation.

Most appallingly from the standpoint of lack of prevention, Roof's white roommate Dalton Tyler said that Roof had been planning a slaughter for "six months," and Christon Scriven, who is black and the resident of a trailer park that Roof regularly visited, said that Roof outlined his murderous plot last week. "He flat out told us he was going to do this stuff...he was looking to kill a bunch of people." Scriven thought Roof was just being "weird" and joking, a miscalculation with mortal consequences. Roof apparently had never finished high school and was unemployed. Reports also say that his parents gave him the money for a gun as a birthday gift, and he has said that he bought it. His prior run-ins with the law include an arrest at a Columbia mall for possession of an unprescribed controlled substance, the drug pain drug Suboxone, and a month later for trespassing at that same mall. According to several news articles, he had been partially raised and recently living with his sister in Lexington, South Carolina.

As church members and people across the country were mourning the slain churchgoers, leading Republicans, including South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, unsurprisingly sought to deflect the discussion away from the obvious causes of the slaughter, as did some conservative news sites, making a mockery of the horror, the facts, and of Christianity itself. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who had just come from Charleston on a fundraising trip, stated that the country needed to face "hard truths about race, violence, guns, and division," though the issue in this case, as with the relentless state violence against black and brown Americans, the expanding carceral state, government-enabled inequality, US imperial action against nonwhite people all over the globe, and so much more, has been the system and structures of racism and white supremacy that pervade every aspect of American life. 

It is not "race" or "racial issues," but RACISM, particularly anti-black racism, black disposability, and white supremacy, that are the problem. It is exhausting to have to keep experiencing and witnessing the effects of racism much as it is to have to keep pointing this out, but it seems that far too many people would rather not deal with this reality and connect the dots, since doing so may implicate them and expose their own  privilege. President Barack Obama was, for his part, somewhat better, calling out American gun culture and our distinctive contemporary problem with mass murders, and historicizing attacks on black churches and people, though he also danced around invoking outright the beast of racism and racial domination, whose visible symbol, the Confederate flag, is still flying at full staff at the state capitol while the US and South Carolina flags were lowered in tribute to the dead. (And its continued presence at the capitol is, I should note, the result of a compromise with its promoters.) 

Rev. Sen. Clemente Carlos Pinckney
(1973-2015, Emanuel
A.M.E. Church)

Yet it is not just the South's blood-drenched standard, but the silences that stand in for the act of naming, decrying and dismantling this poison that has continued to course through the nation's veins since before the country's founding, and which renders the statements with which I started this blog post, of no sanctuary, anywhere, reality for millions. The Justice Department, under Attorney General Loretta Lynch, has announced a hate crime investigation into the attack. Yet the reality of living under the regime of racism and white supremacy in this country will not change, no matter how many federal hate crime investigations occur, unless we make a conscious effort to change things. Nor will we reduce the plague of gun-related murder, including mass murders, until we reform our gun laws and make it harder to get our hands on guns than than to acquire tickets to the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight. We have an immense standing military, funded to the tune of billions of dollars; we no longer need a "well regulated Militia" to maintain "the security of a free State." We must change this society for the better. We must. 

Despite their devastation and in the depths of their grief, many of the family members of the slain churchgoers have already expressed love and forgiveness. One tangible way you show your sympathies is to sign ColorofChange's sympathy card. You also can help out Emanuel AME Church is by going to its website and offering a donation here.

Trethewey Wins Pulitzer + Tragedy at VTech + Poem: Natasha Trethewey

I am so elated to type these words: Natasha Trethewey has won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry!

She was honored for her brilliant recent volume, Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), which appeared last year to great acclaim (and was a past J's Theater Book of the Month pick as well). Natasha was a member of the Dark Room Collective many years ago, and was one of the first winners of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, for her début collection, Domestic Work (Graywolf, 2000), and she later published She is also the fourth Black poet to win the Prize for poetry, following in the tradition of Gwendolyn Brooks, Rita Dove, and Yusef Komunyakaa. I've known her for almost a decade and a half, and can say without hesitation that she's a terrific, gracious person who really deserves this extraordinary honor. I am so happy for and proud of her! Congratulations, Natasha!

One of the two runners-up in the category was poet Martín Espada, another poet I know and think the world of. Martín was one of the earliest readers at the Dark Room's reading series, and has mentored and taught quite a few younger poets. Congrats to Martín as well.

Also, Eisa Davis, another fellow Cave Canem writer, was a finalist in the Drama category for her play "Bulrusher"! Congratulations, Eisa!

And other winners include Ornette Coleman in the Music category (no, you did not read that wrong--someone other than a classical music composer received the Pulitzer in music!--they must be fuming in quite a few university music departments), for his recording Sound Grammar; Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Cynthia Tucker, who often challenges the middling conventional wis-zards on Sunday talk shows, received the Pulitzer in Commentary; and John Coltrane was honored nearly 40 years after his death with a posthumous citation for his "his masterful improvisation, supreme musicianship and iconic centrality to the history of jazz." I only wish his wife, Alice, who died not long ago, had lived to see this day.

Finally, I must note that as was predicted by some in the media, Cormac McCarthy received the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for his most recent novel, The Road, which is the current pick of Oprah's Book Club. I haven't read it, but reader Kai did praise it strongly--at least up to its final scene (right, Kai?). I'll be getting to it one of these days soon.

***

I was busy with university business pretty much all day--we had on campus a very fine visiting poet, Josh Weiner, whom I'll write about soon--so I didn't get an opportunity to check the web or hear the full report from C on the horrific events that occurred today at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, in Blacksburg, where a gunmen went on a rampage and killed more than 30 people, including students, faculty and staff members, then killed himself.

Since I know only some of the particulars of the incident, I won't expatiate on the crime itself, except to say that my heart goes out to the families of the dead and injured, and to the Virginia Tech campus as a whole. Such events sadden me tremendously. Some reports are suggesting that this is the worst shooting and worst university mass-murder of all time. It certainly has to be one of the worst instances of a mass killing in the US outside of a war battle zone, outstripped only by the 9/11 suicide bombings and the Oklahoma City massacre. Such a senseless, horrible crime is almost too awful to register, much like the daily accounts of slaughter that reach us from cities across Iraq and Afghanistan and Sudan, that we heard about in Rwanda, in East Timor, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in Chechnya and Ingushetia....

When C and I lived in Virginia, we became aware of how easy it was and is to purchase guns there. I was and remain incredulous at the idea that anyone would need to purchase handguns right away, without a background check and waiting period, let alone 2 or 5 or 10 or 25 or 100 pistols and rifles and automatic rifles and machine guns and so on in one pop, unless she or he were outfitting a police force, or a military unit. Then, a few years ago, I believe that Virginia tightened its laws and limited the numbers of certain types of guns people could purchase per month, enraging a sizable number of fanatics, but I believe (though I could be wrong) that it's still the case that almost anyone can purchase an unlimited number of guns there at a gun show. Why? Again, what good can come from such a loophole?

As I said, my knowledge of the case is minimal, and I don't know where the murderer purchased his weaponry or why he went on this rampage, but given how easy it is to acquire guns in that state, and in particular, automatic weaponry, I wouldn't be surprised if after impulsively deciding that he was going to avenge some perceived hurt or humiliation he did some shopping there before his spree. Perhaps this will lead state legislators to tighten the laws further, but I'm not holding my breath. (There are already cries on the blogosphere that students, faculty and staff armed with concealed handguns could have prevented the crime. Personally, I find the prospect of anyone other than a policeperson walking around the university with weapons of any sort utterly terrifying.)

In the meantime, let's extend a moment of silence to those who were slain and to the survivors.

***

Back to a more positive note, here's a poem by Natasha Trethewey, from Native Guard:

THEORIES OF SPACE AND TIME

You can get there from here, though
there’s no going home.

Everywhere you go will be somewhere
you’ve never been. Try this:

head south on Mississippi 49, one-
by-one mile markers ticking off

another minute of your life. Follow this
to its natural conclusion – dead end

at the coast, the pier at Gulfport where
riggings of shrimp boats are loose stitches

in a sky threatening rain. Cross over
the man-made beach, 26 miles of sand

dumped on a mangrove swamp – buried
terrain of the past. Bring only

what you must carry – tome of memory
its random blank pages. On the dock

where you board the boat for Ship Island,
someone will take your picture:

the photograph – who you were –
will be waiting when you return

"Theories of Time and Space" from Native Guard: Poems by Natasha Trethewey. Copyright © 2006 by Natasha Trethewey. All rights reserved.