A fact of life. No, not really. If you want the truth, it is a fact of death.
Let me explain. In the process of writing about J.D. Vance in “Revenge of the childless cat ladies,” I ended up reading way too much about him and the things he has said. And one phrase in particular has stayed with me.
But it wasn’t until I watched Oprah Winfrey’s “Unite for America” that I knew I had to write about Vance’s declaration that America’s school shootings are “a fact of life.”
Winfrey had invited the Griffiths family: Doug, Marilda, and daughter Natalie. Marilda recalled how she learned there had been a shooting at Apalachee, Natalie’s school. Atlanta’s Fox5 News wrote:
Marilda Griffith, with tears flowing down her cheeks, said she was notified by a friend about the shooting.
‘She called me, I was at work,’ the mother said. ‘And she called me, and she said, “Do you know about the shooting?”‘
The mother said her heart dropped when she heard the news.
‘My heart just got so heavy,’ she said.
Marilda said she immediately left work to get to the school.
‘The first thing I did was drop to my knee on my floor and start praying,’ she said. ‘I prayed for about 30 minutes.’
She said she could not get into the area of the school, so she parked her car at a gas station about two to three miles down the road and ran towards the school.
‘The experience, you do not know what it feels like until it’s you,’ the mother said.
She spoke to the mothers, telling them that they had one job: to protect their children.
‘We cannot let this go on. We have to stop it,’ she said. ‘I’m ready to make a noise about this and I’m ready to stop it.’
She also expressed sadness and empathy for the mothers who lost their children in school shootings.
‘I can actually hug my child, my child is here,’ she said, contrasting the loss of the loved ones of those killed in the shooting. ‘Those people are suffering.’
Richard Aspinwall and Christina Irimie, both math teachers, and students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14 years old, were killed in the shooting.
‘The people in power, let’s make a change, let’s make it happen,’ she added.
Natalie is a freshman at Apalachee and is part of the band. After getting out of the hospital, Natalie’s parents say she wants to go back to Apalachee to finish the school year.
Her parents also say Natalie’s teacher held her and kept the kids together during the shooting. They called her a hero.
Then Natalie’s dad talked about what happened to his daughter:
‘It’s been hard, you know? It’s hard to see your little girl in pain,’ Doug Griffith said.
Natalie Griffith, 15, was in algebra class Wednesday morning when shots rang out. She was hit at least two times.
‘One went through her arm, one across the chest and then the most damaging shot is to her wrist,’ Doug said.
Medics rushed her to the hospital where she had surgery to reconstruct her wrist with her parents by her side.
‘We’re on the right side of this. We’re getting better. I’m hoping that there’s no long-term effects,’ Doug added.
Natalie is a freshman at Apalachee and is part of the band. Her parents say visits from friends and teachers over the last few days have kept her spirits high.
‘That’s the other part of the medicine that she needed. We’ve had so many good friends that have been by,’ Doug said. ‘They take her mind off of it.’ …
‘I ask her, “Natalie, I do you want to change schools? We can probably change schools, sweetie.” And she said, “No, no, mom. I want to go back to school. I want to go back to the band. I want to go back to my normal life.” She is the bravest little girl that I have ever seen,’ Natalie’s mom, Marilda Griffith, said.
These are the facts of life and death. On September 4, 2024, a student brought an AR-15 hidden in a backpack to Apalachee High School in Windsor, Ga., and killed two teachers and two students. According to The Washington Post of September 5, 2024:
State police identified the suspect as 14-year-old Colt Gray, a student at the school. He was charged with four felony counts of murder and will be tried as an adult, officials said.
The FBI’s Atlanta field office said Jackson County sheriff’s officers interviewed Gray and his father in 2023, when Gray was 13, after receiving anonymous online tips about threats to commit a school shooting. The father told authorities that he had hunting guns in the house but that his son did not have unsupervised access to them, the FBI said. Officials said there was no probable cause for arrest or further action at the time.
CNN posted a video it claimed came from the Instagram account of Colt Gray’s mother Marcee Gray with the words “Proud Mama” beside footage of Colt hunting a deer with a Bushmaster rifle:
Not surprisingly, because we are in the midst of a presidential election, The Washington Post recounted the reaction of Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance:
Following the Apalachee High School killings in Georgia, the GOP vice-presidential nominee said schools must beef up security but rebuffed stricter gun laws.
Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance on Thursday called school shootings a ‘fact of life’ that he dislikes, saying in the wake of the Apalachee High School killings in Georgia that stricter gun laws are not the answer and that schools must beef up security.
‘I don’t like to admit this. I don’t like that this is a fact of life,’ Vance said at a rally in Phoenix where he offered prayers for the victims. ‘But if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realize that our schools are soft targets and we have got to bolster security at our schools.’
His comments echoed what other Republicans have argued: that U.S. gun violence results primarily from mental health problems and not insufficient gun legislation. ‘I don’t want my kids to go to school in a place where they feel like you’ve got to have additional security, but that is increasingly the reality that we live in,’ Vance said. He added that shootings happen in states regardless of the strength of their gun laws and that ‘to take law-abiding American citizens’ guns away from them’ would not solve the problem. (Emphasis added.)
The Post went on to describe the different approach taken by the Harris-Walz campaign:
A Harris-Walz campaign spokesperson said in a statement Thursday evening that ‘Donald Trump and JD Vance think school shootings are a “fact of life” and we have to get over it.’ The latter is a reference to a comment by former president Donald Trump the day after a school shooting in Perry, Iowa, in January that killed a sixth-grader and the school’s principal. The shooting was ‘just terrible’ and ‘so surprising,’ Trump said at the time, before adding: ‘But we have to get over it, we have to move forward.’
Another fact of life: Because this is America and because we’ve been convinced that having a gun is somehow wrapped up in being a real, true American, a 14-year-old disturbed boy was gifted an assault rifle by his father.
To be fair, I want to share a more complete version of what J.D. Vance said on the subject. And, in my opinion, it reveals how so many people like Vance act as if each school shooting is yet another unique, even surprising event, rather than evidence of a continuing crisis that just worsens and won’t go away:
What happened in Georgia is just an awful tragedy and I know we’ve got a lot of parents and a lot of grandparents in this room. I mean, I cannot imagine, you know, little kids so excited to go back to school. God love them. And they’re at their first week back from the summer and an absolute barbarian decides to open fire and take their lives, and also a couple of teachers. We gotta, we gotta think about these people if you’re the praying type, and I know I am, we gotta hold them up in prayer.
We gotta be hoping for the best for these, for this incredible community because no parent should have to deal with this. No child should have to deal with this. And, yes, after holding these folks up in prayer and giving them our sympathies, because that’s what people deserve in a time of tragedy, then we have to think about how to make this less common.
Now, look, the Kamala Harris answer to this is to take law-abiding American citizens’ guns away from them. That is what Kamala Harris wants to do. But we have to ask ourselves, we actually have, have been able to run an experiment on this because you’ve got some states with very strict gun laws and you’ve got some states that don’t have strict gun laws at all. And the states with strict gun laws, they have a lot of school shootings and the states without strict gun laws, some of them have school shootings, too. So, clearly strict gun laws is not the thing that is going to solve this problem.
What is going to solve this problem? And I really do believe this is, look, I, I don’t like this. I don’t like to admit this. I don’t like that this is a fact of life. But if you’re, if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realize that our schools are soft targets, and we have got to bolster security at our schools so that a person who walks through the front door … we, we’ve got to bolster security so that if a psycho wants to walk through the front door and kill a bunch of children, they’re not able to.
And again, as a parent do I want my kids’ school to have additional security? No, of course, I don’t. I don’t want my kids to go to school in a place where they feel like you’ve got to have additional security. But that is increasingly the reality that we live in.
And a, and a bunch of my colleagues in the Senate, we actually worked on legislation that would give schools more resources to bolster their security because if these psychos are gonna go after our kids, we’ve got to be prepared for it.
We don’t have to like the reality that we live in, but it is the, the reality that we live in. We got to deal with it. (Emphasis added.)
Yes, of course, wishing and hoping and praying, but at the end of the day, this is the reality that we live in: that “we got to deal with it.” Then, we are so often told the dealing with it isn’t about gun laws because “the states with strict gun laws, they have a lot of school shootings …. So, clearly strict gun laws is not the thing that is going to solve this problem.” But, supposedly, additional security will work because “if these psychos are gonna go after our kids, we’ve got to be prepared for it.”
In another universe, you might imagine that such a notion might lead to embracing the possibility that those gun laws just aren’t stringent enough. Seems something worth exploring before you embrace the idea that they just don’t work. But, of course, more guns is one the hallmarks of the far-right response to gun violence: If the good guys had more guns, and if there were more good guys with guns in supermarkets and bars and churches and schools and all the places where there has been gun violence, well, they would have taken out the bad guy with the gun before he killed too many people. Except these crazy guys are armed to the teeth with body armor and not too many shoppers are that prepared and willing to die for buy-one-get-one-free tuna fish.
Today, everything about guns—and deaths by guns—goes back to the Second Amendment, or whatever the conservative judges have now decided the Second Amendment really means. Sort of like how the Supreme Court now enables the president to evade the laws all the rest of us have to respect and abide, or, thanks to their Dobbs decision, throwing out precedent to make it almost impossible for women to control their own bodies.
As for guns, here is how the Founders framed the Second Amendment:
And now, according to the Cornell Law School, here is the Second Amendment as reinterpreted by Antonin Scalia and the Supreme Court:
Given the willingness of King George III to use force and violence to retain power of the American colonies, the Framers, no dummies, appreciated and connected the right of the people to keep and bear arms in the context of a well-regulated militia. And because it was absolutely necessary to the security of a free state, it couldn’t be infringed upon.
In District of Columbia v. Heller, Heller challenged a Washington, D.C., ban on handguns. And the Supreme Court transformed and expanded the Second Amendment to ignore the well-regulated militia and include “an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia.”
Scalia searched high and low for any snippet from past legal practice, a dictionary excerpt, and a reconfiguration of grammatical habits to arrive at an expansion of gun rights that fit his ideology. Suffice it say that the Supreme Court in case after gun case has expanded the ability of individuals to possess weapons that are more and more capable of inflicting mass casualties while simultaneously limiting the ability of state, local, and the federal governments to regulate their use and better protect those without guns, who, unfortunately, so easily become the victims of angry and mentally ill gun owners.
Add the National Rifle Association and MAGA into the mix, and you can imagine it only getting worse. Let me take you back to what Donald Trump had to say during his campaign for the presidency in 2016:
Then, Trump exhorts the crowd:
Hillary wants to abolish — essentially abolish the Second Amendment. By the way, and if she gets to pick…
(CROWD BOOING)
If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is. I don’t know. But — but I’ll tell you what. That will be a horrible day. If — if Hillary gets to put her judges — right now, we’re tied. You see what’s going on … you see what’s going on? We tied because Scalia – this was not suppose to happen. Justice Scalia was going to be around for ten more years at least and this is what happens. That was a horrible thing.
So now look at it. So Hillary essentially wants to abolish the Second Amendment. Now, speaking to the NRA folks – who are great – when you – when you — and I’ll tell you, they endorsed me.
(APPLAUSE)
They endorsed me very early. My son’s a member. I’m a member.
If you – we can add I think the National Rifle Association, we can add the Second Amendment to the Justices – they almost go – in a certain way, hand in hand. Now the Justices are going to do things that are so important and we have such great Justices, you saw my list of 11 that have been vetted and respected.
(APPLAUSE)
And have gotten great. And they to a little equate – but if you don’t do the right thing, either you’re not going to have a Second Amendment or you’re not going to have much of it left. And you’re not going to be able to protect yourself, which you need.
You know, when the bad guys burst into your house, they’re not looking about into Second Amendments, and, do I have the right to do this? OK, the bad guys aren’t going to be giving up their weapons.
But the good people will say, ‘Oh, well, that’s the law.’ No, no, not going to happen, we can’t let it happen. We can’t let it happen.
Am I imagining an intersection of the efforts to zealously protect Scalia’s version of the Second Amendment with threats delivered to those who disagree? Trump can just barely hide his desire for someone in the audience to move from theory to action, to actually utilize those arms he is bearing. From “nothing you can do, folks” to “Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is.”
So, I have been thinking a lot about how we think about school shootings and the mass murder of innocents with weapons of war, your everyday homicides with handguns. And I think we have it all wrong. Because the wrong right is always highlighted. When in doubt, invoke the Second Amendment, the rights of the gun owners, not the right of the rest of us to live in peace.
So what does all this mean, and what impact does gun violence have on everyday life? Let me go back to where I started: the facts of life and death. On September 4, 2024, a student brought an AR-15 hidden in a backpack to Apalachee High School in Windsor, Ga., and killed two teachers and two students.
Horrifying, Terrifying. And I wish I could say unbelievable. But I can’t. Let’s turn from politics and politicians to those who have experienced gun violence first hand. Let’s confront the reality of gun violence in our lives:
Let that sink in: Since 1999, there have been shootings in 417 schools. Imagine all the children, the teachers, the custodians, the lunch-room workers, the families, and the neighbors whose lives have been directly and forever touched by the reality that, ever so unexpectedly, they are no longer safe or secure. This reality transcends politics. Differences in gender, race, faith, political party just don’t matter. There is always someone with a gun who hates Black churches or white synagogues, who feels driven to turn grocery stores and country-music festivals into shooting galleries, who is willing to gun down elementary school children or his college classmates.
Since 2006, guns have been used in an average of 25 mass killings per year in the United States, killing 2,523 people in all. We use the term ‘mass killing’ to describe events in which four or more people died, not including the perpetrators. These violent episodes have occurred 22 times since the beginning of 2024.
Some shooters target strangers in public, firing at children in schools, shoppers in stores, worshipers in sacred spaces. Many of these events are so familiar that the locations are now shorthand for the horrors that occurred there: Parkland, Virginia Tech, the El Paso Walmart, the Tree of Life synagogue.
However, many more mass shooters strike in homes, intentionally killing people they know, love or once loved, and few outside the immediate community may hear about it or remember it. Do you recall a Chicago man who fatally shot neighbors in his condominium building as they sat down to dinner in 2019? Or the father in Gustine, Calif., who killed his four children then himself in 2006?
At least 59% of victims were family members or acquaintances of the shooter. Only 27% were confirmed to be strangers, although these killings tend to receive the most attention.
The Post has complied a chart that tracks the number of mass killings from 2006 to 2024:
The Pew Research Center offers this analysis about the number of deaths from gun-related injuries:
In 2021, the most recent year for which complete data is available, 48,830 people died from gun-related injuries in the U.S., according to the CDC. That figure includes gun murders and gun suicides, along with three less common types of gun-related deaths tracked by the CDC: those that were accidental, those that involved law enforcement and those whose circumstances could not be determined. The total excludes deaths in which gunshot injuries played a contributing, but not principal, role. (CDC fatality statistics are based on information contained in official death certificates, which identify a single cause of death.)
Though they tend to get less public attention than gun-related murders, suicides have long accounted for the majority of U.S. gun deaths. In 2021, 54% of all gun-related deaths in the U.S. were suicides (26,328), while 43% were murders (20,958), according to the CDC. The remaining gun deaths that year were accidental (549), involved law enforcement (537) or had undetermined circumstances (458).
About eight-in-ten U.S. murders in 2021 – 20,958 out of 26,031, or 81% – involved a firearm. That marked the highest percentage since at least 1968, the earliest year for which the CDC has online records. More than half of all suicides in 2021 – 26,328 out of 48,183, or 55% – also involved a gun, the highest percentage since 2001.
Gun murders, in particular, have climbed sharply during the pandemic, increasing 45% between 2019 and 2021, while the number of gun suicides rose 10% during that span. The overall increase in U.S. gun deaths since the beginning of the pandemic includes an especially stark rise in such fatalities among children and teens under the age of 18. Gun deaths among children and teens rose 50% in just two years, from 1,732 in 2019 to 2,590 in 2021. (Emphasis added.)
The total number of gun deaths among children and teens in 2021 includes homicides, suicides, accidents and all other categories where firearms are listed on death certificates as the underlying cause of death … Homicide was the largest single category of gun deaths among children and teens in 2021, accounting for 60% of the total that year. It was followed by suicide at 32% and accidents at 5%. Among U.S. adults, by contrast, suicides accounted for a 55% majority of gun deaths in 2021.
Pew continues:
In addition to data on gun fatalities, the CDC publishes estimates on nonfatal gun-related injuries sustained by children and teens. In 2020 – the most recent year with available data – there were more than 11,000 emergency-room visits for gunshot injuries among children and teens under the age of 18 – far higher than in other recent years. An exact count is not possible, however, because the CDC’s estimate is based on a sample of U.S. hospitals, not all U.S. hospitals, and is subject to a large margin of error. (Emphasis added.)
It is especially interesting to note that, contrary to the claims of Donald Trump and conservative politicians, it is not the states with the most urban (read Black) concentrations that have the highest rates of gun violence, but rather Southern and Western states:
The rate of gun fatalities varies widely from state to state. In 2021, the states with the highest total rates of gun-related deaths – counting murders, suicides and all other categories tracked by the CDC – included Mississippi (33.9 per 100,000 people), Louisiana (29.1), New Mexico (27.8), Alabama (26.4) and Wyoming (26.1). The states with the lowest total rates included Massachusetts (3.4), Hawaii (4.8), New Jersey (5.2), New York (5.4) and Rhode Island (5.6).
The results are somewhat different when looking at gun murder and gun suicide rates separately. The places with the highest gun murder rates in 2021 included the District of Columbia (22.3 per 100,000 people), Mississippi (21.2), Louisiana (18.4), Alabama (13.9) and New Mexico (11.7). Those with the lowest gun murder rates included Massachusetts (1.5), Idaho (1.5), Hawaii (1.6), Utah (2.1) and Iowa (2.2). Rate estimates are not available for Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont or Wyoming.
A PLOS 2015 study entitled “Contagion in Mass Killings and School Shootings” explained:
In recent years, tragedies involving mass killings in the US, such as the Aurora, CO movie theater shooting in July 2012, and the Newtown, CT school shooting in December 2012, have intensified societal focus on trying to understand the dynamics and contributing factors that underlie such events, particularly since the per capita incidence of such events and other firearm related mortality is significantly higher in the US than in any other industrialized country …
We find significant evidence that mass killings involving firearms are incented by similar events in the immediate past. On average, this temporary increase in probability lasts 13 days, and each incident incites at least 0.30 new incidents … We also find significant evidence of contagion in school shootings, for which an incident is contagious for an average of 13 days, and incites an average of at least 0.22 new incidents …
And, according to PLOS:
[S]tudies have shown that the firearm homicide and suicide rates in the US are several times higher than that of any other industrialized country, and the patterns appear to be due to higher rates of firearm ownership in the US compared with other industrialized countries … Overall, the pediatric firearm mortality rate is five times higher in the United States compared with any other industrialized country, and 87% of all children age 0 to 14 worldwide killed by firearms are children living in the US, despite the fact that less than 5% of the world’s children live in the US. In September, 2014, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) released a report ‘A Study of Active Shooter Incidents in the United States Between 2000 and 2013.’ In their report, they note that the incidence of mass shooting incidents has been growing over the past 14 years.
According to the FBI:
Ready access to weaponry has been implicated in these trends. For instance, it has been found that two thirds of school shooters obtained their firearms from their own home, or the home of a relative and youths are significantly more likely to die by firearm homicide or suicide in states where gun ownership is more prevalent. In addition, household gun ownership has been shown to significantly raise the risk for homicide in the home, and homicide rates in general. Studies have also shown that the more access people have to firearms, the lower the levels of social trust, and the higher the levels of homicide A strong association has also been found between overall state suicide rates and firearm ownership rates.
As the innocent die, as our students are murdered in their classrooms, the ideological divide seems to grow wider every day. And those in power seem unwilling or unable to do anything to actually help.
And so, it is a surprise that all they have to offer are hopes and prayers and the phenomenally sad suggestion we regard these unnecessary deaths as a fact of life.
Clearly J.D. Vance and his politician friends have nothing to give us. They are truly unwilling to shoulder the shame and responsibility for the kind of life they are willing to offer their children. And so they avert their eyes. But here is what the American Academy of Pediatrician (AAP) is telling us:
Gun violence is a public health crisis that jeopardizes children’s health and safety.
Pediatricians regularly treat children injured or killed by firearms: toddlers who find loaded guns in the home; children who experience gun violence in their communities or at school; and adolescents who attempt suicide. Mass shootings continue to unfold in places that should be safe havens for children, like school. In addition, daily acts of gun violence — suicide, homicide, unintentional shootings — injure and kill children at alarming rates. Exposure to gun violence also contributes to toxic stress and harms children’s health and development.
Just like any other public health crisis affecting children, we need a rigorous scientific approach informed by research that can keep children safe and promote their lifelong health and well-being.
Unlike our cowardly political leaders, the American Academy of Pediatricians are willing to suggest the first steps that can at least begin the process of making the changes we need:
Gun violence is a public health crisis impacting communities across the country – from the mass shootings that capture headlines to daily acts of gun violence. Gun injuries are the most common cause of death for children. A public health approach is urgently needed to address this crisis, including the disproportionate burden of this epidemic on communities of color.
Which means, “Lawmakers must act to protect children, families and communities from gun violence and save lives.”
CBS News reported that Dr. Vivek Murthy, the nation’s top doctor and surgeon general of the U.S., responded to the increasing numbers of injuries and deaths involving firearms in the country by declaring gun violence a public-health crisis:
People are scared in many communities I visit around the country to do normal things like go to school or the grocery store or work and they’re worried about the risk to their life,” Murthy said in an interview with CBS Mornings on Tuesday.
To drive down gun deaths, Murthy calls on the U.S. to ban automatic rifles, introduce universal background checks for purchasing guns, regulate the industry, pass laws that would restrict their use in public spaces and penalize people who fail to safely store their weapons … People want to be able to walk through their neighborhoods and be safe.
‘It is now time for us to take this issue out of the realm of politics and put it in the realm of public health, the way we did with smoking more than a half century ago,’ Murthy told the AP. ‘My hope is that if we understand this as a kid’s issue that we will raise it on the priority list, that we will see it not as a political issue but as a public health issue that should concern all of us,’ Murthy said.
Like the AAP, Murthy suggested simple things we can do:
There are, for example, community violence intervention programs that we can invest in. There are safe storage education programs that we can expand. There are firearm risk reduction strategies like background checks and other measures that would seek to create time and space between firearms and individuals who would seek to harm themselves and others.
I can’t say it better than Marilda Griffiths: “We cannot let this go on. We have to stop it … I’m ready to make a noise about this and I’m ready to stop it.”
So, let me begin by suggesting we no longer allow them to lie. This is definitely not a fact of life. This is a fact of death.
