Appropriate outrage
Australia's reaction to mass murder is normal. What happens in the US is not.
It’s the cliche “if it bleeds, it leads” that always seems to result in TV news reflecting the world as a lawless hellhole. Less well known is the saying that floated around in my early days as a journalist which went something like: “A hundred deaths overseas equals 10 deaths in another state equals five deaths in another city equals two deaths in my city equals one death in my street.” The point wasn’t to minimize tragedy but contextualize its newsworthiness.
Nine people died in a mass shooting in Illinois in January. Another six in California two days later. In early February, six people died in a Pennsylvania shooting. Some 220 people have died in 142 mass shootings the United States so far this year, defined as incidents in which at least four people are injured. Last year, 746 people died and 2,442 were injured in 604 mass shootings; in 2022, it was 762 dead and 2,902 injured in 695 mass shootings.
Over the weekend, I woke to headlines in the Australian media about an attack in Sydney’s Bondi Junction. A 40-year-old, mentally ill man stabbed six people to death at a shopping mall before being shot by a policewoman. The incident has sparked a media frenzy back home and, sensationalist tendencies aside, that’s exactly how it should be. An incident in which multiple people are murdered should make headlines—huge headlines—and prompt inquiries into why and how it happened and what can be done to prevent it ever happening again.
That doesn’t happen in the United States.
Making headlines here requires way more than six people being killed, and it’s not just because the country is generally numb to mass murder. It’s because a big chunk of America is indifferent to mass murder, having concluded it’s an acceptable price to pay for access to weapons whose sole purpose is to kill.
For me, that rubicon was crossed after 20 six- and seven-year-old children were murdered at Connecticut’s Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, along with six teachers trying to protect them. I was living in Norwalk, Connecticut at the time—just 25 miles away—actually opposite an elementary school. I can vividly recall the sense of outrage and disgust and deep, deep revulsion at what had happened, and the collective belief action must be taken. That, surely, a murder that so shocked the senses would force America to come to its own.
And yet … nothing. No restrictions on gun ownership. No assault weapons ban. No deeper background checks or prohibitions for people with mental and other illnesses. No trigger locks. Nothing. The country witnessed the slaughter of 20 children—leaving Barack Obama weeping over what he describes as the darkest day of his presidency—and ultimately shrugged.
“The closest I came to being cynical was the utter failure of Congress to respond in the immediate aftermath of the Sandy Hook shootings,” Obama said on the 10-year anniversary of Sandy Hook. “To see almost the entire GOP, but also a decent number of Democrats, equivocate and hem and haw and filibuster and ultimately bend yet again to pressure from the gun lobby.”
It took a decade—and the presidency of Joe Biden after mass shootings in Buffalo (10 killed) and Uvalde, Texas (21 killed, at another elementary school)—for even some modest restrictions to be introduced. Yet it’s nowhere near enough—46 of the country’s 50 states now allow people to openly carry firearms. 46!
About the only positive to emerge lately in the battle against America’s indifference came last week in Michigan, where the parents of a mass shooter were sentenced to at least 10 years in prison after earlier being convicted of involuntary manslaughter.
“Parents are not expected to be psychic,” Judge Cheryl Matthews said before issuing the sentence. “But these convictions are not about poor parenting. These convictions confirm repeated acts or lack of acts that could have halted an oncoming runaway train—repeatedly ignoring things that would make a reasonable person feel the hair on the back of her neck stand up.”
I’m not sure anything can shake the country’s conscience around access to guns—I mean, kids here take part in “active shooter” drills at school, and it feels like most people regard that as entirely normal. I’m also not sure holding parents accountable will change the calculus, but I’ll support anything that may in any small way result in sanity prevailing.
What happened in Bondi Junction over the weekend is horrific and tragic, but I’ve taken heart in Australia’s reaction: it’s absolutely what’s supposed to happen in response to the unthinkable. Here, people shrug. And while I haven’t bothered to engage with the crazies, I’m sure there’s a passionate online debate about how looser gun laws in Australia would prevent more people from being killed.
U-S-A. Sigh.
A note about whatever this is …
After writing a few thousand articles for newspapers and magazines, I spent a long time trying a bunch of other stuff. I guess I figured what came (relatively) easily must by definition be less valuable, so I wandered in the corporate wilderness, becoming increasingly frustrated and doing work that felt increasingly lousy.
Sometimes with age comes wisdom, and I’ve realized finding something (relatively) easy ain’t a bad thing. So, this is a space where I’m resurrecting writing for myself, on topics weird and wild and wonderful.
Posts will appear when the mood takes me, but I do try to be consistently inconsistent—sometimes it’ll be a couple of days between drinks; sometimes a week. But if you subscribe, you’ll get a email letting you know I’m ranting. Again.