In The Arena What Will It Take to Get Americans to Care About Our Shooting Epidemic?

Doug Pennington is a communications professional based in Washington, DC, and a former staffer for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

America’s gun advocates are living a libertarian dream. How well are you sleeping?

Freed from virtually all meaningful restrictions at the federal, state and local levels, millions of people across the country have access to an almost limitless range of firearms. Along with training requirements that run the gamut from inadequate to nonexistent, the number of places where that firepower can be taken is nearly limitless, as well.


For sale at a gun show or store near you are weapons as small as two-shot pistols that can fit in the front pocket of a pair of jeans. Down the aisle you might find a semi-automatic .50-caliber sniper rifle almost five feet long, capable of hitting a target a mile away. Not to mention the variety of shotguns, semi-automatic handguns, and AK-47 and AR-15 assault rifles in between – many capable of holding magazines of 30 rounds or more that can be fired off in a few seconds.

Who buys these guns? Some buyers might arm themselves after a criminal background check. Many others do not. Small wonder, since Congress continues to permit such anonymous sales. And don’t be fooled. These guns aren’t taken only to the duck blind or the gun range. No, in many parts of the country, they’re taken into the airport, the office parking lot, the corner bar, the hardware store, the neighborhood restaurant or the movie theater. People can even take their guns into church. Many state laws say it’s OK. Some don’t even require a permit.

To have access to a firearm in America, age is almost irrelevant, too. Toddlers or grade schoolers find their parents’ guns and shoot themselves, or each other, every week. Kids under drinking age arm themselves with assault weapons – in some cases from their parents’ collection – and lay waste to classrooms of first-graders. Along with no meaningful age limit to gun access, there are massive loopholes for the dangerously mentally ill, as well as for men who abuse wives or girlfriends, to put their hands on virtually any gun they want to sow terror in homes, colleges or workplaces.

Let’s try a thought experiment. Imagine the airline industry organizing and winning a decades-long campaign to deregulate airplane safety. This campaign results in repeated plane crashes, with deaths and injuries of 100,000 passengers and bystanders on the ground every year. Now, imagine Congress and the American people somehow accepting air crashes and carnage as a fact of life, believing that nothing can be done to make air travel safer. Then imagine us getting on planes anyway.

Sounds like an episode of the Twilight Zone. We know that here in the real world, if 100,000 Americans were dead and injured in a single year from plane crashes, people would rise up with a holy terror on TV news and in the halls of Congress. Air travel would shrivel and die. Gripped with fear, people would desert airports while government officials would be driven like mad to enact any laws and rules needed to reduce the bloodshed. What’s more, airlines themselves would fire the idiots who fought airplane safety regulations in the first place, and then join government in making air travel as safe as it actually is today.

But not the gun industry. To them, this isn’t a Rod Serling production. It’s real life. The gun companies and their chief lobby, the National Rifle Association, have, in fact, organized and won a decades-long campaign to deregulate gun safety almost completely, resulting in roughly 30,000 deaths and more than 70,000 injuries to gun users and bystanders every year. Since the Newtown shooting alone, according to one measure, we’ve seen 74 incidents of gunfire at our schools and colleges, leaving dozens dead or wounded.

Congress and the American people somehow accept this carnage as a fact of life, and believe nothing can be done to make gun use safer. Then we go to our schools, movie theaters and workplaces anyway, recoiling in horror when the shooting we convinced ourselves could never happen where we are, eventually does. It’s insane.

On the morning of April 16, 2007, I called out sick from work. Then, half asleep with the TV on in the background, I heard news of a shooting at Virginia Tech. After a few minutes I knew I had go in. I recall the offices of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence that day as a mixture of frenetic activity and eerie quiet. Watching the news and searching online for any new scrap of information, the horror of that day only grew worse as the hours passed. The number of dead and injured just kept getting bigger. In the weeks and months that followed, the nation’s attention focused with an intensity on gun violence not seen in more than a decade.

Surely, I thought, after a mentally disturbed gunman killed 32 students and faculty—with another 17 injured—the background check system would be fixed. Surely high capacity magazines would be taken off the market. Surely mental health services would be improved. What we got instead was a watered-down monetary incentive for states to submit their criminal and mental health records to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System. Not nothing, but hardly an adequate response to the worst mass shooting by a single gunman in American history. Even after leaving Brady, I asked myself similar questions when Rep. Gabby Giffords was shot with 18 of her constituents, with six dead including a U.S. federal judge. I asked again after 20 elementary school kids and six of their teachers and staff were massacred in their classrooms at Sandy Hook.

What we got instead were thoughts, prayers and politicians looking for an excuse to do what they do best: nothing at all.

The debate over gun policy in our country is caught in a deadly cycle. A mass shooting makes the news; we ask what law could have prevented it; we debate to a stalemate; then we move on to the “next thing” as people by the tens of thousands continue to get shot.

We have to destroy this cycle. We don’t need one law or one regulation to reduce gun violence. We need a whole system of laws that work together to cut the obscene number of dead and wounded in half, and then in half again. One regulation is a single thread. We need many threads, woven together into a gun violence prevention safety net—one that catches thousands of moms and dads and kids before they fall through the gaping holes in our country’s gun safety policy.

America is adrift on a sea of preventable misery caused by gunfire. It is the poisoned water that surrounds all of us. Though occasionally tossed by the wave of a mass shooting, the Sirens of the gun lobby sing in our ears, “There’s nothing you can do” as the faces of thousands of gunshot victims float past our gaze without a ripple.

Enough. We must shake ourselves out of this national trance of resignation to slaughter. Next year’s children stand on the shore, and the tide is coming in.