How do you gauge the effect of so many mass shootings on our psyches?
How can we tell whether we are becoming numb to the daily reports of gun murders at schools, churches, synagogues, grocery stores, massage parlors, theaters?
We think we maintain our sense of outrage and loss, but slowly, over time, the calluses are growing on our hearts.
Early reports about the elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, said that two people had died. Do you know what my first thought was?
“How horrible, but thank God it’s only two people.”
That first report would prove wildly incomplete. By the time the attack was over, 19 fourth graders and their two teachers had been slain by an 18-year-old armed with an assault weapon.
When I read about the medical building shooting in Tulsa, Oklahoma, eight days later, again, my reaction was horror, outrage once more, and a tiny bit of relief that only four people had been killed. A man unhappy about his back surgery hunted down and killed his surgeon and three other people. Four people lost their lives. Only four.
Please do not think I’m becoming inured. I’m just relieved it wasn’t worse.
How much more of this can we take before our elected leaders do something meaningful?
President Joe Biden pleaded with Congress to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, or at least raise the minimum age to purchase them from 18 to 21, to strengthen background checks, pass “red flag” and safe-storage laws, repeal the immunity that protects gunmakers from liability lawsuits, and to address the mental health crisis that leads to gun violence.
Thirty-one years ago, shortly after I was hired by The Times, I covered the aftermath of a hospital shooting in Sandy, Utah. It was a huge story at the time but the sort of news that would earn little coverage today. You see, only one person died. It was not, technically speaking, a mass shooting.
At the time, though, it was unthinkable.
This was four years before a domestic terrorist blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including babies in a day care center. Eight years before two teenagers with guns massacred 12 students and a teacher at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Ten years before terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania, killing 2,977 people.
Three decades ago, we were far more easily shocked.
On Sept. 20, 1991, Richard Worthington, a 39-year-old devout Mormon and father of eight, drove to Alta View Hospital in Sandy. He stormed the hospital maternity ward with a handgun, a shotgun and a bomb made of 42 sticks of dynamite, powerful enough to blow up half a city block. His mission: to kill the doctor who had given his wife a tubal ligation two years earlier.
The hospital siege lasted 18 hours. Worthington took seven hostages – five adults, including a woman who would soon deliver a baby, and two newborns. The doctor hid in an office and called police. When a courageous nurse named Karla Roth tried to disarm him, Worthington killed her.
The Utah hospital siege was not a catalyzing event. At the time, it was so bizarre, so random that it did not spark widespread discussion about gun ownership or even about the dearth of mental health services for people like Worthington.
A month after Worthington’s hospital siege, a gunman in Texas crashed his truck into a Luby’s Diner, emerged from the cab and shot 22 people dead before killing himself. (Another victim died later.)
At the time, it was the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.
And now, three decades later, it is merely the sixth.
Twenty-two of the country’s 30 deadliest mass shootings have taken place since 1991.
Sixteen of the 30 deadliest have taken place in the last 10 years. The trend is clear.
Will our Republican senators finally summon the political will to say, “Enough”?
The Los Angeles Times