For many of today’s most divisive political issues, our government’s inaction toward addressing them can be attributed to an array of factors, building upon each other throughout years, even decades, until the matter becomes too polarizing to form a governing coalition that seeks an effective resolution.
When it comes to our unwillingness to institute any meaningful restrictions on firearms, this reasoning can be applied. Today, it is easy to access a deadly, military-grade weapon because of a decades-long culmination of right-wing U.S. Supreme Court decisions, legislation easing restrictions and targeted lobbying campaigns, all of which have created a world where near daily mass shootings have gained dystopic normalcy in America.
As the saying goes, “Rome was not built in a day.” But, when it comes to gun control, if you did want to point to one day, a day when the political debate over firearm restrictions essentially ended, that day would be Dec. 14, 2012, when a gunman walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and shot and killed 26 people, 20 of whom were schoolchildren.
In the aftermath, as with other mass shootings before then, there was no successful legislative effort to restrict access to firearms. When enough of us decided that we could tolerate dead children in a classroom instead of sacrificing access to weapons was when the gun control debate ended.
That’s why, 13 years and countless more mass shootings later, there was such a mass panic in Chattanooga last week when a hoax call was made to the police claiming there were shots fired on the UTC campus. After an extensive police response to campus, no gunman or shooting victims were found.