“…Things Like This Take Place”
Tornadoes sometimes level whole neighborhoods. Volcanoes regularly blow their summits, bringing extravagant destruction to unsuspecting lives. Avalanches destroy alpine villages. All are part of the network of chance that rules the darker parts of human life. We are right to call them horrible occurrences and wrong to imagine that there is much that we can do.
But that’s really not what happens in a shooting. Somebody takes a gun or three, marches into a gathering of human beings and begins to execute them one by one. It takes some planning, some preparation beforehand. You have to incubate your grievance, do some reconnaissance, and maybe take time to write a manifesto. We won’t know for a while how it went down in Florida, but Phoenix Ikner likely hit these sinister marks before he grabbed his mother’s service revolver and then killed and injured half a dozen people on campus. I’m actually surprised that the media gave it so much oxygen. With the exception of activists and bereaved American parents, school slaughter is pretty much a background issue. As they say in the grief biz, “thoughts and prayers.” Governor DeSantis managed just the “prayers” part, probably because he doesn’t want to give it much thought.
Our President, regrettably, doesn’t want to do anything. The shootings at FSU were, of course, “horrible,” and he promised that he will get back to all of us soon. But for Donald Trump, there is no real causality. Things like this are naturally horrible, but they are part of the embedded mechanics of the universe. They simply “take place,” like the setting of the sun, as if there were no such thing as human agency or a material culture of lethal weaponry available to nearly anyone who wants it. Nothing can be done. It is out of our hands. And even if that were not the case, he took an oath to protect the Second Amendment, the only part of the Constitution that constrains him. If he was passionate about anything on the day of the Florida killings, it was the crucial importance of unregulated gun ownership. Nothing comes between him and his Calvins.
And so there will be no consequences, no new legislation. He won’t try again on the question of bump-stocks, or challenge the crazy lenience of Florida gun laws, which have shredded any notion of common-sense controls. We have heard the last from Donald Trump, who will simply repeat this litany of garbage the next time students are slaughtered on campus. After all, what can a person do, even the most powerful person on earth? “Horrible things like this take place.”