by Melinda Henneberger
Look, I happen to believe in prayer, which as all of the rest of you who do, too, know is nothing like asking Santa for Barbie’s pink Corvette. As my son said when he was little, “Sometimes, it’s a no.”
In fact, I’m the Aunt Crabby who didn’t think we should even be holding our citywide Super Bowl street party on Ash Wednesday, when everyone knows that Fat Tuesday is the right day for revelry.
But I also believe that Emanuel Cleaver II, the United Methodist pastor who represents Kansas City in Congress, was right to walk out of a congressional moment of silence after Wednesday’s mass shooting. He’s been doing that for more than a year now, to protest the fact that his fellow lawmakers refuse to back up their prayers with pro-life action on guns.
With tears in his eyes, Cleaver told The Star that Wednesday “was supposed to be one of the happiest days in decades, and then people are running for their lives. I know that if the murder of children didn’t inspire Congress to act, then the murder of football fans won’t get a piece of consideration. So it goes on and on and on. I don’t know what to do.”
That half of those fans who were injured were children won’t change the calculus.
When and only when voters decide to elect more lawmakers willing to even start making it stop, then it will. Not immediately, but inevitably.
One legal change that has been proven to work, as I’ve written more than once before, is something that used to be routine. But then, in 2007, the Missouri legislature stopped making anyone buying a handgun go through a background check in person at their sheriff’s office.
The Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research found that in the first six years after the state repealed that requirement, Missouri’s gun homicide rate rose by 16% — even as the national rate declined by 11%. The kind of law Missouri repealed is considered the single most effective way to keep those who really shouldn’t have guns from getting them. In the decade after Connecticut passed such a law, gun murders went down by 40%.
As always in these dark moments, speakers at Wednesday’s news conference in Kansas City praised the bravery of the first responders whose job it was to run towards the gunfire. It’s right that we should do that, especially because it’s not a given; first responders at the school in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 students and two teachers were killed, took cover when they heard gunfire.
But what I always think when I hear those words of praise is that if we really cared about the well-being of our first responders, we would stop making their lives, too, so much more dangerous than they already are with our anywhere, anytime for anybody at all gun laws. “Back the blue” and “guns for all” are opposing impulses.
If the presence of 800 armed law enforcement officers at the Super Bowl parade didn’t prevent the gunfire, do we really think that that 801st good guy with a gun might have made the difference?
Some of those readers who wrote to me after the parade said yes, they do think that. But we cannot arm our way out of the admittedly complicated problem of gun violence.
Predictably, among the many arguing that guns have nothing to do with the problem was the Missouri Republican Rep. Mark Alford, who said the only real issue is what’s in our hearts. But he’s only half-wrong about that.
I say that because it’s both guns and free-floating rage that are killing us, as evidenced by the first few reactions from Star readers that appeared in my inbox right after my original column about the shootings posted.
Not long after one life was lost and others changed forever, at a blue-sky civic celebration, the first three emails I received from readers suggest the depth of the commonplace, knee-jerk loathing of someone I’m pretty sure they’d never heard of before yesterday, don’t remember today and knew nothing about for the five minutes they gave me any thought at all.
“You are a disgusting human,” said the first message. “You are going to burn for all eternity. Repent. You evil disgusting pedo witch.”
The second correspondent told me, as several others later did, too, that we don’t have a “crime problem, but a Black crime problem.”
“When you go on about shootings at public events, I think it would be helpful if you were to say what everyone in America knows, but you media people won’t say, is that the vast majority of these shooters are Black. … You ‘journalists’ are covering for them.”
Between 1982 and December 2023, 80 out of the 149 mass shootings in the United States were carried out by white shooters. Twenty-six such shooters were African American and the rest were of other races.
“You didn’t waste any time spewing your leftist hate,” the third message read. “How about an editorial, Praying for healing of those injured and our country as a whole! You are Pathetic!!”
Believe me, I realize that these messages have nothing to do with me, and are in no way out of the ordinary, either. But that this reaction is no more surprising than the gunfire than spoiled not just a happy occasion but entire lives is part of what is wrong.
That social and partisan media constantly tell us that those with whom we disagree are demonic has a lot to do with that, but what do we do about it? In some ways, I’m sorry to say, that’s an even harder problem to address than our ocean of unregulated weapons.
