Promises to protect the traditional family from the perceived threat of feminism drew in white women. That backlash, with the help of conservative political strategists, coalesced into a multi-issue political movement. “Directly and indirectly, conflicts over civil rights have shaped modern understandings of the Second Amendment.”ĭesegregation sparked a reactionary backlash among white voters, particularly in the south, who saw it as overreach by the Supreme Court and federal government. Board of Education of Topeka, the landmark Supreme Court ruling in 1954. “The modern quest for gun control and the gun rights movement it triggered were born in the shadow of Brown,” Reva Siegel, a constitutional scholar at Yale Law School, wrote in a 2008 article in the Harvard Law Review. And like so many other things about modern American politics, the reasons are rooted in the political backlash to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and particularly to desegregation. Recent years have brought many mass shootings, including those of schoolchildren in Newtown, Conn., and Parkland, Fla., but essentially no new gun control legislation. That is a benefit that most Americans cannot access, because of choices that American governments have made. They get a little more innocence as children. I do not have to soothe the fear that would bring. They do not have to wonder if their school will be the next one after Uvalde.
My younger daughter’s day care never taught her to hide silently in a dark room so that a shooter would not find her. Today my older daughter goes to a primary school that does not have any active-shooter drills, and is not learning that her school is a place where she needs to fear being killed. I don’t live in the United States right now. The imagining, the fear, is a cost in and of itself. I was more fortunate than the families in Uvalde, in Sandy Hook, or in Parkland.īut there is still a cost to living in a country where children are taught that school is a place where they might be trapped and murdered to living in a country where being a schoolteacher means making a Secret Service-style commitment to hurl oneself in front of a speeding bullet. In all of those instances, the disaster I imagined never came to pass. Jay Caspian Kang: By sharing memes with each new tragedy, we have created a museum of unbearable sorrow, increasingly dense with names and photos of the deceased.Roxane Gay: For all our cultural obsession with civility, there is nothing more uncivilized than the political establishment’s acceptance of the constancy of mass shootings.Nicholas Kristof, a former Times Opinion columnist: Gun policy is complicated and politically vexing, and it won’t make everyone safe.Michelle Goldberg: As we come to terms with yet another tragedy, the most common sentiment is a bitter acknowledgment that nothing is going to change.I imagined our life together shattering.įrom Opinion: The Texas School Shooting Commentary from Times Opinion on the massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. A few years earlier, when my husband, then a teacher in a public school, texted me that they were locked down because of a reported shooting in the building, I imagined him being killed, or being helpless to save his students. I imagined the life-destroying grief that would follow.īy then I already had practice at the imagining. I imagined how useless silence and a locked door would be against someone who had set out to murder young children. Her teachers explained that they were training the children to hide in a small dark room and not make a sound, so that if one day the worst happened, the shooter might not realize they were there. I imagined it when I arrived one day to pick up my older daughter, then not even 2 years old, from day care in Washington, D.C., and found that they were conducting an active shooter drill with the babies and toddlers. But the truth is it that although I have never experienced it directly, I have had to imagine that pain many times. I am a mother of two young children, and I wish I could say that the pain that parents in Uvalde, Texas, feel this morning is unimaginable to me.