A Covenant Worth Keeping

On the March 27th shooting at the Covenant School in Nashville, TN.

This isn’t what I hoped to write this week but events on Monday have dominated my thoughts this week, as I’m sure they have on many of you. This piece could be overwrought, but as I was writing it I realized that it might be more for me than it is for you. I don’t have a panacea for this issue, but writing this helped to outline and categorize my thoughts. Hopefully, it will do the same for you. See you next week.

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Tuesday afternoon was beautiful. My wife and I strolled around our neighborhood in the brisk spring air with our daughter. Back at home, she made dinner and I entertained the baby as she crawled around the house, yanking books and records from their shelves and leaving them in her wake.

The early evening sun hung just above the trees of our neighbor’s house and shone through our living room window as we ate. Our girl, ever the image of contentment, was busy eating her chicken and sweet potatoes.

I pictured the pair of them in a Norman Rockwell painting in my mind’s eye, their exceptional beauty and innocence, the quiet satisfaction of the closing of another day.

And then it struck me, as it had countless times earlier that day, that this, this invaluable moment of bliss and gratitude, was precisely what had been taken away from six families in our community the day before.

I simply cannot fathom the grief that must take hold on those left to pick up the wreckage of the Covenant School shooting on Monday morning. I can hardly put into words the despair I feel for those terribly unfortunate families.

After such a devastating event, it’s an understandable sentiment to try to make sense of what occurred. But try as I might, it doesn’t. It doesn’t make sense that three sets of parents are now without a child due to the actions of a deranged lunatic. And believe me, there will be droves of talking heads and politically motivated schmucks telling you exactly how this could have been prevented.

I won’t be one of them.

I’m at a loss on how we move forward. None of the data point in the same direction. States that have a high percentage of gun ownership don’t correlate positively with gun violence. However, there does appear to be a correlation between stricter gun laws and fewer gun deaths - Illinois and Washington D.C. being notable exceptions. Homicides are generally higher in red states than in blue, but the majority of homicides occur in cities. So, the conflict between the two might exist in terms of policing.

In 2021, Tennessee passed a permitless carry law much to the chagrin of the liberal population of the state. At the time, I thought it was a reckless, ill-conceived resolution. Surprisingly - and despite Monday’s tragedy, this remains true - gun violence in my home state significantly decreased during the first full year of the law’s implementation.

The United States ranks second in the world to Brazil in gun deaths per 100k people. In America, 2/3’s of those deaths are suicides - not murders. But while America is still a relatively violent country - even after adjusting for the suicide rate - our relationship with guns doesn’t match any other country.

School shootings are a uniquely American phenomenon - not because they don’t occur in other countries but because of the sheer volume of these events inside the states. Between 2009 and 2018, there were 288 school shootings in the United States. In that same amount of time, Brazil had two. Our neighbors to the south, Mexico, had 8, and France had 2. Even if you adjust for population, the number is astounding.

It’s incredibly difficult to find an analog to the United States when searching for answers. Other countries with gun-friendly laws - the United States appears to be one of the laxest - don’t have school shootings at the preposterous rate we do. The US has more citizen-owned firearms than any other nation on earth; the next closest two are Switzerland in third, and Yemen in second. Switzerland has stricter permitting laws than the States and very low gun crime. Yemen’s in a decade-long civil war so I doubt meaningful data can be extracted from that locale. Though it’s possible the Switzerland model is the answer, it still doesn’t answer every question. Swiss citizens report as being some of the happiest people in the world - starkly contrasting the US.

The United States ranks third highest in the world with citizens with depression - behind China, and India, respectively. There’s a hypothesis bandied about that psychotropic drug usage could be linked to these horrendous acts. One non-profit claims that, over the last three decades, 38 school-shooting or stabbing-related events were committed by persons who were under the influence of these types of drugs. The organization is sure to stipulate that these such cases are only the ones where the toxicology reports have been made public.

A study was published in 2019, however, that found no positive correlation between the usage of psychotropic drugs and school shooters. There doesn’t appear to be much information regarding the toxicology of mass shooters, and appropriate studies available. So, take that with a grain of salt.

The CDC’s recent study on behavioral trends in adolescents doesn’t bode well on the mental health front - but we’ve talked about this before. Young girls and boys are reporting that they’re more depressed than ever.

We’re a nation in crisis. And let me tell you the truth - because I doubt many others will - we live in a mentally ill, identity-obsessed, power-consumed society that fetishizes guns. If you’re ignorant of the last part, take a gander at Nashville’s Rep. Andy Ogles’ recent Christmas card photo - or throw a dart at any GOP candidate’s ad from the last midterms.

I realize this is only a difficult debate if you believe in the legitimacy and necessity of the 2nd amendment - which I do. But I’m not a gun owner nor do I have prospects to be - which makes my stance all the more tenuous. I have many people in my life who own guns, but I have a general lack of understanding of why anyone has certain predilections for certain armaments. Americans have more guns than literally anywhere else on earth, we have more firearms than people. A buyback like the one they did in Australia in the nineties would be an utter failure, and a ban on the sale of firearms wouldn’t be enough to stop their transfer.

Red flag laws seem like they’d work but they’re consistently not enforced. The Club Q shooter in Colorado had done enough to trip those wires but the authorities didn’t take action. The FBI knew of the danger the Parkland shooter presented but did nothing. Recently, the Department of Justice reached a settlement with the parents of the victims of the Florida shooting, but the details of the settlement have not been made public. So, should we be relying on bureaucratic incompetence to keep our children away from harm?

Citizens should at least be able to arm themselves with the same equipment as their local law enforcement, and at this point, I’m not sure the cap ever goes back on that bottle.

Now, President Biden is pushing for a return to the assault weapons ban of the 90s. The success of the original ban was debatable - at best. Crime did not go down. Mass shootings with semi-automatic weapons were suppressed, but that decrease was largely offset by the use of other weaponry with larger magazines. Whether or not a new ban is passed is irrelevant; our elected representatives aren’t interested in fixing the problem.

Democrats held a majority in the House and the Senate for the last two years, and not once did they bring a bill banning ‘assault weapons’ to the floor. The NRA pours millions of dollars into the coffers of right-leaning representatives every election cycle, so it’s difficult to tell how much of their opposition is based on principle, or financial incentives.

There’s now a push to put armed guards at every school in the nation, and while I hesitate at the idea of schools increasingly resembling prisons, it’s imperative that we do so. Does it fix the problem? No. Thankfully, the Nashville policemen who killed the shooter were heroes and acted appropriately. But we easily could have had another Uvalde on our hands. Armed guards don’t necessarily guarantee the safety of our children, but it’s a good start.

What doesn’t change, however, is the horrific reality - and deluded fantasy - that 28-year-old woman was living. As a society, as a community of individuals interested in the welfare and prosperity of each other, we have to be able to address the link between transgender ideology and mental health disorders. Trans issues aside, there’s a growing trend in our nation of celebrating mental illness instead of treating it.

Legacy media do not care either. Outlets like The New York Times and Reuters were too busy handwringing over the killer’s pronouns to call the event a hate crime. Literally, a day after the attack, NBC News shifted the focus to identity politics instead of the victims by posting an article about how ‘fear pervades’ the trans community in Nashville after the event. Hope everyone else was already done grieving.

If the media spent the same amount of time offering condolences to white males every time one of them was a mass shooter, it’s all they’d be doing. We can’t selectively care about mass casualties depending on the intersectionality of the perpetrator. Also, we should refrain from labeling people with such base characteristics. Every person in the world that isn’t a mass murderer has more in common with each other than the Covenant assailant.

I’ve held that I don’t think Donald Trump was legally responsible for the events of January 6th, but that he should feel morally responsible for what transpired. Trump’s claims of a stolen election continued unabated while his supporters grew more irate. What followed was a natural reaction from a people who’d been convinced their democracy was being stolen right before their eyes.

The supposed ‘Trans Day of Vengeance’ is a demonstration of escalation. Every time an activist refers to the ‘trans genocide’ in America, this is what could happen. Our president declared today, March 31st, a Transgender Day of Visibility, suggesting trans people in America face an ‘epidemic of violence’. This comes from the president that refuses to acknowledge that Monday’s events were targeted attacks against Christians. Church shootings - and attacks on synagogues - are increasingly frequent, but I’d be willing to bet he wouldn’t describe those acts as an ‘epidemic of violence’.

I have no idea what events, pressures, or media led to the terror that woman, that trans man, chose to afflict - Nashville PD does plan to publish her manifesto in the coming days - but I do know that people respond violently to threats of violence.

I wish I could offer a cogent argument for a policy that would put events like these to an end. Maybe someone smarter can. But what I hope to elucidate is the types of conversations we should be having with one another. If we don’t hear some semblance of these topics debated, then they simply don’t care enough. I’m sure I’ve left plenty out, and I know I must have my blindspots, but I hope you can point them out for me.

Statistically, the risks of our children getting killed at school are incredibly low. I read that the CDC calculated recently that the odds were one in two million. The odds of winning the lottery are greater than that. And if I knew that buying a ticket at those odds would result in my child’s death, I wouldn’t be playing.

According to essentially the rest of the world, we’re doing something incredibly wrong - and something that’s entirely avoidable.

My wife and I have our little girl to raise, and a niece whom we adore that’s starting school very soon. My best friends are having children; it’s nothing short of a miracle watching the birth of the next generation. Their safety and future are dependent upon the decisions we make today.

As of yet, I have no proposal of what legal policy we should pursue immediately. I’m deeply saddened by the loss my fellow Tennesseans are forced to endure, and for now, it’s about all I can comprehend. This is what failure feels like.

We’ve failed the children and adults who lost their lives on March 27th, and we’ve even failed the young woman who planned an unspeakable act of violence for the last act of her life. But I’m not without hope. Every day is an opportunity to conjoin with our fellow Americans with love and compassion in an effort to find a solution. And in remembrance of those who don’t have the gift of tomorrow, we should treat it as such.

May their memories be a blessing.

With love, and to a better next week.

~FDA