Like many parents, I suspect, my first reaction to the news of the shootings at Umpqua Community College, in Oregon, on Thursday was to think of the families of the victims, and my second reaction was to turn away and mutter some obscenities. With the implacable grip that the gun lobby has on Congress, there is virtually no prospect of the United States following the example of nearly every other advanced country and restricting the supply of deadly firearms to civilians. Given that seemingly immutable reality, what is there left to say? Quite a lot, it turns out.
Evidently, President Obama felt the same frustration and hopelessness that many others did. But rather than resigning himself to the situation, he went down to the White House briefing room and issued one of the most powerful statements that he has delivered since taking office. We should be grateful that he did. Even if it doesn’t do much immediate good, it will be there in the record, to remind historians where the primary blame lies for this ongoing national disgrace.
The President started out by saying some words about the victims and their families, and said, “America will wrap everyone who’s grieving with our prayers and our love.” Then he said, “It’s not enough. It does not capture the heartache and grief and anger that we should feel. And it does nothing to prevent this carnage from being inflicted someplace else in America—next week, or a couple of months from now.... We are not the only country on Earth that has people with mental illnesses or want to do harm to other people. We are the only advanced country on Earth that sees these kinds of mass shootings every few months.”
Earlier this year, the President recalled, he made this point in an interview, noting that the country persists with lax gun laws despite repeated mass killings. “And later that day, there was a mass shooting at a movie theatre in Lafayette, Louisiana. That day! Somehow this has become routine. The reporting is routine. My response here at this podium ends up being routine. The conversation in the aftermath of it. We’ve become numb to this.”
Obama’s emotion—his anger—was palpable. He went on: “We talked about this after Columbine and Blacksburg, after Tucson, after Newtown, after Aurora, after Charleston. It cannot be this easy for somebody who wants to inflict harm on other people to get his or her hands on a gun. And what’s become routine, of course, is the response of those who oppose any kind of common-sense gun legislation. Right now, I can imagine the press releases being cranked out. We need more guns, they’ll argue. Fewer gun-safety laws. Does anybody really believe that?”
Whether they believe it or not, supporters of the gun lobby were already out there making this argument—on cable shows, on conservative Web sites, and on social media. Some of them argued that the shooter targeted Umpqua Community College because it was a “gun-free zone,” a claim that has been disputed. Others accused President Obama of playing politics—apparently ignorant of, or oblivious to, the fact that he had already addressed this very criticism.
“What’s also routine is that somebody, somewhere, will comment and say, ‘Obama politicized this issue,’ ” the President said. “Well, this is something we should politicize. It is relevant to our common life together, to the body politic.” He challenged news organizations to “tally up the number of Americans who’ve been killed through terrorist attacks over the last decade and the number of Americans who’ve been killed by gun violence, and post those side-by-side on your news reports.” He went on: “We spend over a trillion dollars, and pass countless laws, and devote entire agencies to preventing terrorist attacks on our soil, and rightfully so. And yet we have a Congress that explicitly blocks us from even collecting data on how we could potentially reduce gun deaths. How can that be?”
We all know the answer.
The Republican Party has long exercised a veto on any meaningful addition to the gun laws. And among its current crop of Presidential candidates, there is no sign of anybody breaking ranks. Reaction to the shooting ranged from nonexistent to predictably depressing. As far as I could see, Marco Rubio and Carly Fiorina, the third- and fourth-place candidates in the polls, didn’t say anything on Thursday about what had happened in Oregon. In a message on Twitter, Jeb Bush called the massacre a “senseless tragedy.” Donald Trump, in an interview with the Washington Post, referred to it as a “terrible tragedy.” He also said, “It sounds like another mental-health problem. So many of these people, they’re coming out of the woodwork.” Ben Carson, the former neurosurgeon, took a similar line. “Obviously, there are those who are going to be calling for gun control,” he said on “The Hugh Hewitt Show.” “Obviously, that’s not the issue. The issue is the mentality of these people.”
That is a familiar trope, of course: it’s not the guns that are the problem, it’s the shooters. There was no suggestion from anybody on the Republican side that what had happened might justify a reconsideration of gun laws, let alone a significant recasting of them. Even those G.O.P. candidates who have previously expressed support for some forms of gun control, such as Chris Christie and George Pataki, didn’t have anything to say on that subject.
The Democratic candidates, by contrast, were united in calling for action. Speaking to reporters in Massachusetts, Hillary Clinton said, “We have got to get the political will to do everything we can to keep people safe.” She suggested that it wasn’t a hopeless task: “I know there is a way to have sensible gun-control measures that help prevent violence, prevent guns from getting into the wrong hands, and save lives. And I am committed to doing everything I can to achieve that.” Martin O’Malley, the former governor of Maryland, said in a tweet, “Tweets won’t stop this. Thoughts and prayers won’t either. Only real gun reforms will stop mass shootings from occurring nearly every day.” Bernie Sanders, who has been accused by Clinton allies of shifting his positions on gun control, called for “sensible gun-control legislation which prevents guns from being used by people who should not have them.”
But Democrats aren’t entirely blameless. After experiencing a political backlash during the nineteen-nineties, when the Clinton Administration pushed through gun-control measures that included a ban on assault weapons, too many members of the Party adopted a craven approach as, during the Bush years, Republicans in Congress rolled back some of the reforms. Even President Obama, who urged for stricter gun control during his 2008 campaign, can’t entirely escape criticism. During his first term, when for two years the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, his Administration didn’t propose any actual gun-control legislation. It wasn’t until 2013, after the massacre in Newtown, that the White House made a serious effort to persuade Congress to act—one that failed in the face of implacable Republican opposition.
If you listened closely to Obama on Thursday, you would have noticed that, in his words of anger and despair, he didn’t entirely spare himself, or the rest of us, from responsibility. “This is a political choice that we make to allow this to happen every few months in America,” he said. “We collectively are answerable to those families who lose their loved ones because of our inaction.”
That is true. But it is also true, as Obama pointed out, that “this is not something I can do by myself.” To break through the politics of hopelessness, it will evidently take something more than blood—the blood of women, men, children, teachers, pastors, janitors, pensioners, first responders, anybody who happens to be in the way—being shed. “I hope and pray that I don’t have to come out again during my tenure as President to offer my condolences to families in these circumstances,” Obama said. “But based on my experience as President, I can’t guarantee that.”
