A good president with a gun can’t save Birmingham | Will Bunch Newsletter

The official start of autumn came on Sunday morning, at 8:44 a.m. to be exact. I don’t think anybody in Philadelphia even noticed on a day when the Eagles and the Phillies were finding new and innovative ways to torment their fans in both victory and defeat, when Donald Trump was out spewing more nonsense on the campaign trail, and it feels like the fall has already been here for months.

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It’s happened far more times than I care to remember. Waking up super early on Sunday morning to write my weekend column, I flip on the TV and there’s some dark and fuzzy video of multiple police cars, flashing blue and red outside some urban nightclub or restaurant, as the anchors solemnly report that while we were sleeping, there was yet another mass shooting in America.

But this Sunday morning, the news cut a little differently.

The rapid machine-gun-like fire had lit up a crowded street in Birmingham, Ala., the city where I lived and worked as a young journalist in the early 1980s. CNN zoomed in with a map and my heart sank because I instantly knew the exact area where four people were murdered and another 17 were injured, some seriously.

The shooter, or possibly more than one shooter, fired more than 100 rounds at a packed sidewalk in the Birmingham entertainment district known as Five Points South, a few blocks from the University of Alabama-Birmingham campus. My fading 20-something memories of the place are fond ones — meeting journalist pals for a beer on the Deep South’s brutally humid summer nights, nodding along with the ever-present Alabama or Auburn fans, even drinking my first-ever Long Island iced tea (and, thankfully, one of my last) from a Mason jar.

Some 40 years later, it took just a few seconds for a shooter with a legal semi-automatic and, police believe, a “switch” that turned it into a machine gun, to shatter any happy recollections of the place, and the lives of the people there just out for a fun Saturday night.

“All of a sudden it was just gunshots, gunshots, gunshots,” 24-year-old Gabriel Eslami, who was on the line for the Hush hookah bar, told CNN. “I started running for my life” — but he was struck by a bullet in the leg and fell to the ground. When he looked up, the scene felt like a “horror movie ... There are bodies laid out all over the sidewalk, gun smoke in the air. There are shoes. People ran out of their shoes trying to escape. I saw people hiding behind cars, laying under cars.”

It may have sounded like the climax of a gory Hollywood movie, but in 2024 news cycle, the Birmingham mass shooting was something of a blip. NPR did lead its Monday afternoon newscast with the story, but the New York Times buried its print article on page A14. In an age of school shootings and presidential assassination attempts, bursts of gunfire on crowded city streets are getting shorter and shorter shrift. This was, after all, the third quadruple murder in Birmingham this year, including one outside a public library. Didn’t hear about that? Me neither.

And yet like any mass shooting in the only developed nation that routinely has them, the Birmingham incident raised some serious questions about policy. Why has the gun-loving red state of Alabama not banned these switches, given their potential for mass carnage? Why has Birmingham seen its murder rate increase in 2024, even as crime is mostly falling nationally? Are we truly helpless to get high-powered assault weapons — subject to an imperfect but highly effective federal ban from 1994-2004 — off the streets of America’s cities?

If a mass shooting happens in the dead of a Saturday night and America has forgotten about it by the time Sunday’s 1 p.m. NFL games kick off, did it make a sound?

One place where the bullets didn’t seem to have much impact was in the presidential race, where guns have been an issue, but not always in the ways one might expect. To be sure, the Democrats are the party that believes government can do something to reduce gun violence. I was there in Chicago’s United Center in August when the loved ones of gunfire victims gave poignant pleas to Democrats, and the party has vowed to again to ban assault rifles and enact common-sense gun laws — in the highly unlikely event it can get around a GOP Senate filibuster. Republican nominee Donald Trump brags that when he was president, “nothing happened” to stop mass killings.

The Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, didn’t release a statement about the Birmingham shooting. Maybe there’s just too many mass shootings in America, or maybe it would be different if Alabama were a swing state. But also, Harris’ recent political messaging about guns has been less about curbing them and more about how she and her running mate Tim Walz possess them.

Harris again confirmed last week to Oprah Winfrey that she owns a gun for her personal protection from her prosecutor days, telling the TV icon that “if somebody’s breaking into my house, they’re getting shot.” First, if someone’s breaking into the vice president’s home, then the Secret Service is in worse shape than we thought. Second, multiple studies have shown that people with guns in their home are more likely to get shot than those who do not, so I’m not sure why Harris encourages that choice. Her campaign then released an online spot that kicked off with highlighting her gun ownership before saying all the right things, including support for an assault-weapons ban.

It’s Politics 101, right? Harris didn’t have to run in any primaries and woo left-wing Democrats as she did for a time in 2019, but now she hopes her affirmation of gun ownership will win over middle-of-the-road undecideds in the general election. Except where is the sense of outrage from the Democratic ticket and the media that I felt when I saw that somebody used an assault rifle to carry out an act of terrorism in Birmingham? Because that outrage is necessary to convince the public that we need some radical changes if people are going to feel safe again going out on a Saturday night, or putting our kids on a school bus.

A good president with a gun wouldn’t have stopped a mass killing in Birmingham. A good president with a moral crusade and a plan just might stop the next one.

Question: How can we get facts across to ‘low information’ voters’? — AmyMusician (@MmeScience) via X/Twitter

Answer: It’s the biggest conundrum of the 2024 campaign. Amy, in her note, spoke of meeting a young voter who was undecided and convinced that the very real Project 2025 is a hoax. And yet polls have shown that voters who consume the least traditional news are the main reason that Donald Trump remains in a dead heat with Kamala Harris. The thing about “low-information voters” is that most of them do get information about things from somewhere — social media sites like the wildly popular TikTok, or in their daily lives from the supermarket to the nightclub, or from their friends and family. And most low-information voters do care about something, whether it’s gun violence or finding an affordable apartment. Candidates must get more creative about reaching these folks with the real information about the stakes in this election.

It’s not much of surprise that most of you who responded to last week’s question — about Donald Trump’s claim that two recent assassination attempts were the result of heated rhetoric against him — agree with me that the No. 1 person in America to blame for turning up the heat is Trump himself, who has encouraged violence since his first days as a candidate in 2015. “When he ran for office, he said he could ‘kill someone on 5th Avenue’ and still get elected,” wrote Jane Schwartz. “He also made it okay to be mean!” Added Mitch Kelly: “I think the people who present the most danger to him are those who at first were true believers but later came to understand that they were duped. People don’t take kindly to being lied to and taken advantage of.”

📮This week’s question: Last week, Israel stunned its adversaries in Hezbollah with a James Bond-style attack that remotely exploded thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies. The plot reportedly killed 37 people — mostly fighters but also civilians, including two children. Do you see the attack as a cunning blow against terrorism, or as a war crime with alarming future consequences? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer. Please put “Pager attack” in the subject line.

The headline the other day came out of nowhere and sounded like Apocalypse Mad-Libs. The Three Mile Island nuclear power reactor just outside Harrisburg — infamous site of the worst nuclear accident in American history — is reopening. Not to light our homes, but because Microsoft wants all the power to run its artificial intelligence, or AI. I mean, it was bad enough that robots are scheming to take away my job before I’m ready to retire. Now they want me to risk radiation poisoning here in Pennsylvania so Bill Gates’ stock portfolio gets an upward bump?

But for all the hype about the rapid changes in AI that were heralded by the arrival of language-friendly programs like ChatGPT, I’d seen little publicity about the massive amount of electricity needed to fuel all of the artificial intelligence products that Silicon Valley is foisting upon us. Let’s not forget — even though we seem to forget constantly — that climate change caused by burning fossil fuels for our power needs is threatening planet Earth with unrelenting heat waves, increased floods, stronger hurricanes, and rising sea levels. The plan had been to accelerate the growth of green energy to meet both our current power needs and environmentally friendly new ones like electric vehicles. Big Tech’s urgent demands to run supercharged AI computers are screwing that all up.

Bloomberg News reported last week that U.S. energy companies are planning new power plants at the fastest rate in years, and that some 60% of these new plants will be powered by burning natural gas, a fossil fuel. Not all of that is because of AI — there’s also those new electric vehicles, and well as the manufacturing boom under Bidenonmics — but this is awful news for fighting climate change. These plants typically stay online for 40 years or so, which makes a mockery of proposals to go carbon-free by mid-century. Even worse, these new plants will prove a boon to the U.S. fracking industry which, as Kate Aronoff reports in the New Republic, has been wildly unsuccessfully in curbing emissions of methane, which is even more harmful to the climate than carbon dioxide.

There’s a lot not to like about artificial intelligence. A report earlier this year from Goldman Sachs found that AI could replace as many as 300 million jobs worldwide by the end of the decade, with losses concentrated in fields like (sigh) writing. And that’s before the robots become sentient, rise up and kill us all. At least we won’t be alive to see how Silicon Valley’s billionaires overheated the planet for their artificial intelligence — because they lack the real kind.

Bad takes? I’ve had more than my share of them, but check out this doozy from 12 years ago today. “I’ve long thought before 2012 that it was time to cross Pennsylvania off the list of battleground states,” I wrote. “Remember, the last time that a GOP presidential candidate carried the state was in 1988, when Buddy Ryan was in his heyday as coach of the Eagles and W. Wilson Goode was just starting his second term as mayor.” Except Donald Trump won the state four years later. What I got right in this piece was that Philly’s educated suburbs would get more and more Democratic. What I missed was how a populist like Trump could rouse such large numbers of rural voters. Anyway, read what I wrote on Sept. 24, 2012: “What’s wrong with Pennsylvania?”

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