The invisible mass shootings
Scott P. Charles is the trauma outreach coordinator at Temple University Hospital She should have been safe. When I first heard that Akyra Murray, a recent graduate of West Catholic Prep High School in Philadelphia, had become the youngest victim of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, my immediate thought was, "My God, she should have been safe."
Scott P. Charles
is the trauma outreach coordinator at Temple University Hospital
She should have been safe.
When I first heard that Akyra Murray, a recent graduate of West Catholic Prep High School in Philadelphia, had become the youngest victim of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, my immediate thought was, "My God, she should have been safe."
Honor student. Basketball superstar. Odds beater. A rising college freshman from a city that had 280 homicides last year, visiting Orlando, a city that had 37. In fact, the victims who lost their lives at Pulse nightclub that night equaled the total number of homicide victims Orlando lost in 2014 and 2015 combined.
Akyra, on the other hand, came from a city that had 1,238 shooting victims in 2015. In all of last year in Philadelphia, there were only 21 days when someone wasn't wounded by gunfire. You would need 41 classrooms - like the ones in which Akyra had excelled - just to hold all the people who had been shot last year. Yet here she was, in a place they promised was the happiest on Earth, meeting the same fate as so many young Philadelphians back home.
My God, she should have been safe.
Despite the constant drumbeat of shootings that plague cities like Philadelphia, Chicago, and New Orleans, America has shown little collective interest in addressing the issue of gun violence in any meaningful way. Ironically, had Akyra died back home in Philadelphia - rather than in a mass shooting in Orlando - it's unlikely most Philadelphians would have ever learned her name. It's even less likely that her death would have done much to move the needle when it comes to America's opinion about gun control.
The present clamor surrounding gun control in general and assault weapons in particular is as ephemeral as it is predictable. The pattern is an all-too-familiar one:Some new city becomes the latest metonym for mass shootings; shock leads to calls for stricter gun control; time blunts the pain; the public moves on. And repeat.
This is not to suggest that passing commonsense gun-control measures is not an endeavor that is both noble and necessary. It is. The problem is the self-limiting nature of our selective outrage.
Americans are rarely swayed by the kind of low-profile mass shootings that occur on a near-daily basis in this country - cases where four or more people are injured in a single event. According to a recent New York Times article, there were 358 such shootings last year, which left 462 dead and 1,330 wounded. If the issue were truly one of lost lives, there would seem to be sufficient carnage to spark a national consensus about keeping guns out of the hands of those who should not have them - criminals, children, domestic abusers, the mentally ill, and terrorists, to name a few.
But herein lies the rub. We like to say that all lives matter but our attitude toward mass shooting basically reflects our attitude toward housing, our level of grief being determined by three key factors: location, location, location.
The majority of America's mass shootings do not happen on college campuses or in suburban movie theaters. They do not happen at holiday parties or in elementary schools. They mostly happen at block parties and on basketball courts, in housing projects and at family cookouts. They happen where disadvantage pervades and nothing is taken for granted. They happen in spaces where America simply cannot imagine her children. As a result, last year, when two mass shootings wounded 21 people in Philadelphia and Detroit within a couple of hours, there was no rush to enact sensible gun legislation. There were no viral hashtags or moments of silence. When mass shootings happen in those communities, we shrug. When they happen in ours, well, there goes the emotional neighborhood.
In that relatively rare occasion when a mass shooting invades America's psychological sanctuary and harms her children, she thinks, "My God, they should have been safe. We must do something." And, for a time at least, America will talk about passing gun legislation. As we witnessed Monday night, though, when the Senate voted down four gun-control measures - including one that aimed to keep individuals on the terrorist watch list from buying guns - America's vacillating indignation is no match for a gun lobby that never rests.
Time will inevitably pacify the sense of insecurity that momentarily grips our nation. Soon, America will return to a state of blissful indifference about gun violence. And eventually - as is the case for San Bernardino, Colorado Springs, Roseburg, Chattanooga, Charleston, Isla Vista, Newtown, and Aurora - Orlando will return to some semblance of its former self. Never quite the same as before but reassured, nonetheless, by the unlikelihood that this level of violence will ever visit it again.
For many of Akyra's contemporaries, however, there is often no such reprieve from the fear of gun violence. In the time since the massacre at Columbine High School, more than 4,000 Philadelphians have lost their lives to gun violence. Since 2006, someone has been shot every six hours in the city. In fact, if this year's shootings continue at their current pace, Philadelphia will likely have more gunshot victims in 2016 than the combined number of victims from every U.S. mass shooting that occurred in 2015.
An emergency room physician recently asked me, "How and when will this get fixed?" My answer? When we reach that tipping point where a significant number of people in positions of power have been personally touched by gun violence and, when speaking of their own losses, find themselves saying, "They should have been safe."