Two years ago, after 18-year-old Salvador Ramos walked into Robb Elementary School with his brand new AR-15 and killed 19 students and two teachers, surveillance video was made available to the public.
The Austin American-Statesman published the footage on its website, showing the ease with which the gunman entered the school and shot his way into a classroom. Showing the delay by local police to stop him. Showing a child walk out of a restroom, see a man with a gun and run back into the restroom. Showing the nightmare that followed.
The newspaper’s editors attached a disclaimer to the start of the video.
“The sound of children screaming has been removed.”
It felt, at the time, less like a disclaimer and more like a national motto.
Robb Elementary was that year’s 27th school shooting. It took place 10 days after a white supremacist walked into a Tops grocery store in Buffalo, New York, and killed 10 people. In between those two incidents, two people were killed and seven were injured during a mass shooting outside a Chicago McDonald’s.
A violent stretch, but hardly unusual.
Gun violence became the leading cause of death among American children and teenagers in 2020 and has remained there, stubbornly, ever since.
Just days prior to the Robb Elementary video’s release, a gunman opened fire at a July 4 parade in Highland Park, killing seven people and wounding dozens.
The sound of children screaming has been removed. From the conscience of gun manufacturers, from the hearts of gun lobbyists, from the priorities of too many lawmakers who could, if they wanted to, do something about this madness.
What if that all changed now?
What if the attempt on former President Donald Trump’s life shifted the tide?
What if an AR-15-toting gunman evading dozens of local law enforcement agents and heavily armed Secret Service agents and managing to shoot a presidential candidate and kill a retired firefighter gives lie, once and for all, to the notion that good guys with guns are enough to stop bad guys with guns?
What if all those pithy memes about wishing this nation cared as much about third-graders as it does about presidential ears turned into something more than pithy memes?
What if both sides decide, finally, that enough is enough? That, at the very least, we need a national and moral reckoning on the legality and availability of AR-15s?
What if that rally changed everything?
I know. Wishful thinking. Hopeless naivety. Political ignorance. I can be accused of them all. I have been. On the issue of guns, I don’t care.
I don’t want to focus on why change won’t happen. I want to focus on why it needs to.
Because America averages one mass shooting per day.
Because presidential candidates should be able to stand at a podium and rally their base and share their ideas and pump their fists and not be shot.
Because Americans should be able to attend those rallies and not be shot.
Because Americans should be able to attend July 4 parades and Super Bowl parades and outdoor concerts and indoor movies and Sunday church services and Saturday synagogue services and holiday block parties and evening yoga classes, for the love of God, and not be shot.
Because children should be able to attend school and not be shot.
Because parents shouldn’t have to keep sharing photos of their sweet, dead children as an offering and a warning and a clarion call for change — in front of Congress, in news stories, on Facebook, in mailings, during press conferences, to anyone who will watch, to anyone who will listen.
Because the sound of children screaming shouldn’t be edited out of a video. It should be eliminated from our reality.
Because we are capable of caring about third-graders and presidential candidates at the same time. We are, in fact, called to. “All flourishing is mutual,” Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in “Braiding Sweetgrass.”
In December 2022, ABC News released a timeline of the Robb Elementary school shooting.
“11:33 a.m.: After entering the building, Ramos walks approximately 20 to 30 feet before turning right down a corridor,” it reads. “After walking an additional 20 feet, Ramos enters a classroom door to his left. The suspect shoots into classrooms 111 and 112 from the hallway. He then enters, exits and re-enters rooms 111 and 112. The suspect fired more than 100 rounds at students and teachers.”
A child’s classroom number should not be his fate. A child’s classroom number should be a beginning. A promise. A way to know which teacher you’ll have and which school supplies to purchase and which friends you’ll sit by. That it spells death in this country is obscene.
We can do better than this. Our children deserve better than this. We all do.
If not now, then when?
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