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More Kids Are Dead

Those four words are the cost of our uniquely American “freedom.”

By Charles P. Pierce     February 15, 2018

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There was another unfortunate exercise of Second Amendment freedoms in an American high school on Wednesday. Seventeen students were killed. The shooter is in custody. This time the scene was Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. From CNN:

Nicole Baltzer, 18, said she was in trigonometry class about 10 minutes before the end of the school day when the fire alarm went off. As students evacuated, she heard six gunshots and everyone started running back inside the school, Baltzer told CNN’s Sara Ganim. “I heard so many gunshots, at least like six. They were very close,” Baltzer said. A police officer told her to close her eyes as she walked past a classroom with broken glass, telling her “there’s nothing good to see in there,” she said.

In a school.

“We have been liberated. God bless, America,” Aidan tweeted after being evacuated from the building. “Love each other. You may never know when it may be the last day you meet someone.”

In a fcking school.

AP

By now we know that the shooter was a troubled young man named Nikolas Cruz, who was expelled from the same school he shot up on Wednesday. From The Boston Globe via AP:

Cruz, 19, had been expelled from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School for ‘‘disciplinary reasons,’’ Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel said, but he insisted he didn’t know the specifics. Math teacher Jim Gard told the Miami Herald that before Wednesday’s fatal shooting of 17 people, Cruz may have been identified as a potential threat – Gard believes the school had sent out an email warning teachers that Cruz shouldn’t be allowed on campus with a backpack. “There were problems with him last year threatening students, and I guess he was asked to leave campus,’’ Gard told the paper.

Unhappy there, Nikolas Cruz asked to move in with a friend’s family in northwest Broward. The family agreed, and Cruz moved in around Thanksgiving. According to the family’s lawyer, who did not identify them, they knew that Cruz owned the AR-15 but made him keep it locked up in a cabinet. He did have the key, however. Jim Lewis said the family is devastated and didn’t see this coming. They are cooperating with authorities, he said.

Good god. This guy was so freaking dangerous he was on the FBI’s goddamn radar. (The countdown has begun to the moment when the president* uses this fact to take another shot at the FBI for his own problems.) There is almost no way the Army or the Marines—or anybody’s army or marines, except, possibly, ISIL—would have handed an AR-15 to anybody with Cruz’s background. But he was able to own it as long as he locked it up at night in a cabinet to which he had the damn key. And it was sitting there, in the cabinet, to which he had the key, while he was posting threats on social media, bragging about killing animals, and shooting stuff with a pellet gun. His AR-15 was right there, locked in the cabinet, to which Nikolas had a key, until it wasn’t anymore.

                                                Shutterstock

Until he opened up and killed 17 people in the school from which he’d been expelled for being dangerously violent, Nikolas Cruz had broken no laws. That’s because this was Florida, and in Florida: a) you don’t need a permit to buy a gun or to register the weapon once you do; b) you don’t need a permit to carry a concealed rifle or shotgun, just a handgun, and it’s hard to believe the NRA let that one slip by; c) you can buy as many guns as you want; d) there are no regulations on military-style weapons or the amount of ammunition you can buy for them, and e) if you want to sell guns, you don’t need a license. The state does require a three-day waiting period, which clearly was effective in this case.

And, in case you were feeling relieved that you don’t live in an armed asylum like Florida, don’t get comfortable. Right now, in the Congress, there is pending something called the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act. This would allow people from armed asylums like Florida to carry concealed weapons without penalty, and without notifying local authorities. In December, two months after a well-armed lunatic named Stephen Paddock shot 58 people to death in Las Vegas, this dog’s breakfast of a bill passed the House of Representatives, in which you cannot carry a gun, concealed or otherwise. It may not pass the Senate. It’s probably unconstitutional as hell. But it got 231 votes in the House. There are 231 members of Congress who thought this was a good idea, even in the wake of mass murder in Nevada.

AP

Of course, I had to look up Stephen Paddock’s name because I’d forgotten it—just as, I suspect, I will have forgotten Nikolas Cruz’s name the next time someone exercises his Second Amendment freedoms in a school, because that’s just the way things are in this country. The entire argument from the National Rifle Association and the members of its terrorist cult can be boiled down to a contention that massacres like the one in Las Vegas and the one in Florida are simply the price one pays for constitutional liberties. This, of course, implies that the Founders, some of whom owned slaves, were also psychopaths.

Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, took to the floor of the Senate almost immediately to excoriate the Congress for being accessories before and after the fact. As CNN reported, Murphy, of course, represents the state in which the Sandy Hook massacre was supposed to be a game changer on this issue. It was, and the game changed for the worse. On Wednesday, Murphy told the Senate.:

“This epidemic of mass slaughter, this scourge of school shooting after school shooting, it only happens here not because of coincidence, not because of bad luck, but as a consequence of our inaction. We are responsible for a level of mass atrocity that happens in this country with zero parallel anywhere else.”

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In December, after Steven Paddock shot up the concert in Las Vegas, Murphy said this:

“This must stop. It is positively infuriating that my colleagues in Congress are so afraid of the gun industry that they pretend there aren’t public policy responses to this epidemic. There are, and the thoughts and prayers of politicians are cruelly hollow if they are paired with continued legislative indifference. It’s time for Congress to get off its ass and do something.”

A month before that, when Devin Kelley—Remember his name? I didn’t—killed 26 people at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas. Murphy said:

“As my colleagues go to sleep tonight, they need to think about whether the political support of the gun industry is worth the blood that flows endlessly onto the floors of American churches, elementary schools, movie theaters, and city streets. Ask yourself – how can you claim that you respect human life while choosing fealty to weapons-makers over support for measures favored by the vast majority of your constituents.

This was the 18th such unfortunate exercise of Second Amendment freedoms in an American school this year. It was the eighth one in which people were killed. It is over five years since Adam Lanza—I remembered his name—slaughtered toddlers in Newtown, which was going to change everything. And it did, too. It demonstrated that, to our government, mass slaughter is just part of the price we pay for being free. It is now the second week of February and nobody is going to do a thing.

This post has been updated to correctly reflect the number of victims.

RELATED STORY

Why Mass Shootings Keep Happening 

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Yahoo Sports

Anthony Rizzo heads home to mourn, heal following Parkland Shooting

Tim Brown, Yahoo Sports       February 15, 2018 

Cubs Anthony Rizzo On School Shooting: “Something Has to Change”

MESA, Ariz. – Maybe it gets better when you’re running the cones. Maybe if you turn up Dire Straits and Jimi Hendrix and pick up one foot and put it down and pick up the other, maybe then your head can slow down and your heart can fill with oxygen again. Maybe then it can be just another day, for just a little while, and those dark clouds can be just clouds and won’t feel quite so heavy, like they’re lying on your chest.

Man, you wake up and it’s so early, still dark outside, and the world is waiting. You get up and think about some coffee and, oh yeah, check your phone and, that’s right, Rizz went back to Florida.

And then you remember why. Those kids. All those people. His people.

Could there possibly have been another day like the others? Could it have happened again?

“There’s a lot of bad people out there,” Kris Bryant says. “I don’t know how to change it.”

So you stand mid-morning on a terrace out back, where Chicago Cubs are spread across the yard. They’re running cones. They’re playing catch. You clasp your hands behind you and open your shoulders a little and take a long breath, and you stare at this piece of life happening in spite of itself. You stare as if it’s the first time you’ve ever seen it. And if you’re like everyone else you think, “This is how we survive this stuff. We go back to work. We put one foot in front of the other. We cry and hope there’s an answer and pray for the fallen. We pray for peace for them. We scream and shout and hope somebody hears.”

You run the cones.

“It’s just hard for me,” Bryant says, “because I just want to see good people. That’s something that personally I strive to do every day, is just to be a good person. And it’s not that hard to do. I just see too much of that in the world today. … But there is a way and it starts with the actions of each human being.”

Chicago Cubs’ Anthony Rizzo takes a practice swing during the eighth inning of a baseball game against the Arizona Diamondbacks Friday, Aug 11, 2017, in Phoenix. The Cubs defeated the Diamondbacks 8-3. (AP)

On Wednesday night, after a day of driving from Las Vegas, Bryant texted his friend and teammate, Anthony Rizzo. Rizzo had been at camp since Monday and had worked out every day since.

What’s the plan tomorrow? Bryant messaged.

His phone buzzed.

I’m actually going home.

Rizzo grew up in Parkland, Florida. He attended Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, class of ’07. His parents and brother live in town. He lives in a neighboring town. Every winter he fills Pine Trails Park for an event that funds pediatric cancer research. This year it raised almost $1 million. He just sprung for new lights for the baseball and softball fields at the high school. Those are his people, all of them. And now there are 17 fewer of them, and the rest will fight not to be broken forever, and Rizzo couldn’t fix any of that but he could go be among them, mourn with them. Because they’re good people. So is he. They need each other.

Gone are sisters and brothers, fathers, teachers and coaches and students and friends, and who knows when it will be safe to smile again, to laugh again, to be normal again. To breathe again.

“It’s his community,” Bryant says. “He’s right there with them. … As sad as it is to say, I’ve been through it.”

Not five months ago, 58 people died at a music festival in Las Vegas, Bryant’s hometown. One man. Automatic weaponry. Another day like the others.

“Parkland and Coral Springs please stay strong!” Rizzo tweeted in the aftermath of Wednesday’s massacre. “This is out of control and our country is in desperate need for change. I hope in this darkest of times back home this brings everyone together and we can find love. You’re all in my prayers.”

You spend all that time hoping to help kids who have cancer, just like when you had cancer, hoping they can live longer and better, hoping they can be kids today and grownups tomorrow, buying hours and days and years for them if you can. Because you love life so much. Because you believe in the good of it. So they will love and believe, too. And then when you’re not looking, when you couldn’t possibly have been looking, this thing happens, this horrific thing. Like someone out there hates life as much as you value it. And the people like him may not be winning, but they’re damn well making a game of it, close enough, and how is that even right? How is it even fair?

When Rizzo told them he had to go, the Cubs told him to go. To stay for as long as he needed. To be sure to ask for help. They’d be there.

“These moments in our culture,” manager Joe Maddon said, “have got to stop. Nobody has the answers, but we have to figure it out somehow. … It’s just horrible. Horrible.

“You just imagine your own kids. Or your family. Anybody that you possibly know, being involved in that. It’s getting way too familiar. … Words. What are the proper words right now? I don’t even know what the proper words are.”

Maybe it’s the guns. It’s probably all the guns.

“I don’t know enough,” he said. “Except that it just doesn’t make sense that an automatic rifle has to be in anybody’s hands. I don’t understand that.”

The sun sets and it’s dark outside again, and now you can’t get the faces out of your head, or the names. Or the noise. Your friend could probably put a lot of those names with those faces, a different kind of agony, and that’s probably why he left. Because of that. To be with the people who maybe won’t ever be the same. To wear that himself, too, maybe.

“It’s so sad,” Bryant says. “I can’t imagine.”

And it occurs to you how exhausted you are, how your soul just can’t bear another hit, that it’s so tired of being mad and helpless and sad, and you’re running out of cones.