Confronting the Lethal Impact of Gun Violence in America
How many more Americans have to die before we admit there is a gun problem?
How many more Americans have to die before we admit there is a gun problem?

It happened again. America had another mass shooting. This time, in Winder, Georgia. The shooting which killed four, two children and two adults, leaves yet another hole in the heart of America. The suffering that comes with said hole inevitably provokes outrage and calls for change. These calls for change, namely in the form of gun control, need to be heard, both in terms of how the media responds to said shootings and how we as a society enact policy when it comes to gun regulation. More than that, however, we are faced with a much more painful reality. The reality that gun violence is and always has been a political issue.
The Political Nature of Gun Violence
The last time I made this point about gun violence was in 2022, when the horrific shooting in Uvalde took place. During that period, I was concerned and still am, that our failure to talk about gun control in the wake of shootings, which is motivated in part by a desire to respect the dead, sadly leads to a failure to act to prevent future tragedies. The article I wrote, which was titled Gun Violence is Inherently Political, focused on the important nature of public threats. In that article, I explained that:
Shootings, as consistent as they are in the United States, are a public problem. They destroy the lives of American citizens, subject the survivors to abject horrors for the rest of their lives and destroy the faith the people have in their public institutions and their own safety. Such a threat to the well-being of the American people will always be a matter of political concern.
The idea that this wouldn’t be political or a matter of public concern is not only naive but restricts the American people’s ability to prevent tragedies like this from happening in the future.
- Conor Kelly, Gun Violence is Inherently Political, 2022.
The unfortunate reality is that public problems inevitably become political ones. This reality doesn’t necessarily have to be partisan, but when it comes to systemic failures to act and when people abuse the well-intentioned desire to respect the dead, the issue becomes partisan by the very nature of a given party’s failure to act. In this case, the GOP’s opposition to substantive gun control measures puts the lives of the American people at risk.
How Many More Have to Die?
While the Federal government doesn’t keep track of school shootings in and of itself, others do. Since 1999, The Washington Post has kept a tracker of all the incidents of gun violence at schools and the amount of children who are exposed to gun violence. According to their tally, an estimated 382,000 children have been exposed to gun violence at school and there have been 419 school shootings since Columbine. That same report found that since they began counting “at least 213 children, educators and other people have been killed, and another 464 have been injured.”
These numbers are unacceptable, and the fact we continue to debate over whether or not we should talk about gun control after a shooting is reprehensible. It is one thing to want to respect the dead, it is another thing entirely to wait for a pre-approved, seemingly unattainable date for when it is appropriate to talk about enacting sensible gun legislation while the next tragedy sits right around the corner.
Our citizens are dying, our children are dying. No amount of civility politics will protect the public, and failing to call out the problem for what it is only leads to more suffering and tragedy. It is high time for the government to enact critical legislation to protect the American people. We can’t wait any longer.
Originally published at https://theprogressiveamerican.com on September 4th, 2024.