Littwin: After another school shooting, let’s face the facts. This is who we are.

I don’t expect this latest school shooting in Madison, Wisconsin, to make much difference, except to those personally traumatized by it, to those who live in the affected community and to those of us who just can’t accept what amounts to our nation’s chronic indifference to chronic gun violence.

Most people, being human, were certainly saddened to hear of the school shooting, and yet indifference, even more sadly, is the constant sum of our reaction to children lying dead in their schools.

“I think we can all agree that enough is enough,” Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes said Monday in a news briefing on the shooting.

But, in truth, we don’t all agree. If we all agreed, enough would be enough. But there is not enough in America. There aren’t enough guns. There aren’t enough gun-related deaths, including homicides and suicides. There aren’t enough mass shootings. There aren’t enough school shootings.

It doesn’t even seem to matter — not enough, anyway — that gun violence is the primary cause of death for children under the age of 18.

This level of gun violence is, as you know, unique among what some call America’s peer nations. If you’ve asked yourself why that is the case, you can watch again as the latest shooting plays out in its tragic absurdity.

Now, just in time for the holidays, the Madison shooting was, according to a Washington Post tracker, the 34th time this year that guns have been fired on school property during school hours and the 434th such shooting since Columbine.

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Other trackers put the numbers even higher, depending on what criteria they use.  A CNN analysis puts this year’s number at 83, including 27 on college campuses.

Since the start of the year, 13 people have been killed in school shootings, including the two at Abundant Life Christian School. The six people injured there — two of them critically — are among the nearly 50 who have been shot and survived, so far, a school shooting in 2024.

Five school shooters have died this year, three by suicide.

The cold, hard numbers get worse. More than 31,000 K-12 students experienced a gun shooting at their schools this year. Yes, more than 31,000 kids experienced the trauma.

No one has counted the number of family members, the number of neighbors, but we know, according to the Washington Post, that 390,000 K-12 students have experienced a shooting at their schools since Columbine. How many do you think still live with that trauma?

Of course, school shootings are just a subset of mass shootings, which come in at 484 so far this year. The Gun Violence Archive considers it a mass shooting when four or more are killed or injured. And mass shootings are, of course, a subset of the tens of thousands of deaths annually related to gun violence.

What have we done?

Why don’t we care enough to do something about it?

History tells us this shooting may shift public opinion, which, according to the polls, has clearly moved toward more gun safety laws, but to little avail. The issue never seems quite important enough for voters to insist that Congress pass tougher laws.

And it won’t shift opinion, or votes, in Congress or policy from the coming Trump administration. We get thoughts-and-prayers blather instead. 

Credit Joe Biden for continuing to try to keep the issue — and also so many kids — alive. He failed. Just as Barack Obama failed before him. When Congress didn’t care enough about Sandy Hook to take action, we had to know the game was up.

We have decided this is who we are. We are a country that elects a felon as president and pretends it’s normal, just as we pretend that mental health is the real issue with gun violence, and not the limitless proliferation of guns and the easy access that even teenagers have to those guns. 

Instead, some of your more zealous pro-gunners want teachers armed and somehow don’t see a problem with teachers and shooters exchanging gunfire in a room of, say, 7 year olds. A normal reaction would be, at minimum, to pass tougher laws on gun storage — home being the place most teenage school shooters get their guns. 

A few parents, as we’ve seen, have been charged along with their children after a mass murder. I understand the impulse, but it’s really just another way to deflect the real issue — guns and more guns and easy access to even more guns.

And, where by the way, is the additional federal funding needed for mental health care we keep hearing about? Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy plan to cut the annual budget by $2 trillion. That’s an impossible number of course, but I’m guessing mental health care funding wouldn’t survive a cut a hundredth of that.

Look, we can’t even bring ourselves to reinstate a national ban on assault-style weapons. Congress has been opposed for years. Even in Colorado, where we have made much progress since Columbine in passing laws to address gun violence, we don’t seem able to ban assault-style weapons, despite an overwhelming majority of Democrats in both houses of the legislature. 

The reason Colorado hasn’t banned assault-style weapons is because Jared Polis, who voted for such a ban as a congressman, thinks state-by-state bans are futile, and that only a national ban can work. As a governor, though, Polis knows full well that the states are where much of the political and policy action begins in this country.

This latest shooting is somewhat different from some others — it was in a Christian private school and the 15-year-old shooter was female — but still much the same. If anything, the fact that the shooter was female may mean that the contagion is even more wide-ranging than we feared. Fewer than 5% of mass shooters have been female.

And as for Christian schools, teaching presumably Christian values and looking to the Bible for education, there is a question about whether to believe your children are safer there. The last two school shootings have come at Christian schools. 

I know a lot of people were shocked — who wouldn’t be? — when Chief Barnes told us that a second-grader had called in the shooting to 911. It seemed like maybe a small breaking point. On Tuesday, though, Barnes said he had gotten bad information, and that the caller was actually a second-grade teacher.

I hope that doesn’t make it easier to accept. My late wife was a kindergarten and first-grade teacher. My sister was a third-grade teacher. My partner was a kindergarten teacher. My daughter teaches in law school.

For me, this is a family affair. Maybe that’s one reason I can’t — and I won’t — let it go.

Because what do you think comes next? Well, you know what comes next.

We wait for yet another disturbed person with access to a gun to open fire in a school or in a grocery store or in a theater or in a house of worship or at a Las Vegas music concert.

After the news breaks, we watch for a bit — especially if the number of dead is particularly high and/or the police failed to subdue the shooter quickly enough — and tell ourselves how awful it is.

And then, soon enough, we just shut our eyes. And keep them shut until it all inevitably happens again.

Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.

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