Dear Progressive Reader,

On May 24, in Uvalde, Texas, nineteen students and two teachers were murdered by a heavily armed eighteen-year-old, who was also killed by police in the incident. This tragedy is the second most deadly shooting at an elementary or high school to date. In 2012, a twenty-year-old murdered twenty children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. In 2018, a nineteen-year-old killed seventeen and injured seventeen others at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, and in 2018, almost exactly four years before the Uvalde killings, a seventeen-year-old murdered ten and wounded ten others at Santa Fe High School, in a Texas town less than five hours from Uvalde.

At the time of the Santa Fe shootings, Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick told residents and the media that the answer was “fewer doors” at schools. His comments drew a firestorm of sarcastic retorts on social media: “Guns don’t kill people, doors do.” One Texas housing official even noted that “Texas has stricter regulations for doors than it does for guns.” The oft repeated rhetoric of “hardening the target” that follows these tragic incidents begs the question – “Why must our schools be ‘targets’?”

As Education Week reports, there have been twenty-seven school shootings so far this year, and 119 since 2018 (the last year illustrated in the chart above). In almost every incident, the killings were perpetrated by a young man between eighteen and twenty-one years old, using an easily available, legally purchased, semi-automatic weapon with a large-capacity magazine for ammunition. Many easy-to-implement, and publicly popular, regulations have been proposed—background checks, “red flag” laws, age restrictions, restrictions on large capacity magazines, restrictions on military-style assault weapons. The Federal Assault Weapons Ban, enacted in 1994, expired in 2004. During the life of the ban, mass shootings declined; since its expiration, they have risen dramatically. There are things that can be done. They must be done now.

As Mark Fiore illustrates, many of the politicians who are currently offering only “thoughts and prayers” to the families in Uvalde, are also speaking at the annual convention of the National Rifle Association this weekend in Houston, Texas (about 275 miles from Uvalde). The NRA has done more than any other single organization to promote the “gun culture” of the United States, which makes us a dramatic outlier in the entire world. Frank Smyth, author of The NRA: An Unauthorized History, reports for our website this week on the convention, noting, “the price of the tall tales they’ve told—about everything from Reconstruction to gun reform—is being paid by the murdered children and their parents along with other victims and survivors of gun violence.”

Also on our website this week, Robert Davis looks at the nation’s affordable housing shortage and what can be done about it; Christian Thorsberg writes about a new museum exhibit that centers Native people in its design and implementation; Ed Rampell reviews a new film that unravels the missing eighteen-and-one-half minutes of Watergate tape from fifty years ago; and Jeff Abbott reports on a Guatemalan judge facing death threats for pursuing justice. Plus Steph Black describes the activism opposing Oklahoma’s new extreme anti-abortion bill, and Mike Ervin asks what else the Supreme Court might go after next, following the current threat to Roe v. Wade.

Please keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.

Sincerely,

Norman Stockwell
Publisher

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