On Wednesday, while students were still being evacuated from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat of Connecticut, delivered a speech on the Senate floor. “Turn on your television right now, you’re going to see scenes of children running for their lives,” he said. “Let me note once more for my colleagues that this only happens here”—in America. He looked more angry than devastated. “It only happens here not because of coincidence, or bad luck, but as a consequence of our inaction.”
It used to be that politicians, by and large, observed an informal grace period after a massacre. Thoughts and prayers came first, followed by gestures of human sympathy, and only then—at an almost stately pace, on Sunday talk shows and eventually in hearings before congressional committees—could matters of public policy be discussed. Murphy was elected to the Senate in 2012, just a few weeks before the mass killing of children and teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in his home state. Murphy is young for a senator (forty-four years old, with broad pate and overworked eyes), and until that point he tended to give the impression of a young man on the make—“a big ball of ambition,” as he once described himself. But he recognized the moral dimensions of mass shootings—perhaps because, at Sandy Hook, he saw them in person—and since then has worked to speed up the nation’s political response to them. In 2016, three days after the massacre at the Pulse night club, in Orlando, Murphy staged a fifteen-hour filibuster to get the Senate to vote on a pair of gun-control proposals, and he ended by telling the story of a teacher’s aide in Sandy Hook who had died with her arms wrapped around the body of a six-year-old autistic boy in her charge. (He got his vote, but the Senate voted down the proposals.) Last fall, the morning after the mass shooting in Las Vegas, Murphy said it was “time for Congress to get off its ass.” On Wednesday, speaking before the shooter had even been apprehended, he did not talk about thoughts or prayers or suffering but about Congress. There was no grace period left at all.
Over the span of Murphy’s career in the Senate—the era since Sandy Hook—the politics of gun control have often been said to be intractable. But in the events this week there were some subtle, important changes. The country processed the Parkland shooting and the politics of gun control simultaneously. This was true in Washington, but it was also true at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School itself, where the students were loudly denouncing congressional inaction even while the shooter was still at large. A seventeen-year-old student reporter, David Hogg, interviewed his classmates as they hid in a closet. “If you looked around this closet and saw everyone hiding together, you would know that this shouldn’t be happening to anyone,” a female classmate, tense and eloquent, said. “No amount of money should make it easier to get accessibility to guns.” Another classmate, her tone controlled, said, “I wanted to be a junior N.R.A. member . . . but this experience has been so traumatizing to the point where I can’t fathom the idea of a gun in my house or on my body.” In an interview with CNN on Thursday morning, Hogg addressed Congress directly. “You need to act,” he said. “We’re the children. You guys are the adults.”
New Yorker writers respond to the Parkland school shooting.
If we no longer set aside a day to be shocked, that may be because a mass shooting is no longer so shocking. If we no longer allocate much time to pursue the matter of a shooter’s motivation, it is because we now know that it may seem trivial against the scale of death. A gun is an escalation machine that enables petty, ephemeral feuds to become mass murders. On Thursday morning, a twenty-year-old man named Jordan Jereb, who said he was the “captain” of a previously obscure white-supremacist group called the Republic of Florida, told reporters that the Parkland shooter, Nikolas Cruz, had once joined the group for paramilitary training. But within a few hours Jereb had said he’d made a mistake; it was another kid named Nicholas, and when the police officers who were interviewing Cruz said they had not discovered any signs of affiliation with the group. On Friday, the F.B.I. acknowledged that it had failed to investigate a tip it received last month from a person close to Cruz, who warned that he had a desire to kill and might conduct a school shooting. The question of what motivated this shooting has somewhat faded; the matter of what the government could have done to prevent it remains.
In December, 2012, as Murphy—then still a member of the House—was hurrying to the scene in Newtown, President Barack Obama spoke about the massacre from the White House. “As a country, we’ve been through this too many times,” the President said, breaking down a bit in the middle of his speech. “We’re going to have to come together to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics.” That seemed like a breakthrough, to have the President acknowledging that mass shootings were a systemic problem. But that emotional breakthrough was not followed by a legislative one. The gun-control debate seemed more intractable, not less.
But while the country’s response to these events has come to feel ritualized, the effect of all this death has accumulated. This week, in Washington, Republicans mostly offered thoughts and prayers, and yet even they seemed to know that their words didn’t match the scale of the horror or the calls for action on the ground. “Something has to change,” the Chicago Cubs first baseman Anthony Rizzo, an alumnus of Stoneman Douglas High School, said at a vigil on Thursday night. Lori Alhadeff, whose fourteen-year-old daughter was killed, was more direct. “President Trump, you say what can you do?” Alhadeff said. “You can stop these guns from getting into children’s hands.”
This is a breakthrough, too. The politics of the shootings are no longer separate from the trauma; they are part of the experience. “Lots of people lamenting ‘nothing will change’ today,” Murphy wrote on Twitter on Thursday. “That’s what people said before the Montgomery bus boycott. That’s what people said before Stonewall.” That seemed less pompous than it might have six years ago, before Sandy Hook and everything after.
