There’s a needle that often needs to be threaded while talking about gun rights after mass shootings. I normally do a fair job of it, I think, but I’ve completely botched it as well. No excuses, but I will say that it’s tricky sometimes, because even people on our own side are concerned about hurting people needlessly, and I get it. There’s no reason to do so.
But on the same token, I don’t appreciate the spin that those of us who value our gun rights and don’t want to see them infringed upon are some kind of monsters because we don’t just let it happen.
Emotional blackmail is a common tactic among the anti-gunners, and they never get made to feel bad about it. So when someone talks about how “our children are watching” as Minnesota refuses to be stupid about gun control, I get a little annoyed. Especially when the body of the op-ed isn’t much better.
The first time I drove past Annunciation after our boys’ preschool reopened, my husband made a sound I had never heard — a choke in his throat. He doesn’t cry easily, but as the weight of it settled, we stayed silent. We both took our boys that morning, their school just a few blocks away, because it felt too heavy for one of us to carry alone. There were guards at the entrance for a week. Something had shifted.
Through fall, winter and now spring, I still drive past Annunciation — past the flowers and weatherworn teddy bears. The tragedy has faded into background noise. It shouldn’t be normal. But it is.
Any gun regulation aimed at reducing harm often stalls at the threshold of rights. But what about the right to drop a child off at school without that visceral jolt of the unthinkable? To attend a concert or parade without automatically scanning for exits? In treating one right as absolute, we aren’t living freely; we’re acclimating to a background hum of danger. We’re teaching our children that their safety is negotiable.
There’s a name for what comes next — though rarely used outside war zones — cumulative trauma. It builds with each headline, keeping our nervous systems in persistent threat detection. Desensitization follows — a facade of resilience we mistake for coping. Adults tune out the violence and life goes on. What once felt unthinkable becomes ordinary.
There’s a name for everything, including stuff that doesn’t exist. There’s a name for determining people’s personalities by the bumps on their heads. It’s “Phrenology.” It’s a pseudoscience, if you can even call it that, but there’s a name for it.
What happened at Annunciation Catholic School was awful. No one is debating that in the least. But contrary to the author’s claims, it’s not normal. It made national headlines precisely because it was abnormal.
What’s normal is the media hysteria surrounding these horrific events, and the claims that these are actually everyday occurrences, when they’re not.
Sites like the Gun Violence Archive, as well as every media outlet and gun control group that cites them, simply pump up the numbers as high as they can to make people think that the odds are against them. They want people to be terrified that when they drop their child off, there’s a real risk to them not being there for pickup time.
Yet for millions of kids, the threat really isn’t there.
Most of the hundreds of “mass shootings” that get cited are gang shootings or involve some other kind of criminal group. Simply not being in an area where gangs are active usually mitigates that particular risk. The school shootings you hear about? Look at the sources sometimes, and what you’ll find is that they lump any bullet that enters school property at any point as a “school shooting,” even if it’s Summer vacation.
Those are ordinary, but they’ve been a common thing for decades. It wasn’t until anti-gunners started lumping everything in together with stuff like the Annunciation shooting that we started to get the idea that this was common.
Now, with all of that out of the way, let’s talk about the cumulative trauma tripe.
I’m a parent. I’ve got two kids, one of whom went through public school his entire life. He turned out OK despite that, but he was there. Guess how traumatized he was? He wasn’t. At all. Neither were 99 percent or more of his classmates, at least from the “trauma” of mass shootings throughout the nation. Do you know why? Because they never experienced any such thing.
Any trauma students feel from these attacks, where they weren’t actually there, is because either they wanted to be traumatized, or because their parents and the media told them to be traumatized.
True mass shootings are spectacularly rare, even in the worst years for them. They seem more common only because we hear about them on the news, but very few people, relatively speaking, have been touched by them.
Last year, I wrote about how students are more likely to be impacted by sexual misconduct at the hands of a teacher–by orders of magnitude more likely–than to be exposed to any kind of school shooting. If anything is going to create trauma, wouldn’t it be your math teacher dropping a pencil and asking you to pick it up so he could look at your butt, rather than something that happened on the other side of the country?
Most likely.
Still, this idea of using emotional blackmail to try to force us to give up our rights is tiring. It’s especially so for people like our own Ryan Petty or me, who have lost people we cared about in these shootings.
Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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