OPINION

OPINION | PHILIP MARTIN: Old news


By now, it's old news to most of us.

We've been through a couple of cycles--the arguments have rinsed and repeated. It's just to do with mental health and culture. Gov. Greg Abbott says "it could've been worse." The gunman is dead. A new outrage awaits us. It's time to move on.

It's what we do. We bury our dead and forget them.

That's harsh. We remember a few.

There's a girl I think about sometimes; she was about 10 years old. She and her slightly older sister got into it one evening when there was nobody else at home. We never knew what it was about, but you could imagine that little sister annoyed big sister one too many times. Big sister swung at her with scissors and plunged them deep into little sister's neck.

Her eyes were open. She looked startled at being dead.

I think about her maybe once a week.

Ever see a 12-year-old girl handcuffed and haughty, staring at you like somehow you did this to her? There was no remorse in the moment, but you know how children are. They get all puffed up and feeling sorry for themselves and lash out.

I'm sure she broke down later, I sure the grief washed over her, but in that moment, with the blue lights flashing and Sissy lying there bled out on the floor beneath the Warner Sallman print of blue-eyed Jesus and beside the orange-glowing space heater, there was nothing you could say to convince her that the whole world wasn't lined up against her.

She was cussing me with those eyes.

I wonder what happened to her, how she got processed by a world for which she never volunteered. She'd be in her 50s now, so there's a better than even chance she's alive. Or maybe that's wishful thinking, given the circumstances of her birth and upbringing. I'm not an actuary.

But if she is, I hope she found a species of peace, even though we're not supposed to wish anything but hellfire and desolation on murderers; we're not supposed to speak their names or acknowledge their trembling humanity. We're not supposed to imagine that they are anything like us.

Because to do so somehow disrespects the memory of their victims, for whom we offer thoughts and prayers.

It was scissors, not a gun.

And it was with bare hands and field stones that a two-time Student of the Year from a little agricultural community murdered a developmentally disabled girl, with whom he attended some special education classes during a high school graduation party with some 30 seniors present.

There was beer and pizza and a "Faces of Death" VHS cassette playing on the VCR. They left the party for a little while, and around 1:30 a.m. he came back with his shirt covered with blood and popped another beer.

He said a farmer, plowing his fields after midnight, had chased him into a briar patch. They bought that, though some of the girls shamed him into washing his hands.

Someone found her body. He confessed and avoided the death penalty. Eventually he got parole. He lives quietly in the same little town where, 35 years ago, he raped and murdered a little girl. I wonder how it is for him, whether he feels eyes on him at the dry cleaner. Some people still remember, but human beings can abide anything.

We can abide Sandy Hook; we can abide Uvalde. Those hot feelings we have in the immediate aftermath fade. People come up with rationalizations. Guns don't kill people, lonely broken and unloved people kill people. Guns just make it possible to think people dead, to kill at a remove, with slight impediment between thought and expression.

Guns make it really easy to kill by accident.

But if you squint at a line of text in an old document that's been amended many times but is still considered inviolable gospel by those who want it to be inviolable gospel, you can make believe it says that gun ownership is a God-granted right. You can also point out that the line seems to be more about the necessity of a "well-regulated militia" than about the sacredness of Bushmaster XM15s and Staccato C2s.

I think most people who enjoy guns are all right, but that almost every one of them knows someone they think enjoys their guns a little too much.

But I don't want to talk about guns, because no matter what you say there are people who are going to try to make up your argument for you. I got this email last week from some guy who refused to identify himself who claimed my column about the old gun store clerk who turned away people whose look he didn't like was advocating for that kind of arbitrary approach.

I wasn't and nobody else thought I was, but that's what this guy wanted to believe, so he believed it. In his mind I'm the guy who thinks we ought to go with our gut when it comes to deciding who gets to have a gun and who doesn't, and there's nothing I can say to change his mind.

Which, I suppose, is what people do. Few of us really change our minds about anything. Only the weak change their minds or learn anything from experience.

And what I haven't changed my mind about is the belief that while we could do better--there are plenty of models we could follow if we wanted to make our society saner and less bloody--but we're not going to do that because some of us have found a way to monetize hate and fear, and our laws are made by people who care far more about their own wealth and power than they do about curating a good society.

They're not actively evil, but they're willing to listen to what evil has to say--and consider what evil has to offer--before rushing to judgment.

Other people just don't want to fill out forms.

After all, we shouldn't rush into anything. And we shouldn't make this political.

Because life can and will go on, and all these senseless events that no one could have ever foreseen or prevented will eventually, in three or four days' time, be driven out of the headlines by some new atrocity or a verdict in the Depp-Heard defamation trial.

After all, it's already old news.

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