Reflections/Jonathan Gramling
Make the Nightmare Stop
One of the most impactful plays that I saw in high school was “Rhinoceros,” a post-World War II play by the French playwright Eugene Ionesco. It was part of the movement called Theater of the Absurd and on its face, it was absurd. One by one, the people in a small town turn into rhinoceroses. While the play was absurd, it was also very deep as it served as a commentary on how Nazism spread amongst we-meaning, everyday people. One by one, it changed people into unfeeling animals.
And I can’t help but think of this play in terms of how gun violence seems to be soaring in the United States as more and more people, in desperation or delusion, turn to gun violence, often times destroying the lives of innocent people before they turn their gun on themselves. According to CNN, American is on pace to set another dubious record in terms of the number of mass shootings. As of this writing — it’s only January 26th — there have already been 40 mass shootings in the United States.
It seems that these mass shootings are happening so rapidly that they are just a mental and emotional blur. No sooner than I was getting my mind around the Monterrey Park, California shooting in which 12 were murdered than another shooting happened two days later in Half Moon Bay, California, which left 7 dead.
If this wasn’t horrible enough, when I Googled mass killings for January, I found that 12 were injured in Baton Rouge, LA, 4 in Robinsonville, MS, 8 in Shreveport, LA, and 2 dead and 3 injured in Chicago, IL in between the two California murders. And since the Half Moon Bay murders, 1 died and 3 injured in Oakland, CA and 2 died and 1 was injured in Rock Springs, CA since the other California murders. I hate to see who died by gun violence when I read the news this morning.
I can’t help but feel that this insanity is spreading like the rhinoceroses in Ionesco’s play. How can you explain a sixth grader bringing a loaded gun to school and shooting his teacher? I realize the child has mental health issues, but still. How did he get the gun and how did he learn that it is okay to shoot someone if you have a disagreement with them.
And I am having a hard time getting my head around the California murders. A man in his 60s comes into a dance studio in Monterrey Park that he frequented for decades while the Lunar New Year celebration is going on in this predominantly Asian American community. And he opens fire and kills 11 people before escaping and later on shooting himself as the police closed in.
And then two days later, another man in his 60s comes to a mushroom farm he worked on in Half Moon Bay and opens fire killing 4 people and wounding 1 and then proceeded to another mushroom farm he had worked at and killed 3 people.
What is so hard to understand is that, to the best of my knowledge, the victims and the shooters in these incidents were Asian American. I can’t remember even one mass shooting involving an Asian American perpetrator and Asian American victims and here we have 3 in three days. Surely people are turning into the rhinoceroses of mass violence. Where did this “permission” to kill multiple people due to real or imagined grievances or because someone looks different than you or someone looked at you funny come from?
As long as we are incapable of enacting meaningful gun control and as more and more people become estranged from a society or social group that expresses moral values, the slaughter will continue. I can’t help but feel that the more adamant anti-any gun control want us to go back to the “good old days” when gun violence was a way of life in the Old West. Or maybe it is a right-wing paranoia of people of color becoming the majority and so military-style guns are the only way to even the equation.
But the lack of gun control and heart-felt condemnation of the mass shootings will only lead more of us to become the rhinoceroses of mass violence. God help us all.