Just learning about this space made me firmer in my anti-war beliefs. I have never been to the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, DC, but in high school I studied Maya Lin’s winning design, a depression in the earth, every last name etched in shiny black stone. Memorials occupy space in the cultural imagination. A memorial is many things, including a stage. At a memorial, weeping can be a political act. They give us a place to which we can lead a march. Memorials give us space to hold memory, to make pilgrimage, and to pay our respects. And you wonder, “How much bigger is this monument going to become?” Work is being done to expand the monument.

A few employees of the Memorial are attaching the latest row of plaques. All the names are printed at the same size.įinally, you reach the present day. And the names of those police officers who died, shot while working. Ulvade.Īnd also, if you care to look up their locations, you can find the names of those who died at the end of a gun held by a police officer. And now, mixed in with the great numbers of names of those dead by suicide and homicide and accident there are the mass shootings. Flowers are left beneath loved ones’ names. All recorded, given some kind of modest context but mostly seen as part of the great whole of gun violence.Įventually you approach the present day. The tide recedes for a time, but not all the way. So many human lives, each ended by one or more shots from a firearm. Perhaps there are design elements to indicate the invention of new types of gun. There is a rise in gun deaths around the Revolutionary War, and afterwards the numbers dip-and then steadily climb. You read the engraved names of settlers, Indigenous folks, enslaved Africans-all people killed by guns. At the start, the scale of the monument is small. You start moving through the Memorial, and you find yourself following the chronology of gun violence in America. The Memorial is on a large grounds, with space to expand as long as gun violence continues. You arrive in the morning and enter through metal detectors. Imagine a trip to the National Gun Violence Memorial. We need a National Gun Violence Memorial. We need a space in which we can sustain our passion, mark our progress, and grow our power. But in the meantime we also need a new vessel for our grief, a new platform from which to communicate the incredible pain our country bears from its centuries-long scourge of gun violence. Instead, I’d like to make a different, though related, proposal. Another cry into the void, no matter how well-written or righteous, is unlikely to make the necessary change.

The representatives of the guns-everywhere crowd at a minimum can veto any legislation or regulation to make this not happen again. On this issue we’re hopelessly paralyzed, held hostage by a small minority for whom guns are central to their identities. I’m sorry this is our world.īut what can we actually do? Yet again make the same well-trodden arguments? I find myself deeply pessimistic about our nation’s politics. For every one of us who bears the psychic wound of witnessing senseless violence at massive scale. My heart breaks, for all these lives lost, these families shattered. More op-eds were penned, hands wrung, hopes and prayers offered. Then, it happened again: a young man with two assault rifles killed nineteen kids and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Ulvade, and injured seventeen others. The media cycle repeated itself, with some changes due to the shooter’s clear link to right-wing propaganda. If you’d prefer an audio version, you can listen to this essay on the Lightplay podcast:Īnd then, as I finished this essay, a young man with an assault rifle entered a Tops grocery store in Buffalo and killed ten shoppers, all of them Black. Gun control advocates pointed to the attack as yet another data point showing the need to pass laws that restrict access to guns. Police expansionists used it to push a narrative of fear and argue that we need a bigger, more empowered, more militarized police. Meanwhile, far away from the actual attack, it didn’t take long for tragedy to get transformed into the hook for hundreds of hot takes and think pieces and press releases. And it changed forever the lives of those on that subway car who experienced this cruel, pointless act. Still, the event filled millions of people with fear and sorrow and empathy. On the New York City subway, a gunman started shooting his handgun and didn’t stop until 29 people were injured. When you write about gun violence in the United States of America, there’s always a next time. It’s not unheard of to write the opening last, and unfortunately, in this case, I knew a hook would present itself in the news soon enough. Two months ago, as I worked on this essay, I wrote the middle parts and left a simple placeholder-“ ”-where this introduction would go.

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