BALTIMORE — Because of its scope — 30 shot, two dead — Sunday’s horror in the Brooklyn neighborhood puts Baltimore squarely in the second category of gun violence in America: not the day-to-day carnage we’ve seen for years, but the mass casualties that have caused sudden death and searing pain in cities, suburbs and rural areas and made national, even international news.
To be sure, we have had shootings that qualify as mass shootings before, but the number of victims in Sunday’s insanity will now put Baltimore higher on the list of communities left bloodstained by these extravagant acts of violence.
The city already had a reputation as one of the most violent communities in America. But that was from the daily shootings, fatal and nonfatal, that have been occurring here for decades.
The trend in 2023 has been better — fewer shootings, fewer homicides. Still, the city has been running a fever of gun violence for a long time, so much so that when five people are shot on a Friday night, or seven on a Tuesday, we barely look in the direction of that news. We only recently started to label them “mass shootings” in media reports.
Thirty victims gives us that second grisly distinction.
These acts are horrible — for parents and siblings who lose young men and women to the gun fever, and for the rest of us, who keep hoping and praying that someday Baltimore will rise up from this swamp of violence. It’s depressing, exhausting and frightening.
I tell people who live elsewhere and who continually slam the city as a violent hellhole that they’re kidding themselves if they think there’s something unique about Baltimore when it comes to humans raising guns to kill other humans.
In March, a man from Perryville, about 44 miles from the city, asked me where I lived.
“Baltimore,” I said.
He shook his head and asked: “Can you outrun the bullets?”
This exchange took place just a couple of days after the massacre of children inside a parochial school in Tennessee.
“Sir,” I said, “it’s a violent country with a huge gun problem.”
Twenty or 30 years ago, I would not have said that. The country had gun violence. But not the mass shootings we see today. Not on this scale. Not at this frequency.
Things have changed. We’re at a different place. Baltimore has had more than 300 homicides each of the past eight years, but I no longer regard it as just a local problem; it’s part of a national trend.
Just a month ago, the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions reported that in 2021, the second year of the pandemic, guns were involved in the deaths of 48,830 people in the U.S. That’s the highest number on record, and it includes both firearm homicides and suicides.
“Our country is breaking records for all the wrong reasons,” said Ari Davis, lead author of the Hopkins report. “Record gun sales combined with increasingly permissive gun laws are making gun violence a pervasive part of life in our country, leading to a sharp increase in gun deaths.”
Guns are now the leading cause of death for children and teenagers in America. We’re way ahead of our peer countries in that category.
So, given all of that — considering that there are believed to be more than 400 million guns from sea to shining sea — a mass shooting in Brooklyn Homes in Baltimore is shocking but not surprising.
Pardon me if this seems like a feeble attempt at consolation for the civic-minded: “Yeah, Baltimore is violent, but so is the country.”
It’s not meant to be. There’s no consolation in such a fact, merely a distressing reality.
Things won’t change until we become, as a more unified nation, fed up with distressing realities.
All of us need to examine, as another Fourth of July approaches, what we, as citizens, have allowed to happen in the name of freedom. Freedom is a glittery ideal we talk about at big American moments. It’s a beautiful idea.
But where’s the freedom in the worry about getting shot at a concert or prayer service or block party?
Where’s the freedom in wondering if the guy who just flipped you the bird in traffic keeps a handgun in his car?
Where’s the freedom in young parents worrying about the threat of a mass shooting at their kids’ elementary school?
Where’s the freedom in all those people of Baltimore who worked to make the city better — people who live and work here, who create or maintain businesses, who volunteer with the nonprofits, who treat the sick, who try to educate children, who look out for neighborhoods and their neighbors — having to live with a gun fever that never seems to lift?
Where’s the freedom in constantly having your city’s promise diminished by incessant gunfire?
Generations of conservative politicians have resisted efforts to break the fever, to lead the country into a new era where there are actually fewer guns and a national agenda for unity, peace and social progress. “Home of the free, land of the brave”? Where are the brave leaders willing to forge a new path for the country?
There are many ways to measure the strength and quality of a nation, and how its grown-ups care for the young is tops. That’s why we need to aggressively address climate change, why we need to invest in education and skills training, and why we need to keep kids away from guns — holding them or facing them — and, on that count, we are failing them.
