It’s all too familiar. Flashing red and blue lights, crying survivors, body bags carried out by stone-faced paramedics and coroners. This time, it took place outside a Lunar New Year celebration in the predominantly Asian Los Angeles suburb of Monterey Park, with many innocents killed and wounded at a festivity meant to welcome a new cycle of possibilities, but instead became a tragic endpoint.
Each time this happens in this gun-mad country, the victims, the survivors, the weapons, the shooters and the motivations are different. Yet, as with every such shooting, two things are always true: it was an abomination that cut down the lives of those who wanted just to live in safety, and it was a choice, one we collectively made.
It is a choice to make it catastrophically simple to purchase semiautomatic long guns for personal use. It is a choice to allow civilians to waltz into a gun store and walk out with multiple magazines and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, ready to be fed into a machine whose only purpose is to maim and kill.
The specifics here don’t change the impact of those choices. Even if the gun was bought illegally, that wouldn’t be possible without the streets awash in firearms that were at some point sold legally with little oversight. Even if the gunman was acting on some personal vendetta, you can’t escalate a grievance to a mass killing without the tools to do so. Even if this was the end result of a condition that went untreated in our woefully deficient mental health system, our failure on that front wouldn’t produce a slaughter with such ease without our failure to control guns.
None of this will matter. The pro-gun factions will always have another what if. There’s never an answer except that this sort of thing is inevitable. It isn’t. It never has been. We chose this and we will just keep choosing it unless we actively change course, if we ever have the courage.
