“The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.”-- Cicero
“…Names wheeled into the dim warehouse of memory./So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.” -- Billy Collins, The Names
Most Septembers, I write here about 9/11, a day where nearly 3,000 people died at the hands of foreign terrorists -- surely a day that will never be forgotten in our nation’s history. I use this month to press for four recommendations from the 9/ll Commission Report that have yet to be implemented 20+ years later. This year, I’d like to use my time to salute the courageous members of New York City’s fire and police departments who died or were injured on the job, as well as emergency medical technicians and emergency room personnel in Manhattan hospitals who cared for those who survived or who were injured while helping others that day.
Over the years, our government has slowly passed legislation that in some small way compensates them or their families for the chances they took in those days after 9/11 to locate and recover bodies in the rubble of the Twin Towers. And some amount of progress has been made in the training that is now offered to our first responders, and in the equipment they have to better protect themselves as they work. There’s a related thread that runs from 9/11 to the present in the development of investigative tools and practices to assess the severity of a threat when it’s reported – and it’s here where we are most stretched thin in resources of several kinds. There’s a shortage of monitoring tools to simply observe behavior. There’s a shortage of mental health professionals to work with troubled individuals before they decide to create a bomb or to blow themselves up. So, while we have become experts at reacting after the fact, we still have a long way to go in what I will call here public safety.
The main tool that is used to prevent threats to public safety is a metal detector that screens out persons carrying guns, knives, or assault weapons – usually the detectors are used at large sporting or entertainment events, but increasingly we have seen them deployed in schools as well, along with a security officer or two. I had not thought how the connection weaves its way over 20+ years – after 9/11 we identified situations in which threats could actualize, whether the perpetrator was radicalized with online ISIS propaganda or was a troubled youth who felt ostracized from classmates and had become a frustrated loner watching online replays of school shooting events where at least 10 people died – examples would be Columbine High School (13 victims, 1999); Virginia Tech (32 victims, 2007); Sandy Hook Elementary School (26 victims, 2012); Marjorie Stoneman Doughlas High School (17 victims, 2018); Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas (21 victims, 2022). This is just a small sample of school shootings, ones that I focused on when teaching my operational risk courses. Nearly all the after-action reports on these events talk about the need to better protect students, teachers and staff, but financial resources are limited. The shooting that took two students and two teachers in Kentucky last week could, we are told, have been much worse had the school not invested in badges for teachers and staff that had buttons imbedded that could be pushed multiple times to trigger a full-scale response from school safety personnel and law enforcement. Not all schools in that district have deployed the tool and trained their teachers and staff, but it is now being used other parts of this country. The badge tool is but one way, an expensive way, to try to make schools safer. Finding the budget for mental health counselors or threat analysis operatives seems to be beyond our reach. And would not necessarily help because you can’t buy your way out of this kind of problem.
Gun violence is our most pressing challenge, more important than many politicians would have you believe. The steps that a young person must go through to get a driver’s license might offer a model of how one studies the rules of the road, then takes both a written and actual driving test before being licensed to drive. Actual background checks with time built in before a gun is sold for the results to come back could be standardized across all gun sellers, commercial and private. A hard look at what it would take to ban assault weapons could include town halls across this country for everyone to get together to discuss the issues involved in gun control. Clearly what is in place right now is insufficient. 9/11 provided an opening for organized hatred and violence against Muslims as well as those who might resemble Muslims. Once that precedent was set and we had a president who reminded us that migrants were dangerous encroachers on our way of life, the hatred level increased as the social media foghorn amplified the message to protect oneself – that those who are not like us are dangerous. Social media also spread rumors and disinformation faster than anything we had seen in 2001.
It's not just entertainment events like Taylor Swift’s Vienna concert. We have a shooter on the roof of a building at a presidential rally. In Seattle and Kentucky both, we have people shooting at drivers on major highways. We have daily tolls of dead from drive-by shootings in nearly every city in this country.
We have vehicles being stolen and driven into the sides of buildings for smash-and-grab work. We have Jewish temples and Muslim mosques being bombed or threatened regularly. What will it take for Congress to enact more changes where the possession of firearms is concerned?
I would argue that if you are looking for a delineator in this fall’s elections, you might want to carefully inspect the policy positions of each party, up and down the ballot you’ll be voting. On the issue of gun violence, the choices could not be clearer. One path includes refocusing on a larger sense of social purpose and judgment that does not privilege the individual over everything else. It is too easy to think if we can identify all the ‘bad guys’ that the problem will be solved. Rather, it would make the fundamental problem worse.
Please consider voting with your whole heart and mind on this issue. No parent should ever wonder if they will ever see their child alive again when they drop them at school in the morning. Fear is a terrible companion when considering whether or not to buy a concert ticket or attend a church service. Our best way to remember the victims of gun violence is to understand that its impact over the years has changed the idea of sensus communis, which is connected to reflective judgment, which always requires a whole community. The root issue here is that social policy must include more than legal or mental health regulations; it must also provide a vivid sense that we are all dependent on others.