Maybe this time will be different.
It feels different, doesn’t it? In Florida, hundreds of teenagers whose classmates were shot dead last week have finally disrupted our pathetic and ineffectual national ritual following a mass shooting.
Fueled by anger and grief, these students have bravely hurled themselves into our stilted debate over gun violence and flipped the whole script. For a moment, anyway.
Their ascendance has been heartening. But it has also been heartbreaking. Because already, the script these gunfire-forged activists set out to rewrite already feels familiar; the details are a little different, maybe, but the plot is crushingly the same.
At a news conference in Roxbury, Senator Ed Markey called it the beginning of a “children’s crusade.’’ But on Tuesday, a bus full of students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland hadn’t even made it to Tallahassee when Florida lawmakers announced they would not be taking up the assault weapons ban that the survivors were planning to rally behind.
These kids took the bullets. Now they have to take the BS, too? How much, exactly, should this country load on the shoulders of its children?
For high school students thrust onto the national stage in the most horrific way imaginable, the first taste of adult indifference was an early lesson in what their country will ask of them: Not just passion, but persistence. Not just eloquence, but savvy. Not just experience, but authority.
It’s an unreasonable burden to saddle a child with. Seventeen students and staff lost their lives, and now the world demands that those who weren’t killed give their lives to the cause, too? But how else will they capture the conscience of a constituency — the gun lobby and its beneficiaries — that has shown time and time again that it does not have a conscience to be captured? After 20 children were shot to death at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school, or 58 at a Las Vegas concert, or 49 in an Orlando nightclub, these people did approximately nothing to stop the next shooting.
How do you shame someone who has proven to be shameless? And if nothing has changed so far, why would it now?
The sad truth is that the National Rifle Association’s grip on our Congress is as tight as it has ever been, and the deep-pocketed gun fetishists at the NRA guard the script closely. If this time is different, the NRA doesn’t seem to know it yet.
After the Parkland shooting, the NRA went notably but predictably silent, perhaps aware that their brand of strident pro-gun rhetoric was likely to backfire. On Tuesday, though, the NRA lurched back to life on Twitter, sharing a good-guy-with-a-gun tale from New Mexico, in which an armed passerby shot a man who had opened fire on his estranged wife. (Whether common-sense laws that confiscate guns from spousal abusers would have prevented the whole thing was conspicuously unexamined.)
Conservative commentators have already begun to push back at the teenagers, mocking them even as they began to attend their classmates’ funerals. Trolls and liars are spinning up conspiracies that allege these students are paid actors. Detractors call the kids coached, and question their motives — as if the sheer terror of that day and the deaths of their friends were somehow insufficient standing to discuss what might have prevented the worst day of their young lives.
The first concession the students have extracted so far — presidential support for a ban on bump stocks, the device used not in Parkland but in Las Vegas — reeked of pandering even as it would make for good and important policy.
After Las Vegas, in which a gunman — I prefer not to use their names unless I must — opened fire with rifles equipped to shoot like automatic weapons, the bump stock ban was supposed to be a gimme. Massachusetts quickly banned the devices, and even the NRA initially expressed support for making them off limits. Somehow, even that simple and obvious change never happened. And now we’re back to bump stocks?
It’s as if the gun lobby drew a get out of jail free card and stashed it away for later. When the next unconscionable nightmare came to life, the president unfurled a bump stock ban that should have happened four months ago.
After the Globe last week gave its front page over to the dispiriting truth that we can predict with near certainty what the next massacre will look like, I spent a day fielding interview requests from European news outlets. They were uniformly bewildered by our apparent willingness to tolerate, again and again, the most devastatingly violent calamities imaginable.
“Will anything ever change?’’ each host asked in some form or fashion.
It’s tempting to say no. But “ever’’ is a long time. The surest hope these teenagers have is not swaying the sentiments of those who should have long ago been swayed — it’s outlasting them.
When today’s NRA puppets are long since retired, Congress will be rich with people who remember mass shooter drills and panic-stricken videos and farewell text messages between students hidden in closets and powerless parents at home.
They deserve a better world than the one they will inherit when their school years are behind them.
But the hard truth is increasingly, heartbreakingly clear: They’ll have to build that world for themselves.
Nestor Ramos can be reached at nestor.ramos@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @NestorARamos.
