To my readers: I tend not to write about politics, but as an educator and someone who believes all children should be safe in all ways when they are in our schools, I feel it is my duty to speak out in a way that corresponds with my area of expertise. Thank you for reading.
Almost nothing about a school shooting in the US today makes sense from a logical point of view.
It is unthinkable, unfathomable that someone would enter a school to kill children and teachers.
And it is equally unfathomable to discover that—apparently—the officers that a city hired to safeguard lives decided not to act when they knew lives were in danger.
No sense at all.
Now it may seem logical that restrictions on guns would lead to fewer school shootings. But every time a shooting happens, we add on to the senselessness by deciding not to pass such legislation.
Unthinkable.
Why can’t we do something? What is holding us back?
Is it that gun manufacturers have a chokehold on lawmakers?
Maybe. But they couldn’t do it by themselves. If one hundred percent of Americans were for gun control legislation, it would happen.
No, there has to be something underneath it all that is stronger than a lobby. Something illogical. Something that has to do more with one’s gut than one’s head.
That something is mythology.
Mythology is usually seen as those stories from long ago loved by children with silly gods and goddesses that personify the sun, the moon, and the seasons.
But every culture has its own mythology. Every culture tells stories that reinforce that culture’s core values, its world view, its ethos. What’s more, the gods are in every story ever told—they just change their names.
Whatever a culture worships, that is their gods and goddesses.
Guns are our gods.
America grew as a nation with guns. From the Minutemen who won our freedom from the British to the Navy SEALs who took out Osama Bin-Laden, guns are our pride and heritage.
American popular culture, movies, books, everything we see is saturated with guns. How many thousands of guns have we all seen on the page or the screen in our lifetime? How many thousands of guns have been the linchpin of an exciting tale?
Guns are us.
Again, when a person decides to buy and use a gun to kill children, it makes no logical sense. But from the point of view of mythology, it makes all the sense in the world. An American who has grown up with guns, been surrounded by them, worshipped at their altars, does not have to make a huge leap of faith to come to the conclusion that they can be the hero of their own story (however incongruous that sounds) by reenacting what they have seen over and over again.
Now, it is also a part of our mythology to cherish our children. There is no way to measure it, but I would wager that Americans love our children as much or more than any other group of people on the planet.
So when children are murdered on a mass scale with a firearm that is the god of our ethos, mythology should come to the rescue. Mythology should resolve the tension between our love of children and our love of guns.
That’s why, in American mythology, there is someone called “a good guy with a gun,” who is able to save the children from the mad shooter.
This how the story goes: Guns are not bad. Guns are good. It is people who are bad. And there are other people who are good, and they save us. They save the children.
But in the case of Uvalde, Texas, it seems that the good guys with the guns failed.
It was never a more gut-wrenching sight in the world to me than to see a group of men on a podium at a news conference wearing spotless white cowboy hats—the original mythological symbol of the good guy with the gun—and having to evade questions about their failures to safeguard lives.
(image found here)
Mythology failed us this time. It failed utterly. It was a heartbreaking, heart-rending failure.
I am an educator and a lover of mythology. I teach mythology to students. I value the power of good stories to transform us. Science alone, philosophy alone, cannot save the human race. We need good stories. Our very being depends on them.
But I also know that mythology alone fails us. And our mythology has failed us, over and over again, from Columbine to Virginia Tech to Sandy Hook to Uvalde. You pick the place.
So, America, look up and away from the altar of firearms. For once, look to logic. Look to common sense. Look away from the stories that falsely promise security.
It may not be that gun restrictions will prevent all school shootings in the future. You never know. But it is past time to see whether it can help.
That’s logic. Not mythology.