Judging from Post editor Sally Buzbee’s introduction to the project, as well as from my own reporting, the paper talked to dozens of survivors and family members and weighed the enormous range of their opinions about this issue to craft the feature. It was so much better than I was expecting that it initially blinded me to the way it was bad. But bad in a kind of routine way: The media, as well as certain kinds of activists, believe we need to be presented with graphic, grisly evidence to grasp what are simply facts. This grisly evidence, they posit, will change hearts and minds.
It will not. Upwards of three-quarters of American voters support almost every commonsense gun law. And we know why political leaders haven’t heeded their call: the gun lobby, and its disgusting political servants. But the Post tried, anyway, with its multimedia “Terror on Repeat” project. I won’t impugn these journalists’ motives. I’ll assume they are good. I’ll just tell you what I saw, and why I would like to spare people seeing the same thing. Especially survivors.
No, the party that wants to get rid of guns says it wants to do those things, but doesn’t actually follow through. In states and cities with Democratic veto-proof super-majorities, most of the things that Dems say they want still doesn’t happen. Take, for instance, affordable housing. We can all agree that good housing that was cheap enough to afford for anyone working full-time–including at minimum wage–is a good thing, right? So we shouldn’t have any problem changing the zoning in an already residential area to allow high-density affordable housing, right? And yet, as soon as the cards are down, Dems turn into NIMBY. Sure, we want to house homeless people, but not near me. Reform criminal justice, but also arrest these black people trying to have a barbecue in a public park. Decriminalize drugs, but arrest the homeless junkies near my Whole Foods.
And I will point out that the states that have Deocratic super-majorities–California, New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, etc.–still don’t adequately fund all the shit that would actually solve the underlying problems that lead to violence. (I know for a fact that Illinois has moved money away from public schools to charter and magnet schools, while the public schools in Chicago are literally falling apart.)