I was waiting for it, and, sadly, the president did not disappoint. There it was: “This is not who we are.”
It is a sentence, or a variant of it, that he has used before (as have other presidents before him) and one he turned to again in an address to the nation on Sunday, a day after the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump in Butler, Pa.
“An assassination attempt is contrary to everything we stand for as a nation,” Mr. Biden said. “Everything. It’s not who we are as a nation. It’s not America, and we cannot allow this to happen.”
“This is not who we are” is something many of us say in the sorrowful aftermath of the political or civic outrages that cross the nation’s path from time to time. We often hear it right after the latest school or supermarket or church shooting that momentarily shocks before fading into oblivion.
“This is not who we are” is, to my ear, getting to sound too much like the equally trite “our thoughts and prayers are with them,” intoned by politicians and other civic leaders in the wake of the many mass shooting events that plague the United States.
My fellow Americans, I have some bad news. This is who we are.
We are a society and a political culture that, whatever rhetorical shock we are able to muster from time to time, has normalized violence in a way that few other contemporary societies have.
Violence in America has roots that predate the founding of the republic, demonstrated in the near-liquidation of the Indigenous inhabitants of this hemisphere and the kidnapping, transport, torture and chattel enslavement of the inhabitants of another hemisphere. Those original sins of violence have begotten multiple others—among them, of course, a civil war that claimed the lives of as many as 800,000.
In the decades that followed that conflagration, violence remained a consistent part of American life, whether in suppressing civil rights or union organizing or in our peculiar institution of mob violence and lynching—even in an effort to disrupt constitutional order. Other nations have significant histories of violence to grapple with, but many have been able to move on and work toward more peaceable contemporary realities.
Presidents, presidential candidates and civic leaders who challenge the status quo have long been among the targets of political extremists, the psychologically unsound and the who-knows-what-made-them-do-its. In my lifetime, Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, two Kennedy brothers, George Wallace, Ronald Reagan, Gabrielle Giffords, Steve Scalise and now Donald Trump have been killed or injured in assassination attempts.
But why “this is not who we are” has come to sound especially hollow has been in our consistently cowardly response to the gun violence that has been normalized as an acceptable aspect of American life. Can we really say, after collectively experiencing the special horror of children murdered time and time again in elementary and high schools across the country and across decades, that “this is not who we are”?
Policy decisions in the aftermath of those “mass shooting events,” a phrase coined in the U.S.A., have only made it poignantly clear that this is indeed who we are and who we must—somehow—want to be. In fact as U.S. mass-shooting counters click higher, many states and municipalities across the country have only made it easier for people to buy, carry and conceal-carry guns and rifles of all sorts. Surges in firearm sales have followed each shooting in the unfounded fear among gun owners that “this time” U.S. lawmakers will finally do something meaningful and permanent about gun violence.
They have not—again and again—and the rest of us have come to treat daily shootings and frequent gun massacres as background noise.
When AR-15s are fired at noncombatants in peacetime in the United States, gun absolutists regretfully refer to the Constitution, blame video games and spiritual dissolution and deplore inadequate mental health services—a crisis that indeed warrants addressing. Sadly, it is one that rarely receives anything more than lip service from politicians often directly collaborating with the National Rifle Association.
Some of the lowlights from a public health advisory on gun violence issued in June by U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy tell us a little bit about who we really are as a nation. Since 2020, firearm-related injury has been “the leading cause of death for U.S. children and adolescents, surpassing motor vehicle crashes, cancer, and drug overdose and poisoning.” And in 2022, nearly 50,000 people died from firearm-related injuries, including suicides, homicides and unintentional deaths. That is more than 8,000 above the lives lost in 2019 and more than 16,000 above firearm fatalities in 2010.
After each act of political violence or senseless mass shooting event, we have had the opportunity to ask what kind of country we want to be. In each instance so far, we have remained the kind of country where troubled young men have ready access to military-grade weapons like the AR-15 that was used in Butler, Pa., to shoot the former president, wound two others and murder a father of two.
This is who we are, but it does not have to be. We can begin by assessing the truth of our past and our present with clarity and courage.
Maybe we should deploy “this is not who we are” not as a statement of fact but as a mantra, a prayer for who we hope to be. In that case, count me in. “This is not who we are” will be my prayer through gritted teeth and tears.
