In America, School Shootings are as ‘Natural’ as the Weather. We Can't Live Like This.
People cannot prevent natural occurrences, and can only react and respond to their inevitable arrival. Gun violence and terror have always been a "natural" part of American life.
On Wednesday, September 4 at around 10 a.m., 14-year-old Colt Gray brandished an AR-15 style rifle and opened fire on a classroom of his fellow students at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia.
Two 14-year-old students—Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo--and two teachers—Richard Aspinwall and Christina Irimie—died in the shooting and nine others were injured. Gray was apprehended at the scene of the crime and has been charged with four counts of felony murder.
I first learned about this shooting through a news update on my phone, but when it flashed across my screen I hardly paid any attention to it. Wednesday’s school shooting was at least the 45th school shooting this year. It was also the deadliest shooting of the year. This shooting is a tragedy but these types of tragedies have become the American norm for the past 30 years, so when they occur we are no longer shocked.
In 1999, I was in high school during the Columbine school shooting that started this dystopian trajectory and killed 15 people and wounded 24. In 2012, the Sandy Hook shooting occurred during my first job in journalism and I still remember my co-workers crying in the newsroom. Journalists can be very cynical people, but the Sandy Hook shooting and the killing of 20 children between the ages of 6 and 7 broke the fortitude of even the toughest, most grizzled newsroom veterans. In 2017, I got fired from a job because my coverage of the Route 91 Harvest music festival shooting that killed 60 people and wounded at least 413 was allegedly too biased against a pro-gun perspective.
Much of my adult life has been shaped by the normalization and increased frequency of mass shootings and as a result, I hardly flinch or adjust my day when I learn that another one has occurred. This too, is a tragedy.
School shootings have become almost like the weather in the United States. It is as if we live in a country that is prone to earthquakes or flooding, and we adapt our lives around these inevitable natural disasters. We build our houses on stilts so that they are above the flood line, or make our houses easy to rebuild so that we can quickly re-erect our homes after an earthquake has destroyed them.
Yet school shootings are not natural disasters. They are easily preventable man-made tragedies, but our society chooses to act as though they are natural disasters because we have been forced to believe that protecting and defending the Second Amendment is also the natural thing for an American to do. In America, banning or regulating guns seems as likely as banning or regulating the rain.
When a society or an individual proclaims that something is “natural,” they have chosen to strip themselves of some of their agency. A “natural” event is not preventable, it is inevitable. This perspective means that our actions will focus on responding to the tragedy, but not preventing it.
This is how the United States has responded to gun violence and mass shootings for the past 30 years. We have made terrorism feel like an inevitable, natural occurrence. Terrorism has become banal, natural, and inevitable; and all we can do is react to it. Active shooter drills, metal detectors in schools, transparent backpacks, armed law enforcement personnel at schools, and the fear that your child might get murdered in their school are some of the ways that we have responded to the inevitable, natural disaster of mass shootings in America.
This has been our dystopian norm for three decades, and the more “natural” or banal we perceive these recurring tragedies to be, the more dangerous our society will become.
What we experience in this country is not natural, even if we proclaim to be. We must ask ourselves about how the United States turned unnatural violence and terrorism into a “natural” event. To help answer this question, we must analyze an obscure Georgia Supreme Court decision from before the Civil War.
Nunn v. State of Georgia
On Wednesday afternoon, I had a conversation with my mother about how my almost 3-year-old son was adapting to his new school, but by the end of the conversation, we had started to talk about the school shooting in Georgia.
I grew up in suburban Atlanta and my parents still live there, so this shooting hit more close to home for my mother. She, like most Americans, hoped that our society could figure out how to prevent these tragedies and as our conversation continued, I ended up telling her about Nunn v. State of Georgia from 1846 and how it helps explain why America allows for this madness to continue.
In 1837, the state of Georgia passed a law banning the sale and carry of certain types of weapons including knives and pistols. As a result of this law, Hawkins H. Nunn, a white man, was charged and convicted of carrying a pistol in violation of this law. After his conviction, Nunn sued the state of Georgia claiming that his charge and conviction violated his Second Amendment rights.
In 1846, in Nunn v. State, the Georgia Supreme Court sided with Nunn and also ruled that the state legislature could prohibit the concealed carry of weapons, but it could not prohibit the open carry of weapons. Since the 2000s, this obscure decision has been cited by conservative Supreme Court justices in various decisions such as District of Columbia v. Heller in 2008 as a legal justification to both prevent states and municipalities from banning weapons and to profess the benefit of open carry laws.
In 2015, a man named Jim Cooley walked into Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta airport carrying a fully loaded AR-15 with 100 rounds of ammunition. On this day, he did not open fire at the airport. He was merely dropping off his daughter and felt that he needed to bring his AR-15 with him. Under a recent Georgia law that continues the precedent of Nunn v. State, Georgia law enforcement were unable to arrest Cooley or confiscate his gun because he was adhering to open carry laws. Cooley claims that he was carrying his weapon for “safety.” No one else in the airport felt safer due to Cooley’s armed presence.
In May of 2023, the Jackson County Sheriff’s department interviewed Colin Gray, 54, and his son Colt about online posts threatening a school shooting, but neither were arrested and the investigators did not have enough evidence or probable cause “to take any additional law enforcement action.” In December of 2023, it is believed that Colin Gray bought his son an AR-style weapon for Christmas, and nine months later Colt Gray committed a mass shooting at his high school. Colin Gray has been charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second degree murder, and eight counts of cruelty to children.
The dangers of Nunn v. State should be obvious to all of us because it normalizes and encourages Americans to possess deadly weapons, but the most significant aspect of this decision may be the norms of the dystopian, slave-owning state of Georgia in the 1830s and 1840s that influenced this decision.
In 1840, 40 percent of Georgia’s population were enslaved. Four out of 10 people in Georgia were enslaved and the state’s enslaved population grew every year. By 1860, 44 percent of the population were enslaved.
Additionally, white Georgians at this time were also terrorizing and inflicting violence upon the indigenous Cherokee people and trying to force them off of their land. The Trail of Tears that forcefully displaced more than 60,000 indigenous people and relocated many of them to Oklahoma started in 1831 and did not end until 1850.
Due to the presence of indigenous people and the prevalence of slavery in Georgia, the white population had to constantly oppress almost half of the population. Terrorism and oppression were the norms of this society. They were considered to be normal and natural, and terrorism helped control what white Georgians would define as a safe society. “Peace” and “safety” were maintained by white Americans being able to carry weapons, but not Black Americans. The Second Amendment did not extend to the enslaved and the “well regulated Militia” of that Amendment existed in the South primarily as a means to organize white Americans in militias to suppress slave rebellions and displace indigenous peoples, and not to combat the British.
However, since most white Georgians carried weapons, duels and white-on-white violence also became the norm, and the Georgia state legislature attempted to curb this white-on-white violence by banning some of the weapons that white Georgians were using to kill each other. This attempted solution proved to be untenable because Georgians like Nunn still needed to carry weapons so that they could oppress and terrorize indigenous people and enslaved Georgians who were collectively about 50 percent of the population.
The Georgia Supreme Court’s decision in Nunn v. State attempts to preserve the Second Amendment—that allowed white Georgians to terrorize, oppress, and control the enslaved and indigenous populations—but also prevent white Georgians from killing each other. Normalizing open carry was their solution because if white Georgians can see each other’s weapons they will be less likely to attack each other.
The logic of the Nunn v. State decision derives from a dystopian, hellscape that few Americans today can even imagine and most Americans would never want to return to, yet by using this logic to shape our laws today we are incrementally recreating this dystopian norm. Georgia has encouraged white Georgians to possess and openly display their firearms for nearly 200 years, and the Supreme Court has embraced this stance, so it should not shock any of us when a white father in Georgia buys his son a deadly weapon for Christmas, and his son then expresses his Second Amendment right by terrorizing and killing other Americans.
The normalization of the violence and terror of the pro-slavery South has morphed into the normalization of mass shootings and school shootings in the 2000s. Since this nation’s inception violence and terror have been as natural and inevitable as the weather. Today’s crisis of gun violence is not a recent problem. It is a bedrock of American life, and thus far our society has been very reluctant to adequately confront and understand this problem.
Our society turns violence and terror into banal actions by both proclaiming that the violence is natural, and erasing or minimizing the violence from the retelling of our history. This is the banalization of terror and evil.
Writing About Gun Violence in America
Writing a story about a school shooting needs to be meaningful. You need to help ensure that the lives of the victims including those killed, wounded, or traumatized are remembered. When people are so close to losing their lives via meaningless, senseless violence, we must write stories that inject more meaning into the world.
Yet the most meaningful thing that a story about a school shooting could do is help to prevent future school shootings. After Columbine and then after Sandy Hook, most Americans believed that meaningful gun control laws would get passed and similar massacres would no longer occur. But now it is much harder to believe that our stories or activism will have that impact.
The meaning that we would like for our work to have has been largely stripped away by the United States’ desire to turn gun violence into a “natural” occurrence. When this unnatural existence results in the random murdering of American children, our society proclaims that it cannot solve this natural occurrence despite the desire of most Americans to do so. In America, gun violence has become as natural as the weather, and we can write stories about the weather, but we cannot change the weather.
If we want to end gun violence in this nation, we need to have an honest conversation about the profoundly unnatural way of life that has been created here. America has spent far too long defending the unnatural division and terror that has shaped this nation, and we suffer the deadly consequences every day. I hope that one day our nation will be strong enough to honestly look at this society, and work together to reconstruct it into a place that neither normalizes nor feels defenseless against indiscriminate mass killings.