On Gun Violence
By Jane-Claire Quigley
A couple days ago, a headline caught my eye: Student, 16, arrested on suspicion of mass shooting, bomb plot at BHS. The “BHS” in this headline is Berkeley High School, which is where I went to high school in the early 2000s.
My initial reaction to the headline was shock—I have a very personal connection to this place that was apparently almost the site of unbearable violence. But even before that thought was fully formed, I checked myself: Why was I shocked? Why would anyone be shocked? About any mass shooting happening? Anywhere in the U.S.?
Last week, a single man with a single gun killed 19 children—none older than eleven years—and two teachers, and injured 18 others, including his own grandmother. This was barely a week after a mass shooting at a Taiwanese Church in Southern California, which itself was just a day after a mass shooting in a grocery store in a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York. The day before yesterday, at least four people died in a shooting at a hospital in Tulsa. About a month before all these, a man shot at least ten people in a subway car pulling into a station a mile away from the Quarter Horse office in Brooklyn.
If there’s anything the last however many years have shown us, it’s that we can’t assume we’re safe anywhere. I understand that to some this sounds like hysterical exaggeration—but if people can be shot to death while at church, if children can be shot in their third grade classrooms, there is nowhere this can’t happen.
To state the obvious: It doesn’t have to be this way. We don’t have to be afraid when we run errands like grocery shopping. We don’t have to worry about back doors being unlocked at our children’s schools. I don’t have to be surprised that I’d be naive enough to be surprised by the possibility of a shooting at my former high school, a place where I felt just about every possible emotion except fear for my life.
What we do have to do is demand change. We have to scream and fight and spit and do everything we can not to slip into complacency. We have to force politicians—those whose job it is to represent us, those whom we elected to protect us—to pass substantive gun control legislation. We have to hold up a mirror to our leaders, to show them that their inaction is tantamount to guilt in and of itself.
To a certain degree, writing this feels a bit like screaming into the void. Trauma surgeon Amy Goldberg said that by doing nothing after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary a decade ago, America lost its “teachable moment” in the conversation around gun violence. If dozens of children being gunned down doesn’t catalyze desperately needed change, why would another 19, ten years later?
At Quarter Horse, we have conversations nearly every day about the exhausting fight against slipping into a lazy nihilism. And what can we do? As a company, we’re advising our clients to express their outrage at the gun violence epidemic in this country. We’re recommending they donate to gun control advocacy groups, particularly Black-led groups like the Community Justice Action Fund, which work in the communities most affected by gun violence.
As American women, we’re marching, we’re voting, we’re donating to anti-gun groups. We’re also looking after each other, holding space for each other. And we’re not letting each other get sucked into the gravitational pull of apathy. We’re screaming and fighting and spitting and doing everything we can. We hope you will, too.
