The Highland Park shooting showed 'it can happen anywhere'

It happened again. This time it was at a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, a suburb of Chicago. A young man with a high-powered rifle opened fire on the crowd; another seven people are dead and more than three dozen are injured.

In reading local coverage of the shooting, I was struck by the level of disbelief among residents that such a thing could happen in their community. “It’s just a terrible thing,” Don Johnson, 76, told The Chicago Sun-Times. “I never would’ve thought this would’ve happened in downtown Highland Park.”

More telling is this detail from the newspaper’s report: “Johnson said his daughter lives in Chicago with her son and that he’s been urging them to move to Highland Park, telling her recently, ‘It’s safe.’ Now, he said, it’s clear that ‘it can happen anywhere.’”

It was in a supposedly safe suburb this weekend that a crowd of innocents was fired upon.

A world of truth was packed into those few sentences. Nearby Chicago, conservatives’ favorite example of “black on black violence," had its own spate of shootings over the weekend. All too often the national conversation about gun violence focuses on the shootings that mar urban communities. But it was in a supposedly safe suburb this weekend that a crowd of innocents was fired upon.

There are a number of reasons why major cities remain the focal point when discussing shootings, some more valid than others, including biases based in race and class, the very size and population density that cities possess, and journalists’ habit of ignoring what happens outside of major metropolitan areas. But the focus on urban crime does a disservice to reporting on the experiences of rural Americans. Last month The Wall Street Journal, citing Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, reported a surge in homicide rates in rural areas since 2020. The factors behind this increase are believed to be many and varied, and they don’t fall neatly into the usual categories that conservatives blame for urban crime, like progressive prosecutors or gang violence.

The Associated Press likewise reported in 2018 that of the then-10 deadliest school shootings, all but one occurred in “small-town and suburban” America. That year there were 24 school shootings, according to Education Week. There have already been 27 in 2022, the majority of them outside of urban centers.

Highland Park was the 309th mass shooting in the United States since the year began, according to the Gun Violence Archive. (Nine more have been added to the data set as of Tuesday afternoon.) It was also the 15th mass murder of the year the group has tracked. Most people would be hard-pressed to pinpoint many of the cities on a map, places such as Mountain View, Arkansas; Stanwood, Michigan; and Corsicana, Texas. The problem of gun violence clearly does not stop at city limits.

I’ve written disparagingly before about how calls to boost police funding are all too often a policy choice based on little but bad vibes about crime rates. I stand by my conclusion that "hardening" areas and hiring more police ignores prevention methods in favor of responding to violence. It’s hard to deny, though, that people are scared right now. The feeling that nowhere is safe is pervasive and contagious. The time between mass shootings feels like it’s collapsing. There’s no corner of the country that feels untouched.

The time between mass shootings feels like it’s collapsing.

And there’s little comfort in the fact that because the Highland Park suspect’s guns were purchased legally, police were able to track him down quickly. Nor is there much of a guarantee that the new gun control bill President Joe Biden signed into law last month would have done much to prevent this latest attack. That law’s passage has taken the pressure off of Republicans to save lives for now. They now can insist that we wait and see how ineffective the compromise law is before rushing to pass measures that would have kept a rifle out of the Highland Park suspect’s hands at all.

It’s a scary world out there. There’s no guarantee that you won’t be met with a bullet while running an errand or celebrating the freedom you supposedly possess. And it’s one made all the scarier by the continued access to guns. The ease with which Americans can still grab up guns all but ensures that next Fourth of July, many Americans will be watching the cascade of fireworks but straining their ears for the sound of gunshots.