I spent most of Tuesday avoiding having to write this article. Anything I could do to keep myself from writing about a mass shooting at Michigan State University, my alma mater, I did. But time marches on and my delay did nothing to change the fact that three students are dead and several more injured on a campus that I visited for the first time in nearly a decade last August.
It’s hard to emphasize the level of disrespect it would be for lawmakers not to act.
It feels worse that there’s still no known motive for the shooter deciding to be at the school’s East Lansing campus on Monday night, no reason for him to open fire on his victims, nothing linking them before he took their lives. Its absence only highlights the common denominator in what Gov. Gretchen Whitmer called a “uniquely American problem” at a news conference Tuesday.
“We’re all too broken by an all-too familiar feeling, a place that’s supposed to be about community and togetherness shattered by bullets and bloodshed,” Whitmer declared. She had delivered a similar statement less than two years ago after a student killed four of his classmates at Oxford High School in the exurbs of Detroit. Some of the students who lived through that trauma are now students in East Lansing. “We just went through this 14 months ago,” Emma Riddle, a Michigan State freshman who graduated from Oxford High, told The New York Times. “What is happening?”
This cycle continues to play out across the country, as the compromise gun legislation Congress passed last year did not treat the cause of this cultural sickness: the widespread availability of guns in America. Instead, it remains up to the states to determine how much death one person should be able to dole out and how quickly, and even those state-level restrictions are being winnowed away under the conservative Supreme Court.
Michigan has some of the laxest gun policies in the country, according to researchers at the Rand Corp. “Despite pleas from Oxford families, these issues never even got a hearing in the legislature,” Whitmer said in her State of the State address last month, calling on lawmakers to pass a series of proposed reforms. “This year, let’s change that and work together to stop the violence and save lives.”
For the first time in decades, there’s a chance that Whitmer’s plea could become a reality. The governor cruised to re-election last fall and Democrats flipped both chambers of the state Legislature — their first such trifecta since the 1980s. So far, the package under consideration includes legislation that would institute universal background checks for gun purchases; enact a “red flag” law that would allow for courts to keep guns away from people who are a threat to themselves and others; and establish safe storage requirements for gun owners.
The Democrats’ majorities are slim enough that just one could effectively veto any bill in the state House if Republicans stand firm against it. But the above proposals should be considered the bare minimum for acceptable reforms. Already, Michigan Democrats are combing through other draft legislation and proposals from years past that could finally become law.
I can’t stop thinking about what it will be like to have that loss hanging over the building, for a fellow student and for any feeling of safety that that campus once provided
It’s hard to emphasize the level of disrespect it would be for lawmakers not to act. Monday’s shooting took place only a 10-minute drive from the state Capitol in downtown Lansing. Some of the students who sheltered in place on Monday are interns in the Capitol. Many of them likely got up, donned a blazer and rode the bus to their representative or senator’s office on Wednesday, despite the trauma they and their friends had just experienced. Dozens of their classmates gathered on the Capitol’s steps on Wednesday, all of them already school shooting survivors before this week, to give faces to the failure of their elders.
A detail that I can’t let go of is that one of the two buildings the gunman attacked was the Union. (Authorities have not identified which of his three victims died there; the other two died in nearby Berkey Hall, a classroom building.) The Union is a place students can meet to study, relax in the game room, or simply cross through as a way to avoid the winter chill. I can’t stop thinking about what it will be like to have that loss hanging over the building, for a fellow student and for any feeling of safety that that campus once provided. It’s a thought that I hope will linger with Michigan lawmakers in the coming weeks and months, one that will hopefully provide some semblance of protection for the 50,000 students on the banks of the Red Cedar whose well-being is in their hands.
