Blue State Blues: Confronting Evil in the Wake of Uvalde

Uvalde officer flowers (Allison Dinner / AFP / Getty)
Allison Dinner / AFP / Getty
Joel B. Pollak

On Tuesday, I picked my son up from his public elementary school, and I had the same thought that I’m sure millions of parents across America had that day: I’m lucky to be doing this.

Because at that moment, moms and dads in Uvalde, Texas, were waiting, and waiting, outside their children’s school for sons and daughters who would never come home again.

It didn’t take long for Democrats to demand gun control and blame Republicans for the mass shooting. It is, after all, an election year.

At least this time they didn’t blame “white supremacy” and Fox News for the killings.

As a Los Angeles Times columnist wrote, with a considerable sense of disbelief, both the shooter and most of the victims were Latino: “I immediately thought: white supremacist. … When I found out that the person who killed 19 fourth-graders and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday was named [redacted] my stomach dropped. … [W]hen it’s one of your own killing their own kind, then what?”

“Then what”?

Then perhaps you stop looking for people to blame, and stop trying to find ways to tie horrific crimes to people who have nothing to do with the event, but with whom you happen to have political disagreements.

And stop attacking “thoughts and prayers,” which are a real, and helpful, way of coping and showing empathy.

The constant impulse to demonize the other side has coarsened our politics to a point that makes cooperation impossible. Our leaders can’t even hold a press conference.

There are no easy answers. All of us want to know what can be done to stop school shootings.

I can’t speak for all gun owners, but I have also asked myself whether new gun control laws might help.

And the answer I always come to is that gun control would be impossible to implement.

There are hundreds of millions of guns in the U.S., with millions more sold each year. And if 2020 taught us anything, it’s that our society rejects aggressive law enforcement, especially in minority communities.

Usually, with mass shootings, it’s difficult to pinpoint a specific law that might have made a difference. Maybe that’s not true in Uvalde.

A California law recently barred 18-to-20-year-olds from buying semiautomatic rifles, such as those the gunman used in Texas. However, that law was struck down earlier this month by the liberal Ninth Circuit as a violation of the Second Amendment.

As scholar Jonathan Turley noted, the Constitution is a bigger obstacle to gun control than the “gun lobby.”

Personally, if the Constitution weren’t an obstacle, I’d probably ban first-person shooter games before I’d ban guns. The proliferation of these games began in the early 1990s, and coincided with the emergence of mass shootings in schools.

Most gamers understand that the games are just fantasy. But if even just a few decide to experience their gaming fantasies in real life, the results can be devastating.

Since we have the First Amendment, there never will be a ban. It’s up to parents alone.

Some on the left are calling for the Second Amendment to be repealed, or at least changed. That won’t happen. Three-fourths of the states would need to agree. And they are not going to do so.

The Framers of the Constitution decided long ago that the risk of an armed citizenry, with all the potential for crime and disorder, was worthwhile as the ultimate guarantee against tyranny. The result is a society that is free-spirited, and entrepreneurial — and a little more dangerous. That’s the tradeoff.

It makes more sense to “harden the target” by protecting schools rather than waiting for politicians to pass gun control that will somehow survive the courts and the daunting obstacles to implementation.

Celebrity figures like Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr, and ambitious Democratic politicians like L.A. school board member Nick Melvoin, attacked the “gun lobby” and Republicans. But they also supported efforts to abolish school police. The safety of students is not their priority.

What made the Uvalde shooting so difficult so process, aside from its sheer horror, is that it seemed to defy everyone’s convenient policy solutions. Gun control? The murderer bought his guns legally. Armed guards? There were early reports — later contradicted — of a school resource officer.  Red flag laws? The shooter had no criminal record, at least as an adult.

Then, on Thursday, we learned that there was no resource officer, that the gunman entered through an unlocked door, and that police waited for an hour before a Border Patrol team went in and took him out.

We can protect our schools. In too many cases, we have chosen not to do so.

Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) told MSNBC this week that parents should tell their kids to be afraid after Uvalde. Any parent who did not would be “lying,” he said. Better to traumatize them and wait for gun control.

And that’s how many Democrats reacted: flogging failed gun control laws, and blaming their political opponents for murder.

But it was Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) who came closest to explaining the Uvalde shooting when he said that a wave of evil had passed over the town, and that the killer had evil in his heart.

That’s not an explanation many of us are used to hearing. The more educated we are, the more we tend to reject distinctions of good-versus-evil as simplistic or dangerous.

“Only a Sith deals in absolutes,” Star Wars said. And it’s generally true that the world is complex. But it is also true that evil exists.

The best way to fight that evil is to promote good — in our society, and within ourselves. We need to remind each other — and especially our young men — that there really is a better way to live, and it is the life that our Judeo-Christian texts describe to us.

We may struggle to live up to that model, and we may wish to depart from it in particular ways. But its virtues remain the best guide to the good life. Even if you discover them outside religion, you will find it hard to improve upon them.

Evil is everywhere. Its potential exists in every moment.

That’s not like saying “systemic racism” exists. The fact that there is racism in our society does not mean our society itself is racist. America was founded on liberty and equality. We can choose to treat each individual fairly, regardless of race.

Likewise, evil does not have to define us. We can choose good, even when doing so means taking risks.

And that is where to start. It won’t bring the kids back in Uvalde. But it will move our country forward.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

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