A Fact of Life

 

I don't know if referring to school shootings as a "fact of life" can be seen as anything but weird, but somehow, it made sense in the mouth of JD Vance. I grew up watching "Facts of Life" and I'm struggling to recall the episode where Mrs. Garrett lunged to put herself between a bullet and Tootie, but then again, when I was a kid we didn't have active shooter drills with the frequency we had fire drills. 

It's not a "fact of life" in any other country. Just this one. 

Now, a guy like Vance doesn't think it weird to be more concerned about kids having access to porn than guns. Republicans believe weird things. They believe in things like "post-birth abortion" which isn't happening and are concerned with that, not the school shootings which clearly are.  Then again, maybe folks like Vance have warm and fuzzy memories about unsecured firearms. 

Just like Mamaw used to have. 

It used to be a fact of life in his world that grandparents were around to raise their kids' kids, I guess. It's a fact of life now that grandparents aren't always retired and available to watch kids. Or maybe they deserve their retirement or maybe they weren't the best people to be raising kids themselves.  

It should be a fact of life that kids don't take guns to school and blow away their classmates. And maybe a thoughtful person would reconsider whether it's the childless people in their world who are screwed in the head when parents exist who know perfectly well their kids are obsessively thinking about and talking about mass violence, and they go and get them some guns. 

It's weird, isn't it? Vance has kids himself and talks about things and to people like a man with as little awareness or compassion as a person can show and still have a pulse. He thinks schools just need more security. Do we need an armed guard in every classroom? Because resource officers haven't magically fixed the problem. 

Yet. Yet?

But we'll just do the same things we always do and say the things we always say. And it's not supposed to be weird. Tolerating it isn't supposed to be weird. Thoughts and prayers ritually normalize something that shouldn't be normal in our society. 

I don't know about that. It's tragic. And what we do about it is very, very weird.