| brucekluger.com |
USA Today, December 13, 2012 When even Santa has to dive for cover Holiday mall shooting reveals that our nation's gun culture increasingly puts our kids in the line of fire. By Bruce Kluger
head, why he was driven to madness, or who his intended victims were, if any. But one fact remains startlingly clear: When the assailant, now identified as Jacob Tyler Roberts, 22, sprinted through Macy's in the Clackamas Town Center mall in suburban Portland, Ore., on Tuesday evening—wearing a white hockey mask and a bullet- proof vest and spraying the crowd with as many as 60 rounds from his AR-15 semiautomatic rifle—he was
meet Santa Claus. Had the assault occurred on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, the carnage might have been sickeningly different.
reporters after the siege. "I thought a red suit was a pretty good target...so I hit the floor. By the time I got up, everybody had left." Two adult shoppers were killed in the ambush, a half-dozen were injured, and the guman took his own life. As these things go, the death toll was thankfully low. And yet the proximity of the bloody scene to an area that traditionally draws hordes of kids calls for a moment of reflection: Is there anywhere left that we can take our children where they are not witness to, traumatized by, or victims of gun violence? Any death at the hands of an unhinged assailant is a tragedy, of course, regardless of the age of the victims. But there's something eerily incongruous about an innocent child being cut down by random gunfire—though that reality is sadly changing. When I was growing up, stories like the Clackamas mall rampage were an adults- only kind of thing—a post office employee snapping, a murderous sniper on a water tower, a liquor store robbery downtown. All of that changed, culturally speaking, in 1999, when two shotgun-toting teenagers mowed down 12 fellow students and a teacher at Columbine High School in Colorado. Since then, kids have become an all too common component of these ghastly scenarios. Nine-year-old Christina-Taylor Green was one of six people fatally shot in the assassination attempt on Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in 2011; teenagers made up nearly one-quarter of the body count in the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007; and last summer's shooting in Aurora, Colo., which killed 12 and injured 58, took place in a movie theater showing a film marketed largely to youth. And that's the problem: Even as children are increasingly drawn into the ring of fire in these ceaselessly shocking outbreaks, the gun debate in this nation continues to be in the hands of inflexible adults. The National Rifle Association maintains its powerful chokehold on legislators in Washington; rabid Second Amendment enthusiasts turn a blind eye to the consequences of their obstinacy; computer electronics manufacturers keep pumping out game after game in which killing is not only the focus of the "entertainment" but is also rewarded with bonus points. Most disturbing, however, are those ordinary citizens who perceive any reasonable curb on assault weapons as an attack on their liberty. When I wrote about the Aurora shooting on this page back in July, I proposed one such solution and was floored by the response. "You anti-gun hack," one reader admonished. "This is as stupid as it gets!" commented another. "Sure, let the perverts circumvent the Constitution," concluded a third. Until we address this deadly stubbornness—until we apply some simple common sense to a problem that has grown into a national epidemic—we need to acknowledge our complicity in the surreal image we witnessed on Tuesday night: a televised news interview with a grown man in a Santa Claus costume, who only moments before held a happy child on his lap as the bullets started flying. (Photo: Craig Mitchelldyer, Getty Images) |
Outside the Clackamas Town Center after a shooting on Tuesday.