MAUREEN DOWD
America’s Human Sacrifices
May 28, 2022, 8:00 a.m. ET
By Maureen Dowd
Opinion
Columnist
WASHINGTON — Once, when I thought of
child sacrifice, I thought of ancient shibboleths.
In Aeschylus, Agamemnon lures his
daughter, Iphigenia, to a spot she thinks is for her wedding, as the chorus
urges: “Hoist her over the altar like a yearling, give it all your strength …
gag her hard.” Agamemnon agonized but felt he had to sacrifice his daughter to
appease a goddess and be granted favorable winds to sail against Troy. Small
sacrifice to get your fleet moving.
In Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus kills
his daughter, Lavinia, at the dinner table, after she has been raped and maimed
by attackers. “Die, die, Lavinia!” he cries. “And thy shame with thee.” Small
sacrifice to save your honor.
On “Game of Thrones,” Stannis Baratheon
orders his sweet child Shireen burned at the stake, as she cries out for the
father she adores, so black magic will melt the snows. Small sacrifice to get
your starving army on the march.
Now, however, I think
of child sacrifice as a modern phenomenon, a barbaric one that defines this
country. We are sacrificing children, not only the ones who die, but also those
who watch and those who fear the future.
Children having their tomorrows taken
away. Small sacrifice if we can keep our guns. Why not let every deranged loner
buy an assault weapon?
America is not a mythical kingdom ruled
by fickle gods or black magic. Our fate is not in the stars. It is in
ourselves. It is within our power to stop schools from becoming killing fields.
We have simply decided not to do it.
The shooter in Uvalde slipped into a
fourth-grade classroom at Robb Elementary School, ominously announced, “Look
what we have here” and fired more than 100 rounds.
The local police did nothing to stop
the human sacrifice. Nineteen officers loitered in the hall for as long
as 78
minutes as
children died. How can you justify
keeping assault weapons on the open market when police officers don’t engage
with them, even with kids’ lives on the line?
As the officers waited, not bothering to break down a barricaded door, the 19 lambs went to slaughter, trapped in a blood-soaked classroom with an 18-year-old madman. In a haunting tableau, one little girl smeared herself with her dead friend’s blood to appear dead.
Meanwhile, desperate parents tried to climb over a chain-link
fence to save their children. The police, doing nothing more useful, kept busy
by handcuffing at least one parent trying to get into the school.
A slain teacher’s husband died of a
heart attack after he took flowers to her memorial at the school. They had four
kids. Who will take care of them?
Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas coldly said
of the massacre, the sixth mass shooting in his seven years in office, “could
have been worse.” Donald Trump, who once told me if he were elected president,
he would get in his limo and drive down to the National Rifle Association and
bargain with it until he could get agreement to some common-sense solutions,
spoke to the N.R.A. convention in Houston Friday evening and spouted gun lobby
talking points — small price for the tens of millions it spent to get him elected. What
a sociopathic jellyfish. It was sacrilege for him to make it seem as though the
N.R.A. cared by reading the names of the dead children and teachers, with a
bell gonging after each name.
What is wrong with this country?
Republicans think they’re showing their toughness by preventing curbs on guns.
But it’s a huge American weakness.
When a gunman killed 35 people in
Tasmania in 1996, the Australian government passed such common-sense gun laws
six months later that there has been only one mass shooting since. More than a
million firearms were destroyed.
When an anti-Islamic extremist in
Christchurch killed 51 people in two mosques in 2019, the New Zealand
government banned most semiautomatic weapons 26 days later. There have been no
mass shootings since.
As the inspiring New Zealand prime
minister, Jacinda Arden, said at the time, she could not have faced the
surviving victims and told them “our system and our laws allow these guns to be
available and that is OK.”
The political debates
here are empty and soulless, with Democrats dodging the issue and Republicans
hardening even on mild proposals like universal background checks, which
has overwhelming public approval.
“Most Republicans in the Senate
represent deeply conservative states where gun ownership is treated as a sacred
privilege enshrined in the Constitution, a privilege not to be infringed upon
no matter how much blood is spilled in classrooms and school hallways around the
country,” Carl Hulse wrote in The Times.
Republicans throw up a fog of
nonsensical suggestions. Before speaking to the N.R.A. Friday, Ted Cruz said
schools should have only one entry point, with an armed guard. Guns don’t kill
people. Doors do. During his speech at the N.R.A., Trump suggested turning
schools into virtual jails and letting teachers pack pistols in class.
“Meaningful policy discussions over
guns or voting or public health have left the room,” said my colleague
Elizabeth Williamson, author of the new book “Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy
and the Battle for Truth.” “Spewing conspiracy theories and bench-clearing
nonsense around mass shootings, elections and coronavirus is becoming a tribal
signifier for some on the right.”
The Republicans are doing everything
they can to stop women from having control over their own bodies and doing
nothing to stop the carnage against kids; they may as well change the party
symbol from an elephant to an AR-15.
America is stuck in a loop on guns —
and it’s a fatal one. This country always cherished its frontier image, Gary
Cooper in “High Noon,” shooting it out with the bad guys. But now when the bad
guys start shooting, lawmakers just shrug.
We’ve become a country of cowards, so terrified of the unholy power
of gun worship that no sacrifice of young blood is too great to appease it.