Shots Fired

Why our Kids Keep Dying and Why Nothing Changes

Two shootings on opposite sides of the world this week. One at Brown University in Providence. One in Sydney, Australia. Different contexts. Different continents. Same pattern.

We’ve seen this movie so many times we know the script. The news alerts. The sirens and yellow tape. The press conferences. The social media debate that rages for 72 hours before the algorithm moves on. Then we wait for the next one.

Because there’s always a next one.

This week’s events triggered a memory I can’t shake. In the 2010s I took a career detour and opened a restaurant. It was misguided, but that’s a story for a different day. I often visited guests at their table to make sure that our food and service were on target. One night I approached a prematurely balding young guy who had been in a few times before. He was wearing a terrible mustard-colored striped shirt, eating a burger in the back. It was obvious to me that something wasn’t quite right.

The problem was neither the burger nor milkshake. His mother was a teacher at Sandy Hook. She’d survived that day. Twenty children and six adults hadn’t.

“She’s an elementary school teacher. In Connecticut.”

I didn’t know what to say then. I don’t know what to say now.

The Soldier and The Father

I’m an American soldier. It’s been nearly 30 years since I last stood in formation, but I remain a soldier. I was a cavalry officer. I’ve fired nearly every weapon in the conventional arsenal from a 9mm pistol to an Abrams tank. I detonated claymore mines, learned to calculate explosive charges to blow up bridges, and coordinated air strikes during major training exercises.

I’m comfortable with violence. I’m not coming at this from a “guns are bad” perspective.

I’m coming at this because our daughter is an elementary school teacher who trains for active shooters the way we once trained for Soviet missiles. The school shooting is a certainty in the same way duck and cover was an absurdity.

The Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins tracks childhood firearm fatalities. In 2024, for the third consecutive year, more children died from firearms than any other cause. Death rates in this age group have increased 106 percent since 2013.

We have laws that mandate seatbelts and bike helmets to keep our kids safe. What kind of morally bankrupt society regulates a Volvo or a Schwinn while ignoring a Glock?

If the purpose of government is to provide security, health, and prosperity for its people, we’re failing at the most elemental level. The question isn’t whether this is a problem. The question is: what allows this cycle to continue while our leaders offer no more than hollow thoughts and prayers?

The Forgotten Clause

Here’s a question: Is a guy with a gun terrorizing students during final exams at Brown a well-regulated militia?

The Second Amendment reads: “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

We’ve fetishized the second clause while erasing the first. The framers weren’t writing a blank check for individual arsenals. From their vantage point in the age of the musket they could no more conceive of the potential carnage wrought by semi-automatic weapons than they could have predicted penicillin, the telephone, or moonshots. They were addressing the specific concern of maintaining citizen militias in a young republic wary of standing armies. The militia clause wasn’t decorative. It was the justification.

Somewhere along the way, we collectively forgot that the amendment contains the word “regulated” at all. We speak of gun rights as if they were the Second Commandment chiseled on tablets and handed down to us by the framers on Mt. Sinai, divorced from any obligation to the common defense or general welfare. And, while we’re at it, let’s recognize that the framers were imperfect men who were the product of their far from enlightened time. Some were slaveowners. All allowed slavery to continue. None of them gave women the right to vote.

A lone gunman terrorizing a community does not constitute a well-regulated militia. Dead elementary school students are not the price of freedom. This is not what Madison had in mind. But we can’t have that conversation because the institutions that might facilitate it have been captured, blinded, and bought.

The Architecture of Blindness

In 1996, the NRA achieved something remarkable: it didn’t just block gun safety legislation, it blocked the ability to study whether such legislation might work. The Dickey Amendment prohibited the CDC from using federal funds to “advocate or promote gun control.” Congress simultaneously cut $2.6 million from the CDC’s budget, the exact amount spent on firearms research the previous year.

The amendment’s language was technically narrow. Its effect was total. CDC funding for gun violence research declined 96 percent. Academic publications on gun violence fell 64 percent between 1998 and 2012.

The information didn’t disappear. Scattered data still existed across law enforcement, emergency rooms, schools. But there was no synthesis function. No one whose job was to connect the pieces and say, “here’s the pattern, here’s what interrupts it.”

The NRA hadn’t just captured policy. It had successfully blinded the government to risks manifested by body counts in elementary schools.

The Fragmentation

We’re not completely blind. Threat assessment programs work. Red flag laws work. Safe storage campaigns work. Hospital-based violence intervention programs work. Sandy Hook Promise’s training has averted planned attacks.

But the knowledge sits scattered. Education departments track school security. Law enforcement has active shooter protocols. Emergency rooms document injury patterns. Mental health agencies run crisis intervention. Public health officials study prevention strategies.

Each domain has its piece. No federal agency synthesizes this into coherent policy. No one’s job is to walk into Congress and say: “Here’s what can stop the pattern of murder in our children. Fund it.”

The Loop

Gun manufacturers profit from fear. Sales spike after every mass shooting. Those profits fund lobbying and campaign contributions. The NRA’s 1977 transformation from sportsmen’s club to political machine created electoral control in rural districts. Any politician who cooperates on gun safety, even measures that don’t restrict gun rights, faces career-ending consequences.

The money bought more than influence. It bought institutional blindness. It fragmented the knowledge function. It made studying gun violence politically radioactive. It erased half of the Second Amendment from public discourse and made the other half sacred.

So the pattern continues. We add Brown and Sydney to Sandy Hook, Uvalde, Parkland, Virginia Tech, and Columbine. We track the statistics. We catalogue the deaths. Yet we can’t transform what we know into policy that keeps our kids and their teachers safe.

We know what to do. The evidence exists on what reduces gun deaths. But The Loop prevents politicians from acting on it, from ensuring they live up to their obligation to deliver security for the kids from Sandy Hook who never got to see their eighth birthdays.

That young man in the mustard shirt left my restaurant that night. His mother survived. Her students didn’t.

Twelve years later. Two shootings on opposite sides of the world this week. One in Sydney. One in Providence. The system that allows them to happen remains perfectly intact.