Three days.
That’s how long it takes for public anger to begin to dissipate after a mass shooting, according to two Princeton University scientists. It’s now more than 24 hours after an 18-year-old gunman massacred 19 schoolchildren and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, and the national conversation about what to do next has already entered a familiar pattern.
Democrats demand action. Republicans are trying to change the subject. And time is running out before the country’s attention inevitably shifts elsewhere.
For a paper published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Princeton’s Patrick Sharkey and Yinzhi Shen examined Gallup’s surveys of Americans’ self-reported emotions in the days before and after a mass shooting.
The more horrific the massacre, they found, the greater the emotional impact on the local community. The response for Democrats was greater — a 50 percentage point increase in grief, versus a 20 percent increase for Republicans — but the sense of devastation faded at the same rapid rate.
“The feeling we all feel today, with this dark cloud hanging over us, it’s just not possible to carry that weight for weeks and months,” Sharkey said in an interview. “I think that’s just an observation about how human emotions work.”
‘We’ve been burned so many times’
Democrats on Capitol Hill are well aware of the urgency, but are also highly skeptical that Republicans will work with them in good faith, as my colleague Jonathan Weisman reports. They have bitter memories of past attempts to pass federal gun safety legislation, and for good reason.
In 2013, a bill to expand background checks for weapons purchases failed after 26 children and staff members were murdered last year at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.
In 2019, after back-to-back shootings in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, DailyExpertNews reported that Republicans are “collateralizing around legislation to help law enforcement take guns away from those who pose an immediate threat” — so-called red flag laws.
President Donald Trump, among other things, expressed his support for the idea in a speech at the White House. But he never put any real pressure on Republicans to act, and Senator Mitch McConnell, who controlled the Senate at the time, waited for the public fury to subside before quietly moving on to other topics.
On Wednesday, Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic majority leader, cautiously left the door open for movement.
“My Republican colleagues can now work with us,” he said. “I think it’s a meager prospect. Very slim, all too slim. We’ve been burned so many times.”
He added: “But this is so important. We need to take action and even ask Republicans to rejoin us.”
The Democrats’ current plan, according to aides close to the Senate leadership, is to investigate bipartisan talks led by Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy while fully prepared for those talks that go nowhere.
“I’ve asked Senator Schumer for the space to have that conversation for the next 10 days,” Murphy told reporters at the Capitol on Wednesday. “And I think in the course of a week and a half we’ll know if there’s an opportunity to get a two-tier bill or not.”
In a possible indicator of the futility of such discussions, Senator Lindsey Graham, South Carolina Republican and a leading supporter of red flag laws at the state level, said separately on Wednesday: “I cannot assure the American people that there is a law we pass that this shooting would have stopped.”
A vote was held on Thursday to close debate on the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act, a bill originally intended in response to the other The recent mass shooting in Buffalo is expected to encounter a Republican filibuster. That includes votes yet to be scheduled to strengthen background checks, as Schumer appeared to acknowledge in his comments on Wednesday.
Anger and helplessness
It’s hard to say whether frustration among Democrats has reached new heights — it was already quite high. But since Tuesday’s shooting, expressions of anger and helplessness have been everywhere.
In the hours after the massacre, Arizona Representative Ruben Gallego threw a series of swear words on Twitter at Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz, who had accused Democrats of trying to “politicize” what happened. Gallego called Cruz “useless” and a “baby killer.”
In Texas on Wednesday, Beto O’Rourke, the Democratic nominee for governor, confronted Governor Greg Abbott at a news conference. O’Rourke said the shooting was “totally predictable” and accused Abbott, his Republican opponent, of “doing nothing” to address the issue. An official onstage called O’Rourke an expletive and Abbott reprimanded him after he was turned away by police.
“There are relatives who are crying right now,” Abbott said. “Think of the people who are injured and help those who are injured.”
When O’Rourke left, he said, “Someone has to stand up for the children of this state or they will continue to be murdered.”
On the ground in Texas
Our colleague Jazmine Ulloa, who grew up in El Paso and is native Spanish, is in Uvalde, where she spoke to relatives when they learned of the fate of their children.
We spoke on the phone as she raced to flesh out the portrait of their killer. Our conversation, compressed and edited for clarity, is below.
What did you see yesterday when you arrived in town?
When I arrived at the town hall, which served as the center for the school community, it was already dark. It was a hot and muggy night, with a thunderstorm a few hours before arrival, and families gathered around their vehicles in the parking lot. They were big families, uncles and aunts and grandparents and cousins.
Many of them just heard the news that their children were gone. People were crying and hugging and you could hear the pain as if it was raging through the air.
Some parents struggled to walk back to their car after hearing the news; they leaned on loved ones. There was a woman who fell to her knees and folded slightly over the passenger seat of the car. She sobbed and couldn’t get up.
You’ve covered mass shootings before. Was there anything that came to mind that was different about this one?
Yes, the El Paso shooting happened five minutes from my high school. With this one, I think what’s different is how young the victims are. The fact that they are children is the most devastating thing. And it’s even harder to handle.
Last night I saw the news that President Biden’s comments about the shooting were being booed at Herschel Walker’s victory party in Georgia. And I was standing in the parking lot with these parents, who felt so much pain. I don’t know what to call it – it was a shocking juxtaposition.
What to read?
— Blake
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