As the small bodies of 19 children between the ages of seven and 10 were carried out of their elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, anxious parents were being asked to give DNA samples, even as their legs collapsed beneath them. Another lone gunman had killed them with ruthless efficiency, using an assault weapon.

Another day, another mass school killing: this is, astonishingly, a literal truth. There have been 212 mass shootings in the US so far this year, as I write. By the time you read this, that number may well have increased — that’s how frequent they are. Twenty-seven of them have happened so far this year in schools, even after the storm of sorrow in Sandy Hook 10 years ago, where 20 of the victims were children aged between five and six.  

A week ago, while interviewing the American author Lionel Shriver (here to attend the Franschhoek Literary Festival), we spoke about this exact subject, as we had done 10 years earlier. Her international best-selling book, We Need to Talk About Kevin, which won the Orange Prize in 2005 deals in depth with the subject — a troubled 15-year-old boy commits a mass killing in his school.  

Shriver’s books are replicas of herself: small but intense packages. The manipulation of violence to achieve an end is the black hole at the heart of Kevin. A decade later, we are in the same space, shortly after the race-fuelled killing of 10 black people in Buffalo.

“I support gun control, based on self-interest,” she remarks wryly. I want to be able to walk down the street and feel relatively safe. I wish I had an answer.” She wonders aloud whether it would be better if we gave the killers less publicity and therefore didn’t inadvertently glorify them. “But what are we going to do — not cover the killings?” 

Democrats in the US are today wringing their hands, talking about another ghastly human tragedy, admitting the impotence they feel; Republican reptile Ted Cruz immediately weighed in, defending the “innocence” of guns. He omitted to mention the innocence of the children.

That old lie about it not being guns but people that kill, is thinner than a  Zuma defence.

The second amendment added to the US Constitution, states simply: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of the free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Pro-gun lobbies regularly polish that amendment’s halo. Yes, it is highly unlikely that any nation today could operate safely without guns, at least in the hands of police and those trained to use them; in other words, the modern militia.

The amendment says nothing about the enshrined right of private individuals to amass weapons for other purposes, let alone own assault weapons that today can carry out a modern-day massacre in a matter of seconds. Militia rifles, used at the time of the writing of the US Constitution, took more than half a minute, on average, to reload. Once. They would have taken an awfully long time to reload and kill 19 children; time enough to save many.

The posture that “it’s not guns that kill” is akin to suggesting that it’s not arsenic that kills, but the poisoner. Yes, poison is administered by an individual; but there’s a very good reason why arsenic is not readily available in shopping malls.

Shriver had, on an earlier visit to South Africa, been interested to hear that despite our record of gang violence and Friday-night alcohol-fuelled assaults, we do not have a similar record of young armed men randomly shooting strangers in schools, universities or public leisure areas. “I saw a car with ‘Armed Response’ written on its side yesterday. I thought, that’s odd — in America that would be a given. Like writing Police, Police!”

On Monday this week (23 May 2022), young men fingering guns lounged on the edge of the Lavender Hill shack village as we surveyed the devastation of yet another fire. One of the shattered victims was familiar; a valued gardener who had long worked for many in the Marina da Gama neighbourhood.

On Thursday night, May 19 around 6pm, five shacks caught fire in the middle of this group of tightly-packed dwellings where Paul Kuiler had lived with his wife, son and daughter, and seven-year-old granddaughter. In this little, simple space, there were chameleons in the tiny garden he had lovingly tended; their cat lounged in the sun. Everything was now gone – the shack, clothes, furnishings, food, documents — the lot. Also the cat, his pet birds and the chameleons, all perished. There is just blackened, scorched earth.

“I can’t stop the shock: 18 years and there is nothing left,” he said, weeping.

Meanwhile the gangsters looked on, guns visible. Calculating whether or not the well-wishers who have arrived to help the victims carry anything of value. If I can see them so easily, why can’t the police? Killings take place here nearly every weekend. Sometimes the victims are children.

The guns, say the police, are illegal — but most of the 400,000 illegally owned guns in SA were once legal. We dare not point a finger at the US while we fail to exercise due control over our own gun ownership, while the Cat in the Hat Minister Bheki Cele helicopters in to yet another tragedy — after the event; what a pointless exercise.

We clutch at the hope we will never have to witness such mass school killings. But it’s getting closer.

The late actor Charlton Heston once roared at a gun convention that we would have to prise his gun out of his “cold, dead hands”. I’m OK with that. Better than picking up the warm, dead bodies of our children. DM

[hearken id=”daily-maverick/9472″]