Artwork by Carolyn Reed Barritt (click to enlarge)

Late evening, July 4th, 2022:

Fireworks can sound like gunfire, and tonight they do, rolling in waves through my neighborhood like a war only hours after six people were killed in Highland Park in a fusillade of similar sounds. All of which is now too often the soundtrack of American celebrations, shopping, church services, workplaces, concerts, clubs, or school classrooms; the rapid sound of copious gunfire, and of panic, and the sight of punctured and torn bodies.

In the early evening a neighbor set off two strings of fireworks that closely mimicked the sound of the Highland Park shooting I’d heard on the 6:00 PM news. The reports came through my window without warning in a close match to that earlier cadence; the new sound of an American Fourth of July.

Centuries ago people invented the first crude versions of a class of weapon, small enough to easily carry, that could contain the expanding pressure of rapidly burning powder in a chamber plugged with a small piece of metal, formed and placed so that it would be forced out through a pipe at speed and carry on through the air in whatever direction the pipe pointed.

We developed many hunting and military arms before this new creation. But none were as effective or as easily used as these “fire” arms — so good at what they are intended for: to pierce, tear, and break the body of an animal — human or otherwise — at a distance, and kill or maim it.

The Fourth of July holiday newscast was led by six stories. As I listened I realized they were all about the immediate consequences of various recent uses of firearms:

1. The mid-morning killing of six people, with many more injured, by a shooter firing from a roof into the 4th of July parade crowd in the Illinois city of Highland Park.
2. The city of Akron, Ohio declaring a nighttime curfew in the aftermath of eight police officers shooting a then unarmed black man at least 60 times as he ran from them.
3. Vladimir Putin declaring that Russia had finally taken the Luhansk region in its war of aggression in Ukraine (where much of the exercise of deadly force occurs with weapons not unlike that used by the Highland Park shooter).
4. A fatal mass shooting in downtown Sacramento, California, only weeks after the previous mass shooting there, which itself was only a few months after the one before. One dead, four wounded this time.
5. The U.S. State Department reporting that the bullet that entered the head of the Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh last month in the occupied West Bank, killing her, was too badly damaged to support a definitive conclusion of its origin, but that it was likely fired from an Israeli Defense Forces position.
6. The Danish government announcing that the perpetrator of last week’s shopping mall mass shooting had acted alone and was undergoing a 24-day period of psychological evaluation to determine his fitness to stand trial.

How dominant firearms have become in shaping the world we live in. Not from a distance, not as an element of history, but as a daily reality, particularly in America with, by far, the most heavily armed civilian population per capita in the world, holding more firearms than there are people in the country, each designed to enable someone with little or no training to inflict death by pointing and the pull of a trigger. With such simple access to convenient, lethal power, any altercation, any moment of despair, any distorted malcontent, any curious exploration by an infant, can easily become deadly.

Firearm safety training frequently stresses a particular maxim: “Never point a gun — whether you think it is loaded or not — at anything you are not willing to destroy.” Which, of course, implies the complement: Whatever you point a gun at, you can, and might, destroy.

Today’s news focused on the past few days only. There is so much more gun violence than that, week after week, year after year. And where we measure the duration and casualties of our formal wars carefully (WWII, 5 years 11 months 2 weeks, 405,000 battle, in theater, and non-theater dead; Vietnam, 19 years 5 months 4 weeks 1 day, 33,000 battle, in theater, and non-theater dead; Afghanistan, 19 years 10 months 1 week 1 day, 2,325 hostile and non-hostile deaths and called our longest war), we barely notice our civilian campaign of gun-enabled violence. It has no fixed start date, and it is nowhere near an end, and conservative politicians have been blocking most systematic data gathering on its human cost for decades (Washington Post, Forbes). If we think of it as a war, it is our longest. And its death toll, just from the past 20 years, is more than 50% of the death toll from all formal U.S. wars in history combined (V.A., DoD).

Today the funerals in Uvalde and Buffalo are barely over as a new round will begin in Highland Park, and Akron, and Sacramento.

To paraphrase John Donne, who I have quoted here before (This is Where it Ends): No community in America is an island, entire of itself. Every one is a piece of the whole linked in many ways. Therefore never think, “this is something that happens to them, not to me, not to us.” Don’t ask who was shot; we all are every time.

Here is the original in Donne’s inimitable style.

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” (John Donne, Mediations XVII, 1623)

It makes no sense to think gun violence and mass shootings are someone else’s problem: they occur anywhere, and everywhere. You fool yourself if you think it will never touch you or your family and friends.

And now again my neighbor’s celebratory 4th of July fireworks triggers in me a sense of nearby gunfire instead of celebration, just as other fireworks did today for jittery crowds across the country in Orlando, Harrisburg, Pa., and Washington, D.C., where people ran thinking that they too were under attack.

What life is this we have created for ourselves?

Full darkness has fallen now, and the simulation of weapons fire has increased outside, more in fact than I remember ever before, echoing continuously: the intentional recreation of the sound of war as an act of celebration. When once we lived in peace, long removed from the war this holiday celebrates, such displays felt harmless. But now we are in a time of close, booming, self-inflicted gun violence in all the places where we live and gather. We spend our days aware of the possibility of random attack from peers using tools of war that many continue to insist be available to everyone.

We create the world we live in through our choices. Now, more than anywhere else in the world, we in the United States have created a country of national self-inflicted mass murder. Why is this what we choose?

What we simulate in celebration on this Fourth of July is far too close to the actual experience of those in Highland Park, and Akron, and Sacramento, and hundreds of other locations every single day (in essence everywhere, if we take Donne’s message to heart). The random vagaries of a modern human environment as civilian war zone becomes even more real to us as we move further toward “hardening” our schools, teaching our children to avoid being shot, making emergency response plans for every event, and knowing in the back of our minds that it might happen to us anytime we are in public.

I wish that this evening’s expression of patriotism were more thoughtful, and quieter. I wish that the idea of fireworks as a lighthearted recreation of a long ago formative victory could be less fraught, could still be truly festive. But when random acts of real war increasingly exist in our civilian lives, and when we begin to accept this as normal and unremarkable, perhaps we should pause the celebration of the sights and sounds of war, no matter how traditional, no matter how colorful. If metal fired into the fabric of our lives is the new normal, let us not reinforce this with the simulated sights and sounds of the tools that make this abomination possible.

Fourth of July fireworks are literally intended to represent something of the artillery fire of the revolutionary war. In times of peace we may forget how this represents munitions tearing apart the bodies of others, and be, instead, drawn to a simple adventure in sensory stimulation, celebration, and visual wonder. But we, none of us, live in that time of peace any longer. We have woven ourselves into a fabric of guns and constant senseless random acts of mass violence (with the same type of weapons used in war, the same as those used in Ukraine today). Far too many now, in constantly growing numbers, have seen something of this experience firsthand in their daily lives.

As we live with a deepening integration of this particular (and peculiar) invention — the gun — entwined in our lives, we enable the perversion of daily life toward periodic and random warfare. Much as civilians struggle through this experience in more conventional wars, we now struggle through it as well.

Americans today do not know when or where the next mass shooting will occur; murderously wanton, heartless, but also randomly certain.

Why is this the world we have chosen to create?