<TIM BALL, POLITICO, LAS VEGAS, Nevada>
Las Vegas is one of those cities where you can have it all.
On the two-year anniversary of America’s deadliest-ever mass shooting — when a man with 24 guns knocked out the windows of a 32nd-floor hotel room and rained down bullets on thousands of concertgoers on the ground below, killing 58 and wounding 422 — you can drive down Las Vegas Boulevard, past casinos on the left and casinos on the right, to see that famous “Welcome to Las Vegas” sign across from a Harley Davidson dealership.
You can stand in line with the dozens of people lined up to snap photos in front of it, or you can walk behind it, and instead focus your attention on the 58 wooden crosses demanding that nobody forget the victims of this city’s latest tragedy.
You can then drive a few miles back up the Strip, past Mandalay Bay where the shooter knocked out those windows; past the expansive city block where festival goers danced to country music before dodging a spray of bullets falling out of the sky (it’s now fenced off, and will become a parking lot); to one of countless gun ranges marketed toward tourists.
You can pull into that parking lot, next to the pharmacy, across the street from McDonald’s and just shy of the Little Vegas Wedding Chapel, plunk down a hundred bucks or so and fire some of the very guns used in that attack — a semiautomatic revolver, a bolt-action sniper rifle, and an AR-15, an assault weapon banned under U.S. federal law from 1994 to 2004 but now wildly popular with gun enthusiasts, and which the National Rifle Association calls “America’s Gun.”
* * *
I chose the Strip Gun Club — No. 7 on Tripadvisor’s list of “fun activities and games” in Las Vegas. Six of the top 10 fun activities and games are shooting ranges. (The list is rounded out by a place that lets you smash cars in a wrecking yard, an ax-throwing club and a place called the Wreck Room, “a unique rage room experience where people can break things in a safe and clean-up-free area.” I’ve been to Las Vegas many times. There are a lot of fun things to do there that don’t involve shooting, chopping or smashing things, but admittedly I’ve never tried the rage room.)
After signing a waiver and having my drivers’ license checked — though it was unclear for what, as later my instructor would tell me they have no way of checking from existing databases whether someone is allowed to own a gun — a muscular young guy named Jake grabbed the weapons I’d chosen, handed me earplugs, and escorted me to the range.
We started with the pistol (easy enough for a first-timer, though Jake charitably didn’t move the target all the way down the range), then progressed to the sniper rifle (quite a lot of gun to handle, even for someone of my, er, ample frame); and then to the AR-15.
Shooting one round at a time, the gun clearly packs a punch despite its relatively compact size. But when you flip the switch to fully automatic — if you’re someone without Jake’s extensive training, at least — it feels like holding a snarling wild animal in your arms. Easy enough to keep it pointed forward, but impossible to keep aimed at the center of a target.
Jake warned me about that before even handing me the gun. “Fully auto, it’s really not accurate, or practical.” It took mere seconds to unload the 15 rounds in the firearm I was holding, and with my ears ringing, a bruise already forming on my chest and the air thick with gunpowder, I couldn’t wrap my head around how someone without any training could own one of these.
I was part of the last generation of American high school students that only had to worry about bullying, dating, acne, that calculus test, coming out, college applications, where to sit at lunch, taking showers in gym class and whether I had the right clothes to put on afterward.
Adding active-shooter drills to the mix, and flinching at any sound that goes POP loud enough, would have been too much.
I grew up around guns — not in my house, but in plenty of friends’ houses and on plenty of racks in plenty of pickup trucks. California’s El Dorado County was beautiful and rugged: People hunted, voted Republican, spent weekends fishing and hiking and skiing. When you flipped open the rinky-dink local newspaper, you scanned the police blotter to see if you recognized the last name of anyone arrested for drunk driving; not to see who’d shot who and where.
I was 18 — an age when many would still be in high school in America — when I covered the aftermath of my first school shooting, for the City College of San Francisco magazine. It wasn’t Columbine, though the name of that Colorado high school has become synonymous with the dawn of this age of terror in the hallways.
On a May afternoon in 1998 in Springfield, Oregon, about a year before Columbine, a 15-year-old named Kip Kinkel, a slender, freckle-faced, meek-looking boy, didn’t much like his father’s idea of military school, and responded to it by shooting him in the back of the head with a rifle. When his mother arrived home a few hours later, Kinkel met her in the garage, told her he loved her and then shot her six times.
The next morning, his parents’ bodies now covered with sheets, Kinkel packed two knives, a rifle, two pistols and 1,127 rounds of ammunition under a trench coat, drove to Thurston High School and shot 29 of his classmates, one of whom tackled Kinkel when he was trying to reload, stopping the attack. Two died.
* * *
Then came Columbine.
The indelible image from the 1999 massacre will always be Patrick Ireland, a handsome, athletic 17-year-old shot twice in the head, blood staining his jeans and t-shirt, dangling out a window jagged with broken glass. He would, improbably, live to tell that story. Thirteen of his classmates weren’t so lucky.
After that, mass shootings struck a steady beat; a rhythm that feels more uniquely American than the national anthem.
In 2007, a student at Virginia Tech killed 32 people and wounded 17 more with two semi-automatic pistols before turning one of the guns on himself.
In 2012, during a midnight screening of the Batman film, The Dark Knight, in Aurora, Colorado, a man slipped out an emergency exit door, donned all-black tactical gear and a gas mask, grabbed a pair of tear gas canisters, picked up three guns, then walked back in and killed 12 people and injured 70 others.
At around 9:35 a.m., just five minutes after the school doors locked as part of recently upgraded security procedures, a 20-year-old with a history of mental illness shot out the glass next to the front door, walked into a classroom and shot 15 first graders and their teacher. A six-year-old girl was the lone survivor.
The shooter proceeded to another first-grade classroom nearby and continued firing. Five minutes after the shots began, a final one rang out — self-inflicted, to the head, by the perpetrator. In all, the death toll stood at 27, including the shooter, his mother and 20 children between 6 and 7 years old.
When the shock and grief subsided, outrage followed, because how couldn’t it?
But outrage does not sweeping legal change make. Tearful, distraught, enraged parents who’d just buried their children fought for stricter gun laws — then watched a bill enacting universal background checks die on the Senate floor.
The wind that had filled their sails blew no longer.
* * *
Hope doesn’t spring eternal anymore in this country, but it does spring.
I had come to Las Vegas not for the memorials, the shooting range or the gambling — but for a forum on gun violence, attended by nine of the leading Democratic candidates for president of the United States.
As I stepped into the nondescript events center near the Las Vegas airport where it was being held, the vibe was more after-work-mixer than national-political-showcase.
Activists and students mingled with organizers and reporters, fueling up with coffee for the long day ahead. As the crowd meandered into the main room — a hall with a few hundred seats, dressed up for the day with flags and bunting and harsh television lighting — the dull roar of small talk eventually gave way to the main event.
Organized by two advocacy groups — March For Our Lives and Giffords — the forum was by far the highest-profile political gathering dedicated to gun control. The presidential candidates had come — we all had come — because the role of guns in American lives had taken on unprecedented importance in the race for the White House. With bodies dropping not just in schools, theaters or nightclubs, but on the walks to and from them, and everywhere else, stanching the bleeding had become an Issue with a capital I.
As we watched, the would-be nominees did something that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago: They tried to one-up each other on gun control. There was no more dancing around the subject; there were now concrete policy proposals to be debated. One after the other, the candidates — Pete Buttigieg, Julian Castro, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, Beto O’Rourke, Amy Klobuchar, Andrew Yang, Kamala Harris — strode onto the stage, gleaming smiles, all feeling very presidential indeed. They talked through their own plans and took questions from the audience, many of whom had lost a loved one to a bullet.
No candidate had come to unveil a drastic shift in their thinking, or their proposed policies. Warren shot into the room with the energy of someone half her age; Biden rambled his way into more than one baffling corner; O’Rourke was fired up and ready to fight.
The prime organizers of the event, March For Our Lives, is calling on politicians to put in place a five-point plan: It includes a mandatory buy-back of “weapons of war,” a national licensing and registry system for guns, the declaration of a national emergency around gun violence; a federal tax investigation of the NRA; the appointment of a national director of gun violence prevention; and that Americans be automatically registered to vote on their 18th birthday.
It might be common-sense reform, at least viewed from afar. But enacted all at once, the plan would be a seismic shift in the way guns are regulated in a country known for protecting them.
And perhaps that’s why only a single candidate — O’Rourke, the former congressman — has endorsed the lot.
And yet, something felt very different. For nearly eight hours, the top Democratic candidates talked about how to combat gun violence. The entire party had clearly reached a sort of consensus: Something needs to be done.
The day’s first speaker, Buttigieg, the fresh-faced mayor of South Bend, Indiana, hit the nail on the head: “Pretty much everybody in this parade of candidates is going to say they’re in favor of the same things. … We all think our plan is the best, but all of them are multiplied by zero if we get nothing done.”
He was right, of course. On this issue, momentum has a tendency to flag when headlines drop off the front page. But as the candidates spoke, positioning themselves for the 2020 election, it was building.
* * *
The momentum that had brought us to the forum in Las Vegas began — because of course it did — with yet another shooting.
It was a Wednesday afternoon in 2018, Valentine’s day, at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in balmy Parkland, Florida. A day that many on campus would go on to describe as one of those rare, magical days of high school when everyone really seemed happy. Roses delivered to classmates, crushes revealed, smiles all around.
School was nearly out for the day, and it was then that a former student climbed out of an Uber with a rifle case and started walking purposefully toward a building on campus that housed 30 classrooms.
Armed with an AR-15, he set off a fire alarm and started shooting — in hallways, in classrooms, through windows, on the first, second and third floors. The gunfire only lasted six minutes, but in that time he managed to kill 14 students and three staff members, and injure 17 more.
It would have been just another bit of percussion in America’s deadly beat if not for how the survivors reacted.
Two days before the Democrats took the stage, I called David Hogg, one of the students who survived the Parkland shooting, and one of the most prominent members of March For Our Lives, the gun-safety organization they formed in the days — well, hours — after their school became a statistic.
Though he has plenty of cohorts, Hogg, 19, is quite literally the face of this movement. If you’re even passingly familiar with the debate raging in America, you’ve seen him — angular cheekbones, steely gaze, a fighting stance. (He does smile easily, though you wouldn’t know it to watch cable news.)
The day of the shooting, as everyone scrambled to find out who, what, why; as every student started ticking mental boxes when they heard from this friend, and then that one; Hogg arrived home before his younger sister, Lauren. Though his inner circle was accounted for, four of Lauren’s friends were killed in the massacre, and when she returned home, her crying, her wails of grief, were frantic.
[David Hogg, co-founder of March for Our Lives, at the presidential forum on gun safety in Las Vegas. The Harvard freshman is dyslexic, and when he started high school, focused on the debate team and broadcast journalism rather than writing “because you can’t misspell when you’re speaking.”]
“I was made so uncomfortable by that,” Hogg told me, “that I couldn’t just do nothing.”
So he grabbed his bike and rode back to school, determined to seize control of the day’s narrative, and to give voices to his friends, his classmates, their parents — anyone who was ready to talk, regardless of their political point of view. “I knew that if we didn’t treat this differently,” David says, “that this would be another one-week story, tops. Which is just so horrible, that this is how numb we’ve become.”
* * *
Hogg is no stranger to the totemic role guns play in American life. His father, Kevin Hogg, was a Navy helicopter pilot, and then an FBI agent in Southern California, so he wore a gun on his hip for much of his life.
He remembers, as a second-grader, watching Dad clean his bureau-issued revolver on a workbench in the garage. He remembers shooting guns for the first time — assault weapons included — as a fourth-grader.
“I understand why people want to own guns,” Hogg says. “It’s to protect their families. But are we going to create an America where the only way we can protect our families is through arming every single person?”
Ensuring the answer to that question is “no” is what fuels the activists behind March For Our Lives and what brought them together the night of the shooting, and in the many nights since then. Originally calling themselves “Never Again” (a name that proved overly hopeful), the group grew, rapidly.
These children — and they were children — knew they had to push the grief aside for now, and keep the momentum building. Maybe it was that subconscious step — forward, rather than aside — that made the biggest difference this time around: Play through the pain, because if you don’t, the field disappears.
And so they boarded packed buses to visit state legislators in Florida to demand stricter gun control. They announced a march on Washington — carefully calculating a date far enough into the future that they could somehow pull off the logistics; but not so far that momentum would wane.
Hundreds of thousands showed in the nation’s capital; more than 1 million worldwide marched in solidarity. The rag-tag group of high schoolers from the debate team, student government and the drama club became a powerhouse, raising millions of dollars in funding and pulling in millions more supporters.
* * *
Will that be enough? Could anything be enough, at this point? With so much behind us, it’s hard to be bullish on the future.
Back in that auditorium in Las Vegas — all stars and stripes, though now a little listless, after lunch — Beto O’Rourke ambled onto the stage, waved to the crowd, and took a seat next to the moderator. He was among friends.
Though he was behind in the polls, he was well ahead of the pack in moving the needle on gun control. After a mass shooting felled 22 in his hometown of El Paso, Texas, in August while he was out campaigning, O’Rourke became the grown-up face of the movement. He is one of the few candidates who supports a mandatory buy-back of assault weapons — meaning, if you own an AR-15, that snarling gun I’d fired the day before, under O’Rourke’s plan, you would own it no longer.
O’Rourke has an easy, open smile that always seems welcoming — and mighty Texan of him. But on stage, and with the luxury of having heard five of his rivals, he took aim at his opponents.
Most other candidates support a voluntary buy-back of these guns, and a ban on further sales, but that would leave many millions of them on the streets. The outcome would be a little bit like an announcement at a baseball game that beer sales will stop an hour from now: Better stock up.
The other candidates, he said, “are worried about the polls and want to triangulate or talk to the consultants or listen to the focus groups.” The smile faded. “The polls, if you need them, support this.”
For those in the room, it was a winning message. To the rest of America, less so. O’Rourke left the hall to a standing ovation, but he also left Las Vegas polling at just 1 percent in the latest update from Monmouth. And then, a month later, last Friday, he announced he was dropping out the race.
Are things going to change? I wanted to speak with someone who’d seen all this before; someone familiar with the cycle of outrage, demand for action, followed by weeks or months or years of apathy and then — inevitably — the next tragedy.
Eli Saslow is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Washington Post, and has covered — in one form or another — mass shootings from coast to coast over the past decade. Searching washingtonpost.com for “Eli Saslow” and “shooting” returns 276 stories. His specialty is coming in after the news vans leave and telling the stories of those left to pick up the pieces.
Curious for his take, I reach him by phone at a coffee shop near his home in Oregon: Is this latest push like all the rest, or is there actually change in the air?
“There’s definitely something that feels different,” Saslow tells me. And then there’s a pause as he considers his next words. “Unfortunately,” he said, “this isn't the first time it’s felt different.”
Tim Ball is POLITICO's creative director. Before moving to Brussels in 2015, he spent nearly two decades working as a journalist in the United States. See more here: https://www.politico.eu/interactive/gun-violence-gun-crime-a-very-american-epidemic-las-vegas-columbine-sandy-hook-parkland-2020-presidential-campaign/
11/5/19, 4:00 AM CET Updated 11/5/19, 2:00 PM CET
