The Rev. Bodie Gilbert, pastor of the Bering Memorial United Church of Christ, takes part in a protest rally outside the annual convention of the National Rifle Association in Houston on Friday, May 27, 2022. The convention opened days after the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, which killed 19 elementary school students and two teachers. (Annie Mulligan/The New York Times)
When Republicans — reciting NRA talking points like religious zealots chanting mantras — insist that the best way to stop school shooters is by arming teachers, I’m reminded of Carl Robert Brown.
Brown was a 51-year-old middle-school history teacher seething with imagined grievances. On an August day in 1982, Brown, angry over a $20 repair bill, gunned down 11 employees at a machine shop near his Hialeah home, leaving eight dead and three injured.
A witness crashed his car into Brown, killing him before he reached his next destination, Hialeah Middle School, where he planned “to kill everyone there.”
Imagine if Carl Brown, when he was teaching a classroom full of rowdy teenagers, had been packing heat.
South Florida Sun Sentinel columnist Fred Grimm. Rolando Otero, South Florida Sun Sentinel (Rolando Otero / Sun Sentinel)
In the 40 years since, I’ve written so many variations of the same bloody theme that I can categorize them by venue: factories, offices, churches, schools, post offices, college campuses, concerts, restaurants, shopping centers, bars and, of course, here in Fort Lauderdale, an airport and a beach maintenance shack.
In the aftermath, I’ve dutifully reported just as many variations of the statement from Archbishop Thomas Kelly in 1989, after a fired worker returned to a Louisville printing plant with an AK-47 and two MAC-11 semiautomatic machine pistols. He gunned down 19 of his former co-workers, killing seven.
“We must pledge ourselves to do all we can to see that this never happens again,” the archbishop said. “There has got to be a way to stop these dreadful tragedies.”
In 1989, I was naïve enough to suppose the archbishop was expressing a universal sentiment. Surely lawmakers could grasp the correlation between dreadful weapons and dreadful tragedies.
But a cascade of gun massacres since — the worst committed with assault weapons — has amassed a death tally that proves that America has enacted no effective gun laws or regulations.
As a journalist, I’ve accumulated my own gruesome archive of mass murder stories — the body count into the hundreds — confirming that elected officials won’t dare inconvenience America’s gun fetish. It hasn’t mattered that the firepower available at gun shops became so fearsome that police officers were often outgunned.
Between 2009 and 2012, I covered five mass shootings in the bleaker zip codes of Miami-Dade County. Drive-by gangsters with assault rifles sprayed mourners outside a funeral home, two birthday parties, a street corner dice game, a wake. Six died, 42 were wounded. Nearly all the victims were simply unlucky, unintended victims.
But inner-city gangbanger shootings make no impression outside South Florida. They rate a few fleeting local stories, but are ignored by the national media.
Not that it much matters when mass murders make national news. Gun zealots can still fend off even the most tepid feints at gun control in Congress. The AR-15 killing of 26 first graders and teachers Sandy Hook generated no more remedy than “thoughts and prayers.”
In the aftermath of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School mass shootings — 17 dead, 17 injured — Florida managed to prohibit “bump stocks” that convert semi-automatic rifles to rapid fire. The legal age for firearm purchases was raised to 21. Laws were passed allowing police, under certain conditions, to confiscate weapons from gun owners gone loony.
But nationally, not much. A federal regulation (not a law) banning bump stocks has, so far, withstood court challenges. But Republicans have stonewalled universal background checks or raising the firearm purchase age or — heaven forbid — banning weapons like the AR-15.
Nor have the horrors at Uvalde changed things. Senators Marco Rubio and Rick Scott have made it clear that they’re not budging.
No surprise. Nightmarish scenarios at a nightclub in Orlando, a concert in Las Vegas, a movie theater in Aurora, a synagogue in Pittsburgh, a church in Charleston and a Walmart in El Paso didn’t change Republican votes.
Their remedy for stopping gun violence remains putting firearms in the hands of the mythical “good guys,” although armed security guards and local cops failed to stop a shooter with an assault weapon at Uvalde.
But give Republicans credit. They’ve been brilliant, distracting constituents from insane gun policies by ginning up fake issues. As if critical race theory was more urgent than 19 fourth graders murdered in their classroom.
They’re now pushing their own fix for the gun violence problem in Florida: Allow unvetted gun owners to carry weapons, no permit necessary.
Finally, after covering this deathly continuum 40 years, I can finally write about the Republican solution to mass murder: more guns and more gunslingers.
Ingenious. Only wish I had thought of it first.
Fred Grimm, a longtime resident of Fort Lauderdale, has worked as a journalist in South Florida since 1976. Reach him by email at leogrimm@gmail.com or on Twitter @grimm_fred.