One of the things that has always been captivating to me about the TV show Alone is how it illustrates our endless capacity for invention in the absolute worst of times. It's a reality show about survival, but really what that means is adaptability. When you lose a supply of arrows, can you fashion more from branches and scavenged parts? Do you know how to use sphagnum moss to treat a wound after an unfortunate ax misadventure? If a crafty vole has raided your stores of fish, will you be able to find more food or resort to gnarly bark-based teas and intermittent fasting as the frost sets in?
It's a manufactured danger. But part of the appeal is that there's no one coming to the rescue. Ultimately you survive and win, or wind up another sucker ferried back to civilization after an intense flirtation with giardia. Either way, these people have to figure out a new way to live every day.
I've been thinking about adaptations a lot in the week since the most recent apparent assassination attempt on Donald Trump. It's been a week since someone was in close proximity of the former president with a semi-automatic rifle, the second such time in less than three months. The shooter at the campaign rally in July was killed by the Secret Service after firing on Trump; the suspect in the golf course plot is in FBI custody after his plans were foiled.
When someone takes aim at a former U.S. president and current presidential nominee, you expect a swift reckoning. Back in July the head of the Secret Service resigned, and Congress promised an investigation. Republicans assured the public there would be an investigation of the investigation; they also blamed the Democrats' rhetoric for all but pulling the trigger. Now, after the most recent incident, the conversation has instead turned to whether the former president, who is notorious for playing golf and stewing in the faded opulence of the golf courses he owns, should be playing less golf because of the security risks. The problem is the Secret Service. Or the Democrats' mean words. Or the noxious would-be autocrat who has only ever listened to the urges emitting from the pleasure centers of his brain. The problem is the golf.
No one has said maybe it's time Americans should have less access to guns. Because the guns are everywhere. Four people were killed in a shooting at a family party on the island of Oahu in the beginning of this month. Four people died—two students and two teachers—after a mass shooting at Apalachee High School in Georgia that also left nine others injured on Sept. 4. Five people were left seriously injured following a shooting off Interstate 75 in Kentucky on Sept. 7. On the same day of Trump's golf game, police opened fire on a subway fare evader in Brooklyn and wounded four people, including one of the cops involved.
Instead of talking about how to stop a public health emergency with a well known cause, the conversation moved on, again, to solving for life with acceptable violence. A sheriff in Florida saying any teen who calls in threats to their school will get a perp walk and mug shot as a lesson. The parents of students killed in the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School releasing a video game to teach kids how to survive when a gunman enters the building. The New York Times publishing a story on the growth industry of bulletproof school supplies:
Steve Naremore, owner of the ballistic shield company TuffyPacks, acknowledged that it was a "morbid industry." He said that he sold tens of thousands of products to parents within a week of the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.
"People say, 'Oh, you're just profiting off the carnage,'" he said. "And you know what I say? 'Look, don’t blame me. I’m just the fire extinguisher manufacturer, OK?'"
TuffyPacks to solve your fears. Harden all the targets. More secure golf courses; let the good walk remain unspoiled. The answers are all a sign of America's collective despair and political sclerosis, if not its abiding faith in freedom through capitalism.
It's an understatement to say America learned no lessons after 26 people were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012. Congress couldn't find enough courage or other meaningful motivation to pass an assault weapons ban after families had to bury 20 children during the holiday season. So we've been stuck in a traumatic loop where the spasms of gunfire and critical wounds stir political promises, while the only real consequence is a gradual numbing and the faint resignation that it's only a matter of time before things get worse. Parkland happened: 17 students and staff were killed. After that it was Uvalde: 19 students and two teachers dead.
Now we've reached the point where assassination attempts on a former president are just another conversation in passing, one of the many persistent markers of life in any American city, as regular as weather on the eights and the college football scores. The unspoken truth is that if the life of a child doesn't matter, that means anyone is forfeit, even if you once occupied the White House. It's a bleakly egalitarian and uniquely American concept.
To be clear: The problem remains, as ever, feckless politicians and their handlers, those who cozy up to power in the name of public good. Congress passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act in 2022, which has a nice-sounding name for a law that effectively changed very little. All the background checks and mental health screenings and crackdowns on gun trafficking amounted to theater. One party would rather let the death toll rise in defense of the gun, aided by a Supreme Court that believes a conveniently retconned Second Amendment describes the only constitutional right worth preserving. On the other side we have a party caught in its own moral collapse, spinning loose as it offers thoughts and prayers for some, sensible gun measures for the rest. We all just watched a presidential debate in which gun violence was barely mentioned. One candidate has been shot at; the other is telling Oprah she'd pop off a round at anyone who dares break into her home.
In the absence of any material change to the role guns play in this country's civics, all the rest of us have is a basic need to adapt to an unforgiving environment. We go through the motions of our day and let that momentum become a form of forgetting; we numb up and find a way to adjust. So kids run active shooter drills before they've learned multiplication tables. Teachers conceal and carry. States loosen handgun laws because the only way to talk to a gun is with another gun, regardless of who is "the good guy" in that scenario.
None of it has to be this way, but we know no one is coming to the rescue. It's that knowledge, twisted and gripped with the anxiety of the life expectancy of those you love, that eats away at your being. You're left with a brittle survival. You're left to manage, and that very human response makes the hurt grow as the collective sickness prospers. The guns will continue to kill us. Cope is a terrible way to not die.
