America witnessed something this week never seen before in such gruesome and vivid detail—the slaughter of far too many innocent people gone too soon. A seemingly endless number of witnesses told harrowing survival stories, with many wondering how they made it out alive. The hail of bullets rained down relentlessly on attendees of the Route 91 Harvest country music festival for about 10 minutes as concert goers hid and scrambled and jumped fences in a firefight more reminiscent of a war zone than a night out on the Vegas Strip.
"This country has become a killing field," New York Daily News journalist Mike Lupica noted grimly on MSNBC.
Yes, it has. On a yearly basis now, we are setting new records for the "deadliest" mass shooting in modern American history. After every catastrophe, people ask, Will this time be different? Will it be sufficiently sick and sad and outrageous enough to force lawmakers—Republicans, in particular—into passing gun safety legislation into law?
But the latest carnage just might have created a unique opening for several reasons—not least of which is because of the sheer scope and horror of the tragedy, along with the ready documentation of it. Some 22,000 people attended the concert last Sunday, at least 59 of them died, and more than 500 were injured. Survivors of these events usually recreate pieces of the story in retrospect, leaving the rest of us to imagine what it was like. That's bad enough. But this week video and audio of the actual shooting flooded our screens, leaving little to the imagination. It was simply chilling.
The scene also ripped at the heart of country music lovers, a fan base so supportive of gun rights that the National Rifle Association launched NRA Country in 2010 in an effort to cultivate closer ties with country music artists and their listeners. But in the aftermath of the weekend, many of the artists that had previously partnered with the NRA either declined to comment on their affiliation or explicitly said they were no longer associated with the gun group. Country music star Rosanne Cash, an advocate for gun safety, encouraged her fellow musicians to "stand up" to the NRA in a New York Times op-ed, writing:
There is no other way to say this: The N.R.A. funds domestic terrorism.
But the most telling conversion came from one of the concert's performers, Caleb Keeter of the the Josh Abbot Band, who explained in a twitter post that even though members of the band's crew had legal firearms on the bus, "They were useless."
"We couldn't touch them for fear police might think that we were part of the massacre and shoot us," he wrote.
Keeter and his crew were the epitome of the "good guys with a gun" the NRA always touts as the best defense against bad guys with guns, yet they were as helpless as everyone without a weapon.
A self-declared lifelong "proponent of the 2nd Amendment," Keeter concluded, "We need gun control RIGHT. NOW."
Some criticized Keeter's conversion as too late to the game.
"I mean...really? CHILDREN were mowed down in their classroom. Six year olds. SIX YEAR OLDS. THAT didn't convince you?" one person responded on twitter.
On one hand, I share the outrage. But on the other, these are exactly the type of conversions that build a movement over time. After the Pulse Nightclub shooting that took 49 lives last year, I wrote an op-ed arguing that the gun safety movement would eventually gain enough steam to pass legislation once, sadly, enough Americans have a direct personal relationship to it—either through being the victim of gun violence themselves or knowing someone who was. That's how the LGBTQ movement changed the heart of America over a time period pollsters still marvel at—people came out of the closet in droves over the course of a couple decades and more Americans than ever realized they were personally connected to the issue in a way they hadn't been before.
In 1992, a majority of Americans — 56 percent — said they didn’t know anyone who was lesbian or gay; but by 2010, the same CBS News poll found that number had fallen to just 22 percent. As gay people came out to their communities in increasing numbers and with greater visibility, they destroyed stereotypes and provided a personal attachment to the issue for millions of Americans, creating an urgency that wasn’t there before.
Unfortunately, the carnage in Las Vegas gave around 22,000 concert goers last Sunday a deeply personal connection to the havoc gun violence is wreaking on our country. As concert headliner Eric Church said in an emotional speech several days later, "Those were my people. Those were my fans."
"That night something broke in me," he added, choking back tears before he played a new song he had written titled, "Why not me?"
Of course, not everyone will reach the same conclusion Keeter did, but at the very least, the tragic event will spur reflection and difficult conversations in the exact demographic where we most need to start a different dialogue—among gun enthusiasts.
In fact, that may be why NRA officials actually made the highly unusual move this week of making a concession following one of these mass murders. In a statement, they said the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) should revisit a 2010 review of “bump stock” devices like those used by the Vegas gunman to turn his semi-automatic weapons into automatic killers.
“The NRA believes that devices designed to allow semi-automatic rifles to function like fully-automatic rifles should be subject to additional regulations,” NRA officials wrote.
It's not nearly good enough. Regulation is far easier to change on a whim than legislation is. If the ATF can conclude one thing in 2010 and the exact opposite in 2017, then its findings are totally fluid—which is exactly why the NRA expressed support for it rather than legislation. Still, the fact of the matter is, the NRA looked eager to avoid a high profile fight on this device that made the Vegas rampage so lethal.
Usually, the organization simply lies low for a while and then rears its ugly head to oppose new gun measures as soon as they materialize. Several days after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting on December 14, 2012, that took the lives of 20 children and six adults, the NRA issued a tepid statement saying members were “heartbroken.” But the group didn't really kick into gear until a couple days after President Obama vowed on December 19 to propose a package of new gun measures. Two days later, NRA officials held a press conference in which they explained that passing gun laws would only put children at greater risk and then proposed creating a national program spearheaded by the organization itself that would place armed security guards in every school.
Following the Pulse Nightclub shooting on June 12, 2016, they weren't nearly so delicate because the shooter wasn't white.
"Radical Islamic terrorists are not deterred by gun control laws," NRA chief lobbyist Chris Cox wrote in an op-ed published day after the shooting. "It’s time for us to admit that radical Islam is a hate crime waiting to happen. The only way to defeat them is to destroy them — not destroy the right of law-abiding Americans to defend ourselves."
But this week, their opening bid was a defensive posture. That's movement in the right direction, along with at least some Republicans expressing an openness to taking action. And even if it feels like a baby step given that our country accounts for about 4.4 percent of the world's population and nearly 50 percent of civilian-owned guns around the world, it's an opening that didn't exist before last weekend.
Passing laws is about perception and momentum. This week, the NRA concluded that neither of those two forces was on its side.