A time of senseless tragedy—and cautious progress
BY CHARLOTTE ALTER
IN AMERICA’S BATTLE AGAINST GUN VIOLENCE, 2022 was a time in which nothing seemed to change—and yet some things finally did. Another round of mass shootings seemed to echo earlier attacks in a morbid rhyme of senseless loss. But this year Congress also offered hope that the rhythm might finally be disrupted, passing federal gun-safety legislation for the first time in nearly 30 years.
Americans have said “Never again” many times before. (A cover TIME released in June, at right, drew on a motif that we have had sad cause to repeat several times in recent years, including after the 2018 Parkland shooting.) But in 2022, “again” seemed to come with alarming frequency. Ten years after the Sandy Hook massacre, a gunman murdered 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Six years after the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, a shooter killed five people in an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs. Three years after a racially motivated shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, authorities are investigating the massacre of 10 people at a grocery store in Buffalo, N.Y., as a hate crime. Bullets flew at high schools and colleges and at a parade in Highland Park, Ill., that was packed with young families celebrating the Fourth of July. In May, the CDC announced that firearm deaths had become the leading cause of death for American children.
In some ways, these tragedies simply continued a drumbeat of slaughter that has defined American life for the past decade. It might be tempting to read 2022 as a grim reminder of the intractability of the problem. As of Dec. 6, there have been 620 mass shootings this year, according to the independent data-collection group Gun Violence Archive, which counts incidents in which four or more people are shot (aside from the shooter). This year was on track to have the second most shootings since the group began tracking in 2013.
BUT EVEN IF 2022 WASN’T different, “what I can tell you is that it was different for me,” says Kitty Brandtner, a recruiter and mother of three in Winnetka, Ill. After the shooting at the Highland Park Fourth of July parade, she started March Fourth, a nonprofit devoted to lobbying for a federal assault-weapons ban. “If not now, when?” she says. “We’ve got several massacres over the course of months, so what are we waiting for?”
Brandtner wasn’t the only one driven to action. In June, President Joe Biden signed the first federal gun-safe
