Columbine. Sandy Hook. Parkland. Uvalde. What do we do now?

Columbine. Parkland. Pulse. Virginia Tech. Sandy Hook. Las Vegas.

Now Buffalo and Uvalde. Two more tragic mass shootings, added to the heartbreaking list of the worst such incidents in American history.

Does nothing change? That is what it can seem like. Politicians make familiar utterances about thoughts and prayers, and there’s a spurt of citizen energy and media attention, but that fades, and big things intended to lower the nation’s shocking level of deaths caused by firearms don’t happen.

It may be true that Washington has taken little concerted action on gun violence in recent years. It’s a difficult, complex issue – and national politics is polarized and too often gridlocked.

But some states and cities have taken significant steps to respond to gun tragedies, says Daniel W. Webster, co-director of the Johns Hopkins University Center for Gun Violence Solutions. Grassroots organizing against gun violence is growing.

And it is important to push back against the fatalist attitude that terrible shootings will continue, says Professor Webster. Accepting them as inevitable becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. There are things that work to curb such violence. They can be implemented, realistically.

Two tragedies in a month could be a tipping point.

“Frustration and momentum for change does multiply,” says Professor Webster.

“It starts with our neighbors”

It’s been 48 hours since a gunman ran into Robb Elementary School here and killed 21 people, including 19 fourth graders. In that time, Brandon Amor has driven from San Antonio to Uvalde and back, a three-hour round trip between the town where he spent much of his life and the city he now lives in.

Mr. Amor is in his early 20s. He was born around the time a massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado ushered in a new era of fear and social paralysis around mass shootings, particularly at schools. The country has wrestled with the crisis ever since, with little meaningful, visible progress. Now it has come to Mr. Amor’s hometown, and 24 hours after the shooting he’s audibly fighting the same numbness and despair.

“I hate that feeling. I know a lot of people hate that feeling,” he said on Wednesday. “You feel like you can’t do much.”

He drove to Uvalde Tuesday night after he heard about the shooting, to go to a Mass and, generally, to support his hometown. Watching the town crawling with law enforcement and journalists, seeing TV trucks lining the streets and helicopters flying overhead, he barely recognized it. He isn’t sure Uvalde will ever be the same again, and he doesn’t know what can be done to spare other communities the pain and chaos brought on his town this week.

“It starts with our neighbors. Love your neighbor like you would love yourself,” he adds. “Maybe that’s where we need to start.”

Can Congress break through?

The problem of guns and gun violence is difficult because it touches on many of the most intractable divides in American society: red versus blue states, urban areas versus rural ones, hunters versus non-shooters, and economic and racial schisms.

In the wake of Buffalo and Uvalde, Congress is struggling to reach agreement on some sort of response that could draw 60 votes in the Senate and pass. That might be a national “red flag” law empowering law enforcement to seize guns from individuals who appear to be a danger to themselves or others.

But even a minimal gun bill may not pass muster. In general, Republicans oppose gun control bills, saying that proposed changes would not prevent the worst incidents from happening, and that gun ownership is a foundational right of Americans, enshrined in the Constitution.

Pressed on possible gun restrictions by reporters this week, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas echoed the traditional GOP view this way: “That doesn’t work. It’s not effective. It doesn’t fight crime.”

However, Texas’ senior senator, John Cornyn, has taken a quieter, more hands-on approach – negotiating with Democratic senators this week to craft potential solutions. He did this at the behest of GOP Leader Mitch McConnell, who told reporters, “I am hopeful that we could come up with a bipartisan solution.”

Public polls generally show strong support for specific gun control measures. A recent New York Times/Morning Consult survey found 86% support for universal background checks, 85% support for banning gun sales to stalkers, and 76% approval of mandatory safe storage for guns in homes, among other proposed national laws.

There are many reasons why such figures do not translate into legislative changes, however. An energized organized minority, such as gun owners led by the National Rifle Association, can often block action by a less-interested, unorganized majority. Many red state politicians know that a majority of their voters, particularly in primaries, are committed gun owners. And few citizens base their votes in elections on single issues. 

“Where do we start first?”

The next day, normal life has resumed for Mr. Amor. He’s back in San Antonio, back at work. But he’s been talking with his supervisor about the shooting. They’ve talked about red flag laws, about writing lawmakers and channeling grief and anger into political action. He returns to what he was thinking about the day before, and he wonders if there’s something deeper at play.

“Love your neighbor like you love yourself – but nobody knows their neighbors anymore,” he says. “Everybody’s just stuck in [their] own world, and nothing else really matters.”

People have tunnel vision, he adds. “It’s all fast-paced, and then it’s either fast-paced in the right direction or it’s fast-paced in the wrong direction.”

Sitting outside at a Starbucks near his work, he cycles through possible solutions. Hardened schools, red flag laws, raising the age to buy a long gun. But then he cycles through all the arguments against those solutions. Under the fierce Texas sun, he debates himself over and over, until he throws his hands in the air and flashes a rueful smile.

“It’s easy to [say], ‘It’s out of our hands,’” he says. “But how do we – ah. I guess, where do we start first?”

What about taking a step back? We always see the same pattern: an initial wave of grief and anger, and then life moves on, because it has to. Do we need to not move on somehow? How do we do that?

“You bottle up the anger, and you shake it up and you use it as a motive,” he says. “Shove it in front of their face every single time we have to vote. Make sure they know that we do not want this to happen again, it cannot happen again.”

“As long as we try to entertain the reasons why we couldn’t, we’re never going to see the reasons why we can, and really take on the responsibility to do those things,” he adds.

“Accept small victories”

Reducing gun violence today might seem daunting, perhaps even impossible. But America has handled complex social problems before. Take auto safety in general. Over the past 100 years, the fatality rate per 100 million miles driven has been reduced by 90% due to better roads, traffic engineering, and car devices from seat belts to air bags.

Cutting gun violence will similarly require a systematic approach. Professor Webster compares it to cutting the teen drunken driving rate. Under pressure from the citizen activist group Mothers Against Drunk Driving, states raised the legal drinking age from 18 to 21. Driver education stressed the dangers of inebriation. Driving tipsy became not humorous, but dangerous.

In 2020, Professor Webster published a study analyzing data on specific firearms policies dating back to the 1980s. His takeaway from this was that two things in particular had a strong effect: requiring licenses for firearm purchase, and banning sales of large-capacity ammunition magazines.

Licensing gun owners, akin to licensing drivers, had a powerful effect on all forms of gun violence, including homicides and suicides. Limiting magazines would target mass shootings in particular, which are a limited percentage of gun violence, but have been on the rise.

Following recent school shootings – such as the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, in 2018 and the Sandy Hook Elementary tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012 – a number of states acted to expand the background checks required for gun ownership, Professor Webster points out. Nineteen states, including red states Florida and Indiana, now have gun violence restraining “red flag” laws. Child access protection laws, which mandate safe storage of guns in locked safes in homes with children, could also be effective, and possibly passable in the current political environment.

Perhaps most important, following past tragedies a grassroots energy around anti-gun violence activism has arisen in the U.S. “Moms Demand Action” now has chapters in every state, says Professor Webster. 

“Parkland started a youth movement that expanded grassroots energy,” he says.

Another expert says that citizens organizing against gun violence might take lessons from another recent social effort – the push to ban or limit abortions in the U.S.

David Meyer, a sociologist from the University of California, Irvine who has written about the gun regulation movement, says the anti-abortion movement demonstrated a number of points that the anti-gun violence advocates should keep in mind. It accepted that social change could take a long time. It showed persistence matters. It learned that public opinion helps, but is not definitive. It was unafraid of partisan politics. It did not ignore the courts.

And it showed that progress can be incremental.

“You have to be willing to accept small victories. ... Don’t be dispirited by getting so much less than you need,” says Professor Meyer.

“Get people talking”

Erika Alonzo moved from Uvalde to Austin, Texas, seven years ago. She rushed back this week after the shooting. Her parents settled here after they emigrated from Mexico, and her sisters are teachers in the town. Like everyone else, they have spent the past few days in a state of numb disbelief.

On Thursday, there is a pleasant distraction. Ms. Alonzo’s nephews are graduating from high school in Laredo, a city two hours away, and the family is hurrying to get on the road.

Leaning against a fence in the front yard, she contemplates the scale of America’s mass shooting crisis.

“If we have the right resources, it can be solved,” she says.

Eighteen-year-olds shouldn’t be able to buy those kinds of guns, for example, she says. But “it also starts with the school district, and I just don’t think they were prepared for it” in Uvalde, she adds.

“We have very little resources, and they never thought it was going to happen here,” she continues. “I think that there’s a lot of small towns that don’t think that it’s going to happen.”

The car is filling up, and it’s almost time to hit the road. Will this be a wake-up call then, for Uvalde at least?

Ms. Alonzo doesn’t think so. “It will be in the news for a little bit, until the next big story,” she says.

But Uvalde has been chaotic this week, and she believes it’s important that the town remains chaotic. It quickly became clear that the initial timeline law enforcement gave of the shooting didn’t add up. On Friday, the head of Texas’ Department of Public Safety admitted that up to 19 police officers waited more than 78 minutes to break into the classroom, while inside students dialed 911 repeatedly for help.

“It was the wrong decision. Period,” Col. Steven McCraw said at a press conference.

Uvalde, Ms. Alonzo says, needs to remain the big story.

“Keep the children’s names in the news. Really make sure that nothing gets covered up, that everyone knows exactly what happened,” says Ms. Alonzo.

“Continue to talk about it so that things do change,” she adds. “Get people angry, get people mad, get people upset, get people talking and wanting to make a change.”