EDIT: The US did pass the Bipartisan Safer Communities act. When I wrote this piece it seemed like that wasn’t going to happen. I’m very pleased that action did happen. While it’s not perfect, it is certainly steps in the right direction.
My heart, and many tears, go out to the families and beautiful kids affected by the Uvalde shooting. I debated a lot whether I could, or should, write anything here. Ultimately, I felt as a safety practitioner I may have something small to add.
Tragedies reliably happen, even with deliberate safety design efforts. Car collisions, bullying, medical errors, sexual assault, bridge failures, contagious infection, and many other possible risks. When you have billions of people interacting in continually new ways, things will go wrong. However, we’re supposed to learn from these.
When I’ve seen something go wrong, we seek to understand it and then use the learnings from that to make everything safer looking ahead. When a new type of infection occurs, like COVID, we study it and then roll out new techniques to prevent and manage the risk. If a bridge fails, engineers do a post mortem failure analysis and use those findings to enhance the safety of future buildings. It’s a never-ending effort for continual improvement.
This effort takes three things:
A common understanding of what is considered wrong
Thoughtful analysis of a problem
Urgent action once viable solutions are found
Unfortunately, that has been a challenge for gun violence. There’s not common understanding of what is wrong and right. Accordingly any efforts to improve, even if initially small, become intractable. We are having a values crisis compounded by a governance crisis. Even if the majority want positive change, the elected officials don’t necessarily enact it.
“I’m not looking for perfect.” - Senator Chris Murphy
What’s needed is to start from a shared set of values. From there we can get alignment on problems, goals, and solutions. I sure hope we can get there.