How to Frame a Shooting

As a person who was 10 when Sandy Hook happened, 13 during the Charleston Church Shooting, and 15 during the Parkland high school shooting, with countless more in between and outside, I had begun to think this was a part of American culture that would exist in perpetuity. For my generation, fire drills coincided with active shooter drills. We were taught how to be quiet, where to hide, and the very real stipulation that we could die in school. Just two weeks ago, there was a school shooting in Colorado where two young students were injured in the attack. As most of us know, this attack was on the same day as the Charlie Kirk shooting, so it ended up on the back burner of the major news networks. Which is where most acts of gun violence now end up, unless, of course, these acts can be transfigured into political power.

In the wake of the Charlie Kirk shooting, GOP politicians have espoused rhetoric painting the death of Kirk as a political act from the Left, with little to no evidence of the shooter’s actual political leaning at the time. President Donald Trump championed this message, saying, “The radicals on the left are the problem…and they’re vicious and they’re horrible and they’re politically savvy.” Additionally, during Charlie Kirk’s memorial service, which acted more as a political rally, Chief of Staff Stephen Miller gave a speech saying, “We will prevail over the forces of wickedness and evil. And to those trying to incite violence against us, those trying to foment hatred against us, what do you have? You have nothing. You are nothing.” Most likely, any objection to these statements will be met with, ‘Well, we meant anyone EVIL on the left… you’re being crazy,’ but it’s not hard to read between the lines at this point. Shootings and gun violence are now rhetorical weapons to be used as the political establishment sees fit. It is not enough to say thoughts and prayers, as the GOP has now found out, but to espouse feelings of retribution against their supposed enemies. 

At the early hours of today, 9/24, there was a shooting at an ICE detention facility in Dallas, Texas. During the attack, two detainees of the facility were injured, with another detainee dying. In the minutes after this attack, both Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem took an interesting perspective, with Vance tweeting, “The obsessive attack on law enforcement, particularly ICE, must stop. I’m praying for everyone hurt in this attack and for their families,” and Noem tweeting, “There was a shooting this morning at the Dallas @ICEgov Field Office. Details are still emerging but we can confirm there were multiple injuries and fatalities. The shooter is deceased by a self-inflicted gun shot wound.  While we don’t know motive yet, we know that our ICE law enforcement is facing unprecedented violence against them. It must stop. Please pray for the victims and their families.”. Neither of these statements acknowledges that no ICE agents were harmed. It was the detainees, the very people ICE imprisons, who bled. Their bodies were only useful insofar as they could be leveraged to prove ICE was under siege.

As mentioned earlier, the GOP has realized that thoughts and prayers are not as powerful as espousals of retribution, and in a world and news cycle constantly shifting and moving far too fast for our monkey brains, it makes sense to trust the supposed authority on these subjects. For the MAGA group that is Donald Trump and his wild band of misfits. When Trump, Vance, or Noem say something is the cause of left-wing violence, there’s no reason not to trust them; you already do, and have far more pertinent things to take care of in your actual life. Ethos, thus, is the catch, supposing that what Trump or any of the government says is effectively true, both takes the load of thought off your mind and confirms your internal bias of what the truth is. The obvious rebuttal to this is assuming there is some kind of pushback from the opposing side. To hope that the Democrats will not bow to the lies and fabrications from the right, but instead, in recent months and years, the D’s have only seemed to capitulate to the R’s framework. This is in hopes of winning over Republican voters to the Democratic side, which anyone with some semblance of logic knows is an ultimately losing battle. The Trump administration did not win because they were sensible to both sides, but instead cast the D’s as the enemy. When portraying the other side as fallible to your base and yourself as infallible, you no longer need to worry about debate or truth. What you say is gospel. This allows free and open access for the Trump administration to feel free to act in any way they please, while utilizing any moment in American history to garner support, whether true or not. This framing is then quickly calcified into common sense. By the time Democrats curate a response, it’s usually in the same key: condemning division, vague statements about healing. This only reinforces the GOP premise, every shooting is first and foremost a sign of loyalty or threat. Violence creates panic, and panic creates narrative. At no point will the violence be confronted as a national failure, but instead will be distributed as political capital. And so the shootings continue as fixtures of American life, each one claimed by one side or the other.