Highland Park Is My Hometown. Living Abroad Provides Perspective
Spending the evening sat glued to a janky US news stream, I reflected that this does not occur in the United Kingdom, nor in any other developed country in the world.
“Her family [was] sitting in front of Blue Mercury. The gunman was on top of Ross’s. He fired toward Walker Brothers. If he had fired straight, it would have hit her.”
Anyone who has experienced a mass shooting in their community can speak to the surrealism and fear felt when receiving texts such as these, which I was sent from my mother on Independence Day. The unreality of hearing Wolf Blitzer announce on national television that my hometown was the victim of senseless violence, of watching footage of recognizable streets and shops that have turned into a warzone, and of knowing friends’ parents who became heroes, is truly indescribable. I grieve endlessly for my community.
I was not intending to celebrate the Fourth of July. Though expatriating to the United Kingdom does bring out a certain amount of national pride simply by nature of being an “other”, seldom anything about America has been worth toasting in my adult life.
There is something rotten in the USA. Since I came of voting age in 2016, I’ve seen the slow collapse of democratic, electoral, and judicial institutions, numbing gun violence, countless acts of terror by white nationalists, an attempted insurrection, the dissolution of a woman’s right to her own body, and the cessation of hope for timely climate change policy.
But I could not have celebrated even if I wanted to. I spent Monday evening sat glued to a janky US news stream as I waited to hear how my hometown, 4,000 miles away, had been, like 307 others (as of that day) in 2022, afflicted by the plague of mass gun violence.
Highland Park is a bubble of a community. Though I was raised in the post-Columbine generation of students who were subjected to regular “code black” school shooter drills, we were unironically aware of the privilege that came with living in our town. No place in the world felt safer. Affluence hid the dangers of the world from our predominantly Jewish community. Michael Jordan’s mansion was a short drive away, Ferris Buehler was filmed right there. The most dangerous situations I knew law enforcement to handle were noise complaints against drunk high schoolers throwing basement parties and sixteen-year-olds hotboxing their cars.
Sure, kids at school would morbidly joke that the quiet antisocial kid could turn out to be a mass shooter someday. It is a topic of conversation that has occurred, I’m confident, in every school across America over the past two decades. On Monday, for Highland Park, those crude immature jokes became real.
The alleged perpetrator lived two blocks away from my childhood home. His siblings were classmates of my siblings. His father operated a beloved sandwich shop I frequented as a teen before he unsuccessfully ran for mayor in 2019.
The deceased are people who, as I did every year when I was a kid, attended a parade in exuberance of their country.
Close friends barely escaped with their lives. The unlucky victims have had their bodies unspeakably torn open by a young man who, despite threatening in September 2019 “to kill everyone” —leading police to remove sixteen knives, a dagger, and a sword from his possession—was in 2022 able to legally purchase a gun.
Highland Park was one of the first towns in the country to enact strict gun control laws in the wake of Sandy Hook in 2013. It is a community where something of this nature should not be able to happen, if only the rest of the country could summon the courage to ensure the same.
A strong and growing majority of Americans believe in tougher gun safety measures. While President Biden, in response to the shooting, pointed to the successful passage of the recent Bipartisan Safer Communities Act as an example of progress, there is indeed “much more work to do,” including instituting bans on assault weapons.
Spending the evening sat glued to a janky US news stream, I reflected that this does not occur in the United Kingdom, nor in any other developed country in the world.
It is an argument that is frequently brought up by anti-gun advocates. I’ve grown up with it comically hammered home to me by John Oliver on The Daily Show, by The Onion, and by common sense: this is a uniquely American issue, one with a solution that elected representatives, primarily on the right wing, are either too cowardly or too corrupt to wilfully resolve. These poor exemplars of leadership should be voted out of office.
They blame senseless violence on anything except the weapons that enable it, in particular concerns over mental health. But mentally ill people (almost all of whom are nonviolent) exist all around the world, including here in London—it’s just that no one has ease of access to guns that allow them to terminate the lives of so many innocent civilians at once.
The further I distance myself from my home country, the more indefensible it becomes. No one I have spoken to in Europe can understand our obsession with firearms nor our peculiar electoral system that has disallowed us from correcting it.
No, England isn’t perfect. It is suffering from the effects of its own populist, right-wing government, even if Boris Johnson has finally been forced out after Tories discovered their spines. But here, I don’t have to worry that I will be shot if I attend a family-friendly parade.
Americans could learn a thing or two from the public that makes up its progenitor, a country which has succeeded in enforcing gun responsibility. In response to a cost-of-living crisis that is proving devastating for a country whose real term wage growth this year fell at the fastest rate in over two decades, widespread strikes are taking place in all sectors of the economy.
The majority of Americans want much-needed, adequate reform on guns, among a host of other issues. When we will be willing to similarly risk our livelihoods for our lives?