This commentary is by Walter Carpenter of Montpelier, who works in Vermont’s tourist business, is a writer and a health care activist, and survived a drive-by shooting.
The first was in 1972. The second was in 1993; the third was in 2015; the fourth was in 2017. These are the years when the culture of guns that America worships as a symbol of its “exceptionalism” directly or indirectly touched my life.
The first was my turn. It was on an August night in 1972. I had just turned 17 years old. I was on the ground, pressed to the earth by someone on top of me, my mouth kissing the grass as a stream of bullets punctured the leaves of the trees above us with a sickening sound of ripping and tearing and wondering if I would survive the next few minutes.
The barrage had come quickly, a rifle barrel poking through a passenger-side window of a car that pulled over out of the night as we were hanging out at a park.
Someone saw it before whoever was behind it pulled the trigger and sounded the alarm. Several Vietnam veterans (it was one of them who had seen the rifle sticking out the opened window) fresh from the jungles were with us that night. One of them flung me to the grass as the shots blasted overhead. Then the firing suddenly stopped and squealing tires replaced the banging of gunfire as the car sped off back into the night.
We were lucky. Due to that early warning, none of us got hit that night. We never found out who shot at us or why.
In 1993 a friend of mine was not as lucky. This was a woman who was 33 at the time, married and with several kids. She had no warning. She went down in a hail of semiautomatic fire from a man who had always been “a responsible gun owner.” I knew the man, too. This was in South Newbury, New Hampshire. He was a regular guy of northern New England, a deer hunter-type, and a devout believer in the sanctity of the Second Amendment.
He was furious over a permit decision gone against him and stormed into the town hall, where my friend worked, with his legally purchased semiautomatic and let loose his rage over that denial. My friend and another woman died instantly; a third survived, maimed for life.
It happened again in 2015 in Barre, Vermont. Another woman and a friend. She was a social worker and was gunned down over a custody ruling by a client with severe mental health issues and easy access to a gun.
In 2017, yet another friend, also female, a friend from high school, found herself a target of concentrated semiautomatic fire. She was at a music festival in Las Vegas when a lone shooter fired on the crowd from a hotel window, using AR-15s equipped with bumper stocks. He killed some 60 people and wounded over 400 in the worst mass shooting in our sordid history of mass shootings.
My high school friend was among those he missed, but before he shot himself he left her with a PTSD syndrome that will take a long time to heal if it ever does go away.
I know what that’s like. Fifty years after I was pressed on the ground and those bullets flew over my head, I am still scanning car windows, especially at night, looking for that lethal barrel that could be poking out from any one of them.
So now our gun culture has brought us another school massacre. What can be said about it has already been said by so many commentaries in VTDigger and elsewhere, but the unanswerable question of why will remain as it always does after these so deadly and easily preventable events. The survivors will never be the same again and that so-called American Dream (whatever that is) is gone forever from us.
American exceptionalism for us is the knowledge that it could easily happen again and we watch our surroundings warily. Vermont is not immune from this either.
Yet, the worst of it, beyond living with the trauma, is how we know that the corporate and political perpetrators who turned this country into a killing field for their own power and financial gain will never face prosecution. There will be no Nuremberg trials for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Sen. Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, the NRA, and all their ilk down through the years.
They are responsible for the bullets fired at me and those friends, and for those infamous places like Columbine, Newtown, Parkland and far, far too many more.
As that escaped slave turned abolitionist of the 19th century, Frederic Douglass, said in his famous Fourth of July speech in 1852: “Search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.”
Douglass was as right then as he is now. For us, this is what that much-ballyhooed “American exceptionalism” really is underneath its facade of red-white-and-blue, its Fourth of July, and all the rest of it. It is a sham as it always was a sham.
This is your country, not mine anymore. I hope that you like your children having to practice active shooter drills. You can have it.
