In the line of fire

Mass shootings leave Americans feeling that nowhere is safe

WASHINGTON Alexander Sandoval brought his five-year-old son to witness a patriotic parade and wound up putting him in a garbage dumpster in a desperate attempt to keep him safe. Is there a more evocative image of what unfolded in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park during Independence Day celebrations on Monday than that?

“I thought that it was the navy that was saluting the flag with rifles, but then when I saw people running, I picked up my son and started running,” Sandoval told CNN. “We ran behind the building and I put my son in a dumpster and he sat there with his dog,” while Sandoval ran back to search amid the bodies and blood on the sidewalk for his wife and their six-year-old daughter.

News reports across the U.S. were filled with such horrifying firsthand accounts after a shooter on a rooftop opened fire on a crowd assembled for a Fourth of July parade Monday morning, killing seven people and injuring over 30 others, according to the Lake County Sheriff’s Department.

Lauren Silva and her boyfriend told the Daily Beast they rescued a toddler — still in a diaper, one shoe lost and his other sock bloodied — from beneath his wounded father’s body.

Nicolas Toledo, 76, was there, sitting in his wheelchair between his nephew and his son and “happy to be living in the moment,” his granddaughter told the New York Times. “We realized our grandfather was hit. We saw blood and everything splattered onto us,” and Toledo was killed.

Bystanders spoke of bodies falling around them as they fled. Videos from the scene showed panicked people sprinting — families holding hands and parents carrying children — through the streets as music from bands on floats was drowned out by rapid-firing gunshots. Photos of the aftermath showed sidewalks strewn with strollers, children’s bikes, and lawn chairs.

The suspected gunman — 22year-old Robert Crimo — was arrested later in the day Monday.

On Tuesday afternoon local sheriff’s department Deputy Chief Christopher Covelli said at a press conference the attack had been planned for weeks. The shooter used a legally purchased high-powered rifle and was disguised as a woman, Covelli said.

Where fireworks displays went ahead across the country, “scenes of chaos” broke out as crowds of people erupted in panic when mistaking the celebratory explosions for gunfire, the Washington Post reported: “Crowds panicked and ran from loud noises in Orlando, Harrisburg, Pa., and Washington, suggesting a nation on edge following a recent spate of high-profile mass shootings.”

Who could blame them, even before the Highland Park news? Out for a long-weekend walk with my own family on Saturday in a neighbourhood here in D.C., we heard loud bangs coming from just down the street. “Is that a gun?” one of my daughters asked, as I briefly glanced around for shelter options before we realized it had been prematurely lit firecrackers. In this country, now, it isn’t necessarily safe to assume such a sound is celebratory rather than violent.

“While we celebrate the Fourth of July just once a year, mass shootings have become our weekly — yes weekly — American tradition,” Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker said on Monday, asking people to “be angry.”

A common sentiment this week is that no place in the U.S. feels safe from this kind of violence. Within the past two months, I have been to an impoverished Black neighbourhood in the city of Buffalo, N.Y., where random strangers were attacked in a supermarket, and then to a modest Hispanic neighbourhood in the small town of Uvalde, Texas, where children and teachers were murdered in an elementary school. Just weeks later in the overwhelmingly white, affluent suburb of Chicago, people were mowed down as they gathered to watch a parade.

Every death is sad. Every murder a tragedy. And every mass killing is a horror: I’m thinking back to the shock and mourning when bystanders were shot in Toronto in a gunfight at the Eaton Centre in 2012, or after a shooting rampage on the Danforth in 2018, or the van attack on random pedestrians on Yonge Street the same year.

And yet in the U.S., some of the shock has worn off, even as the terror has intensified. This sort of thing happens so often that the political responses and media script have now become routine: after the police press conference Tuesday, cable news pundits compared Deputy Chief Covelli’s performance to that of Uvalde police last month with the been-there, seen-that manner of reality show judges.

In May, U.S. President Joe Biden immediately reacted to the shooting in Buffalo saying, “We grieve for the families of 10 people whose lives were senselessly taken.” After the shooting in Uvalde, Biden said, “I had hoped when I became president I would not have to do this again: another massacre.”

On Monday he addressed Highland Park: “Jill and I are shocked by the senseless gun violence that has yet again brought grief to an American community on this Independence Day.”

Lives senselessly taken. Another massacre. Yet again. These have become the rote phrases of ceremonial address in the United States. On the 246th anniversary of American independence, declared in the name of individual rights and freedoms, the interpretation of the constitutionally protected right to bear arms has led to this: “A day dedicated to freedom has put into stark relief the one freedom we as a nation refuse to uphold: the freedom of our fellow citizens to live without the daily fear of gun violence,” Gov. Pritzker said.

Even in the best of situations, you cannot escape symbolism in the U.S. on July 4th. This week, in the worst of situations, the symbolism was all the more obvious, and sad: across the country, people running in terror from fireworks, fearing that the display of patriotism might turn out to be lethal. And in Highland Park, a literal dumpster feeling like a safer place for a child than a parade route.

‘‘ A day dedicated to freedom has put into stark relief the one freedom we as a nation refuse to uphold: the freedom of our fellow citizens to live without the daily fear of gun violence.

J.B. PRITZKER ILLINOIS GOVERNOR