Opinion: Mass shootings, police killings: An awful taste of ‘normal’ in America

Good morning. I’m Paul Thornton, and it’s Saturday, April 17, 2021. Let’s take a look back at the week in Opinion.

Disneyland is taking our money again, mass shootings are back, and police killed another unarmed Black man. We’ve all been chafing at COVID-19 restrictions and pining for a return to normal, but if this is what counts as “the way things were” — and let’s not kid ourselves that mass death and brutalizing Black Americans are anything other than that in America — we have our share of problems to fix once the pandemic’s out of the way.

But that may be too optimistic, because it suggests we’re even capable of fixing these problems. As The Times Editorial Board noted after Thursday’s mass shooting in Indianapolis, what makes these tragedies peculiarly American is their frequency and our government’s inability to stop them. The problems identified by gun-rights supporters — mental health issues, economic anxiety and so forth — exist in every other part of the world; what doesn’t, says the board, is the easy availability of guns: “Access to personal arsenals is ... distinctly American. So, too, it seems, is an inability to do something about it.”

As for the shooting death of yet another unarmed Black man by police, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that the killing of 20-year-old Daunte Wright struck me as both heinous and unnervingly familiar. After all, as columnist LZ Granderson puts it, the problem is not one police department in Minnesota or a single officer who pulled the trigger: “It is about the truth nestled in the heart of this quote from Chinua Achebe: ‘Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.’”

This is were I’m supposed to say that the pandemic is still a problem — and of course it is! Cases are rising in the U.S. despite rapid vaccination of the population, but so far California seems to be resisting the dreaded fourth COVID-19 surge. The situation is promising enough on the West Coast that some people are just as anxious about emerging from their “caves” after restrictions are lifted as they are about the virus itself. Columnist Nicholas Goldberg writes about the curious social phenomenon of “cave syndrome” now that many of us are getting ready to resume normal life. L.A. Times

White people, Tucker Carlson is not your friend. Sure, his program on Fox News features commentary that feeds the white grievance machine, but his punditry is, in a very practical sense, unhelpful to his audience and extremely racist. “Carlson would rather scare white people than help them organize for decent healthcare and education, stronger labor protections, a more robust safety net and a sustainable planet,” writes the editorial board. “Indeed, this charlatan — born in San Francisco and raised in La Jolla — has never used his perch to actually help disadvantaged people of any race. Always, he prefers to stoke his audience’s fears, suspicions and resentments.” L.A. Times

Are American parents doing it all wrong? We yell at our kids too much, we praise them too much, we give them too much work, we don’t expect them to help out around the home much — if you’re a parent (as I am), surely you’ve heard versions of these criticisms before, usually from an empty nester dismayed by the vagaries of millennial mothers and fathers. But I promise you, Robin Abcarian’s column about a mother and author who lived with families raising children in traditional Indigenous cultures around the world and then wrote about it is different. L.A. Times

Moving homeless people into shelters still leaves them homeless. Los Angeles wants to clear encampments, but to do so legally it must offer shelter or housing to a certain portion of the city’s homeless residents. Problem is, the City Council is considering a proposal that would almost certainly accomplish this by moving unhoused Angelenos into temporary shelters, a short-term solution that doesn’t focus on permanent housing. Says the editorial board: “Rather than solving the homelessness problem, the city will simply have allowed police and sanitation workers to clear homeless people off the streets — which is what a lot of the council members’ constituents want ... But it’s not what the mayor and council should do. It’s not right, and they know it.” L.A. Times

Please, don’t freak out over the Johnson & Johnson vaccine pause. All drugs come with risks, and vaccines are no different. Here in the U.S., six women out of the more than 7 million people who received the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 shot developed a rare and dangerous blood clotting disorder, causing the federal government to recommend suspending administration of the vaccine pending its investigation. The editorial board gives this assurance: “More than 76 million people in the U.S. have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 with virtually no major adverse effects. That’s a success by any measure. Regardless of the questions about the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, the public should feel supremely confident that the COVID vaccines are safe and effective.” L.A. Times