The most common adjective employed by weather reporters on Saturday, 23 November 2013, was ‘treacherous’. But in reality there was not a hint of betrayal about it. The day was every bit as foul as one would expect the week before Thanksgiving. A ‘Nordic outbreak’ of snow, rain and high winds barrelled through the desert states and northern plains towards the Midwest. Wet roads and fierce gusts in northeast Texas forced Willie Nelson’s tour bus into a bridge pillar not far from Sulphur Springs in the early hours, injuring three band members and resulting in the tour’s suspension. With warnings of a 500-mile tornado corridor stretching north and east from Mississippi, the weather alone killed more than a dozen people.1 And as the low front shifted eastwards, so did the threat to the busiest travel period of the year, bringing chaos so predictable and familiar that it has provided the plot line for many a seasonal movie.
There was precious little in the news to distract anyone from these inclement conditions. A poll that day showed President Barack Obama suffering his lowest approval ratings for several years. That night he announced a tentative deal with Iran over its nuclear programme. Republican Senate minority whip John Cornyn believed that the agreement, hammered out with six allies as well as Iran, was part of a broader conspiracy to divert the public gaze from the hapless roll-out of the new health care website. ‘Amazing what WH [White House] will do to distract attention from O-care,’ he tweeted.2 Not surprisingly, another of the day’s polls revealed that two-thirds of Americans thought the country was heading in the wrong direction. That night, Fox News was the most popular cable news channel;The Hunger Games: Catching Fire was the highest-grossing movie, and the college football game between Baylor and Oklahoma State was the most-watched programme on television.
It was just another day in America. And as befits an unremarkable Saturday in America, ten children and teens were killed by gunfire. Like the weather that day, none of them would make big news beyond their immediate locale because, like the weather, their deaths did not intrude on the accepted order of things but conformed to it. So in terms of what one might expect of a Saturday in America, there wasn’t a hint of ‘betrayal’ about this either; it’s precisely the tally the nation has come to expect. Every day, on average, 7 children and teens are killed by guns; in 2013 it was 6.75 to be precise.3 Firearms are the leading cause of death among black children under the age of nineteen and the second-leading cause of death for all children of the same age group, after car accidents.4 Each individual death is experienced as a family tragedy that ripples through a community but the sum total barely earns a national shrug.
Those shot on any given day in different places and very different circumstances lack the critical mass and tragic drama to draw the attention of the nation’s media in the way a mass shooting in a cinema or church might. Far from being considered newsworthy, these everyday fatalities are simply a banal fact of death. They are white noise set sufficiently low to allow the country to go ab
