A very American question: how should we do historical markers for mass shootings?
What physical reminders will go up to mark them, and what will they say?
As I write this, it's Jan. 8, 2025 – the 14th anniversary of what's commonly known as the "Gabby Giffords shooting." On that day in 2011, a shooter killed 6 people and injured 13 outside a Safeway store in Casas Adobes, Ariz., near Tucson, at a constituent event hosted by then-House Rep. Giffords. She was among those shot.
Outside the Safeway, off to the side of the front door in an area you can easily walk by and miss, there is a rock garden with one larger stone in the center that the store's management put up. It reads:
Honoring the victims of the event of January 8, 2011
The Tucson Tragedy... we shall never forget
Forget... forget what? The marker doesn't say what the "event" is. Of course, Safeway shoppers probably would freak out and look for another store after seeing a large marker that describes a mass shooting in excruciating detail. I know it felt weird walking in to get Vitamin Water and doughnuts, imagining a tragedy folding outside.
The Safeway display is more along the lines, in a very small way, what Columbine and Sandy Hook have put up since their tragic mass shootings – memorials that invite reflection, rather than a dry recitation of horrible facts.
With 514 mass shootings (at least four shot and injured, not including the shooter) in 2024 – less than the annual rate from 2020-23, but more than 2013-19 annual rate – it does get one (particularly, me) thinking of what physical reminders will go up to mark them, assuming any go up.
Too soon? Too soon. Jacksonville, Fla., is putting up a historic marker for a mass shooting that occurred in 2023 and is centering the narrative on the racist motivation behind it. But you probably won't see widespread historical markers about mass shootings in your lifetime.
Markers, by nature, tend to focus on events where most involved have long passed, and where an agreed-upon narrative of their impact is known. (And sometimes, that agreed-upon narrative changes after the market is erected.) It's pretty safe to say we're 0-for-2 on passage of time and unity of narrative.
It may be that widespread markers, if they come at all, may parallel the efforts of the Equal Justice Initiative, which is placing markers at the site of lynchings of Black people in the Jim Crow era. They'll come in about 70 to 100 years, and probably from an advocacy group.