‘The U.S. Has a Gun Addiction’

Scot Peterson stood by as a slaughter unfolded at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Jamie Thompson wrote in the March 2024 issue. Does the blame lie with him, his training—or a society in denial about what it would take to stop mass shootings?

The American people relate to guns as addicts relate to drugs. Addicts change everything in their life to accommodate their drug use. They filter their relationships, alter their schedule, and change their living situation—all to facilitate their access to the substance. They blame everything and everyone for what goes wrong, but never the drug.

And so it is with guns in the United States. Law-enforcement officers should alter their techniques because of shootings. Teachers should carry weapons to protect themselves and their students. Sixty-year-old men should be trained to run into the line of fire. Children should learn when to duck and when to run. Everyone attending a public event should know where the exits are. We are willing to put everything second to our need for guns.

The U.S. has a gun addiction. Until the American people wake up to the fact that our drug is killing us, until we stop enabling our addiction, we will continue to see tragedies like that at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

Victoria B. Damiani
Malvern, Pa.

As the father of a member of law enforcement, I am keenly aware of how many local police departments are unprepared for an active-shooter situation. That said, there is no excuse for Scot Peterson’s failure to respond at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. It was his duty to do what he could to protect those students, and he failed miserably. If his actions had saved even just one student, he would have performed his duties as required by the oath he took as a sworn officer. While a jury may have found him not guilty, I think he deserves the title “Coward of Broward.” He will live to enjoy his retirement pension, but his inaction sent students to their death.

Gary Rog
Buffalo, N.Y.

We seem to live in a society that has overlooked the fact that each of us is, by default, a “first responder” to any crime committed against us. One wonders how the outcome at Marjory Stoneman Douglas might have been different if at least three or four of the school employees who had a duty to care for students had been armed.

Steve Pawluk
Wrightwood, Calif.

Jamie Thompson’s “American Cowardice” proves, I think, that we can’t expect even trained cops to rush in and save people from mass shootings. This being the case, can we as a country dispense with the fantasy that any random “good guy with a gun” can somehow protect us?

George Wiman
Normal, Ill.

Jamie Thompson is correct to consider the psyche of the public servants we enlist to protect us. As a first responder with 40 years of experience working across diverse organizations, I have seen friends die or suffer grievous injuries while trying to effect bold rescues: of juveniles who ventured too far out onto the delicate ice of a deep alpine lake; of comrades who fell into a collapsed snow cavern.

Those who sign up for high-risk duties do so because they feel a call to serve. But attempting daring rescue operations is made easier by the knowledge that we are well equipped and regularly train as a team. We’ll retrieve a kid from a burning building because we’ve got a breathing apparatus, fire-resistant gear, a charged hose, and a trusted team behind us. We’ll drop onto unstable snowpack in a raging blizzard because we are equipped with state-of-the-art radios and avalanche airbags and probe poles, and we train constantly. We’ll crawl out onto the ice in a dry rescue suit with a rope and board to snag a struggling hypothermic swimmer, knowing that the shore team will haul us in.

We answer the call because we want to be the person who goes in, but also because we know we can do it safely and successfully. Without proper equipment, relevant training, a qualified team, and confidence in your abilities, you cannot go in.

Chris I. Lizza
Lee Vining, Calif.

Like many Americans, I made a snap judgment about the “Coward of Broward” when the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas first made headlines. My judgment was twofold: First, Peterson was a coward, and second, the National Rifle Association’s oft-repeated challenge to proposed gun restrictions, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” was not true. Reading Thompson’s story dispelled my first judgment. (As for the NRA’s mantra about good guys with guns, I’d never believed that.)

As a father of three, I understand the desire on the part of the victims’ parents to blame someone for their children’s deaths. But if these parents want to find the real culprit, they should look at the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, passed in 2005. This law largely shields gun dealers and manufacturers from legal liability for crimes committed with weapons they produce or sell. That law and myriad others have made assault weapons like the AR-15 ubiquitous; they are responsible, I think, for the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas. Once citizens can sue any gun manufacturer and dealer and possibly even put them out of business, incidents of mass gun violence will decline sharply. Why can I sue my neighbor if I’m attacked by their unleashed dog and not the gun dealer that puts an AR-15 into the hands of a teenager who shoots up my children’s school?

Michael Hugo
Mundelein, Ill.

I want to thank Jamie Thompson for a deeply researched and reported article. This is such a difficult topic to tackle—and it’s been difficult for me to process. I worked for the Broward County Sheriff’s Office for more than five years. I knew and worked with some of the people in this article; I was even a school resource officer from 1989 to 1990. The shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas happened not long after I retired from the Fort Lauderdale Police Department.

When I worked with FLPD, after having left Broward County, I received training in active-shooter response numerous times. (Michael DiMaggio, who, Thompson writes, believes he was the first in the Broward County Sheriff’s Office to see the footage of Scot Peterson standing outside Building 12, was once one of our trainers.) The department was exemplary in those days at providing training to its officers, and I believe it still is. I recall in particular one lecture with an officer who had responded to a shooting incident that had left him disabled. He stressed that it was imperative to take action immediately, whether you were confident or not. I took this message to heart; I believe it helped me survive more than one critical incident.

In the end, though, I have always believed that none of us knows what we will do in any given situation, and thus we must keep from judging others. As Stephen Willeford observes in the article, “How do you know you would be any better at it than he was?” Police are asked to do an incredible range of things; any given individual may excel at some tasks, but probably not all of them. We are, like everyone else, only human.

Barbara Barrett
Jasper, Fla.

In this month’s cover story, “The Great Serengeti Land Grab,” Stephanie McCrummen investigates how the Maasai people were evicted from their ancestral lands. To illustrate her story, we asked the Nairobi-based photographer Nichole Sobecki to travel to Arusha, Tanzania, and photograph Maasai communities. Our cover image depicts a Maasai moran grazing his cattle and sheep, an embere spear and fimbo staff resting on his shoulder. As McCrummen writes, the confiscation of land, ostensibly in the name of conservation, has left vanishingly few Maasai able to raise cattle, as had been their traditional way of life.

— Bifen Xu, Senior Photo Editor

Correction: In the April 2024 issue, the “Behind the Cover” feature misidentified a photograph of Leonard Nimoy.

This article appears in the May 2024 print edition with the headline “The Commons.”