Time USA - August 19, 2019

2 Time August 19, 2019

LasT year, we puT five survivors of The massacre

at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.,

on the cover of TIME, with the word eNouGh emblazoned

across the image. Determining the cover is always a team

discussion, and in the course of it, some in our newsroom

urged that we not use that word. How to determine what ex-

actly is enough? Wasn’t it enough at Columbine? At Virginia

Tech? At Fort Hood? Won’t it be enough when, sure as night

follows day, the next massacre occurs?

We all have our measures of how obscenely normalized

domestic terror has become. At TIME, one is how frequently

we have felt compelled to devote our cover to the subject.

In my own less than two years in this job, we’ve run seven of

them, from the 2017 massacre at a Las Vegas music festival

that killed 58 people to this spring’s murder of 50 worship-

pers at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.

In recent days, as the heartbreaking news from Gilroy to

El Paso to Dayton swept across America, I thought about

these covers as well as the hundreds of images from mass

shootings we’ve published over the years. Terrified children

who survived Sandy Hook walking single file to safety. Giant

photographs of the dead at the prayer vigil for the victims at

Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charles-

ton. The side-by-side graves of two brothers killed, among

11 altogether, at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.

Searing images and yet somehow forgotten by leaders with

the power to effect change.

But as the week went on, what seemed to me to travel the

farthest and speak the loudest were not pictures but num-

bers. Numbers that showed how tragically exceptional Amer-

ica is in its gun violence. Numbers making clear that rates of

mental illness and video-game consumption in the U.S. are

similar to those of countries that don’t experience routine

mass murder. Numbers revealing just how many civilian fire-

arms are already in circulation in America: 265 million.

Another number: this week’s cover, by artist John

Mavroudis, lists the locations of 253 mass shootings in

America so far this year. This list, tallied by the Gun Vio-

lence Archive, of incidents in which at least four people

other than the shooter were injured or killed is a reminder

that the toll of gun violence is even greater than the public

attacks we typically think of as mass shootings.

I grew up in a family of gun owners and have always

used them responsibly. But it shouldn’t be easier to own

and use a gun than to own and drive a car. Why should gun

manufacturers be shielded from liability that incentivizes

We have a choice

Edward Felsenthal,

ediTor-iN-chief & ceo

@efeLseNThaL

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nearly every other manufacturer of

consumer products in America to think

about safety? Retailers can follow the

lead of companies like Dick’s Sporting

Goods, which ended sales of assault-style

weapons after the Parkland massacre.

Simple safety technology, the kind that

powers smart homes, cars and phones, can

also be applied to guns.

Aryam Guerrero, who lost her brother

Juan Ramon at the Pulse nightclub in

Orlando in 2016, told my colleague

Melissa Chan this week that she has

become numb to the constant threat. “I

just live my life as if I could die in the next

30 minutes,” Guerrero said. “You have no

choice but to live with it.”

We do have a choice as a society. Not

a perfect choice. Or a guaranteed solu-

tion. But doing nothing in the face of

repeated mass murder in our society is

indefensible.

More than 250 mass shootings in

the first 220 days of 2019 alone,

it’s hard to believe that this

doesn’t go without saying.

Enough.

What to say

When tragedy is in

the news, children

can struggle to

understand and

process what they’re

seeing. With that

in mind, TIME for

Kids has curated a

set of resources to

help families and

educators talk about

tough topics like gun

violence. Go to time

.com/toughtopics

to read more.

From the Editor