I can’t tell you how many anti-Second Amendment voices I’ve had tell me that mass shootings in general and school shootings, in particular, are a uniquely American problem. “These things don’t happen in other countries,” they bellow.

Of course, I can point to plenty of examples of where they have, but those are generally ignored. They don’t matter when you’re busy advancing the narrative.

Since left-leaning publications tend to also be anti-Second Amendment publications, you expect them to push this very same narrative. However, The Nation has apparently opted to go off-script.

Scenes familiar to Americans filled the Russian media on the morning of September 20. The country watched as Perm State University students ran to safety. Inside, a shooter went on a murderous rampage, resulting in at least six dead and 20 injured. The shooting, the second one this year, was carried out by a freshman. Just a few months earlier, on May 11, 2021, there was a massacre at a school in the city of Kazan, which ended in the deaths of seven eighth grade students and two teachers.

School shootings have never been a major issue in Russia. Unlike American students familiar with active-shooter drills since the 1999 Columbine massacre, Russian students have worried primarily about becoming hostages in a terrorist attack—a fear born out of the horrific 2004 Beslan school siege. The first school shooting in contemporary Russian history took place at a Moscow school in 2014. The deadliest one occurred in 2018 at the Kerch Polytechnic College in the annexed Crimea region. It claimed 20 lives. Questions of why school shootings happen and how do we stop them have been circulating in the local media for months now.

Good for them…but only to a point.

The author immediately goes on to argue that we here in the US have a problem because we don’t have enough gun control, even while noting that getting a gun is much harder in Russia, yet it still didn’t stop the killer from getting one.

So close and yet so far away.

Yet the author also misses an opportunity to ask just why these things happen in countries with such very different gun control laws. After all, if gun control is the answer, why didn’t Russia’s far stricter gun control laws fail to prevent this from happening.

Or, maybe there’s something about our society that seems to make such acts appealing to those who are so horribly broken?

I can’t help but wonder if social media stardom plays a factor. After all, we see annoying, untalented people become famous for absolute nonsense and others see this and figure they can be famous too. Since these guys are also often angry about everything, they simply decide to shoot up a school instead of start a YouTube channel.

We’ve seen plenty of them talk about getting a “high score” or similar euphemisms for killing more people than others, why else except for fame?

That transcends borders, after all.

Still, it’s a shame that rather than recognize this truth, the author decided the problem was that Russia’s gun control laws weren’t strict enough either.

Again, so close and yet so far away.