Nothing Will Change

Spectator

By Stephen Tuttle | Aug. 9, 2025

On July 28, a man entered a building on Park Avenue in New York City and shot three people to death before killing himself. The same day, a man opened fire at a casino in Reno, Nevada, killing one and injuring a second person.

On July 29, a shooting at a park in Conway, Arkansas, killed two and injured nine others. That shooter is still at large. On August 1, a shooting at a bar in Anaconda, Montana, left four dead. That shooter is also still at large. On August 2, a shooting in north Omaha, Nebraska, left seven injured. Two days later in Omaha, a separate shooting resulted in one death and two injuries.

There were more, as there always are, but this is a representative sampling of what happens in this country virtually every single day. The stabbings that happened at our Walmart on July 26 were far from abnormal because mass casualty events are the norm, not the exception.

Think that’s an exaggeration? According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been 267 mass shootings resulting in 258 deaths and 1,161 injuries since just January 1, 2025. That does not include any of the incidents listed above so the numbers have already grown and continue to do so.

Most of our attacks involve guns because they are so easily obtainable legally and ludicrously easy to obtain illegally. According to the annual Small Arms Survey, about 40 percent of U.S. households have guns but many have several, so we now have somewhere between 400 and 500 million guns owned by civilians. But Americans are creative when it comes to violence and killing, and if a gun isn’t handy, maybe a knife will suffice

According to something called ammo.com (yes, there really is such a site) about 14 percent of violent attacks involve stabbings, and that results in about nine percent of all murders.

Our alleged attacker—and how silly it is we have to use the word “alleged” when we all know precisely what happened, if not why—was wielding a relatively small knife, for which we should be thankful. A combat knife or a gun would have made things worse, though they were plenty bad as it was.

Americans are not very good at preventing these things, but we are very, very good at reacting immediately after the fact. We’ve had enough practice that there is now practically a formula. We should not have been surprised it happened here and we should not be surprised we reacted pretty much like every other community with a similar unfortunate experience.

Some eyewitnesses immediately start attending to the wounded while others try to confront the attacker. First responders arrive quickly and work efficiently. Emergency medical personnel prepare and deal with multiple trauma patients with professionalism and speed.

Then, of course, we have to have some post-event hand-wringing, a mandatory vigil of some sort, and people claiming we will somehow be forever changed. That might be true for the victims and witnesses, but it is clearly not for the rest of us who will go about our lives mostly unchanged. And it’s unlikely we'll do anything to prevent this from happening in the future.

We weren’t immune to the problems that culminated in this incident and we aren’t going to solve them because we, as a society, are still confused by mental health issues. We have hard working and dedicated people in the field trying to catch up with overwhelming caseloads continually increasing but with no comparable increase in societal commitment or funding.

We decided, starting almost 70 years ago, that “warehousing” the mentally ill in large asylums was not working. And to be fair, some of the conditions and treatment were cruelly brutal. So we slowly started closing those facilities, a strategy that picked up speed until, finally, the Reagan Administration in the ’80s cut funding for mental health, and big state hospitals closed forever. The idea was that we would instead fund more community-based mental health programs and patients would be treated more humanely.

What actually happened was the community-based facilities were not fully funded and the result was that we continue to warehouse those with mental health issues but now we do it in homeless shelters, jails and prisons, and cemeteries. The National Alliance on Mental Illness says fully 40 percent of the prisoners in our jails and prisons have diagnosed mental health issues.

What happened here was not unusual, our response was not unusual, and our frustration at not finding solutions or even any desperately-needed help for mentally ill people and their families will not be unusual, either. Federal spending for mental health through schools and Medicaid has been cut. The need is great; our will to meet it less so.

Walmart now has armed security both inside and outside the store. Nothing else is likely to change.