The CBS Evening News closed out their newscast with a commentary piece on the most recent school shooting in Winder, Georgia. The editorial was high on emotion, but offered little in the way of solutions beyond calls to “do something”.
Watch the commentary in its entirety as aired on the CBS Evening News on Thursday, September 5th, 2024 (click “expand” for transcript):
CBS EVENING NEWS
9/5/24
6:56 PM
NORAH O’DONNELL: We've spent the last two days confronting a horrifying part of life in America these days: School shootings. Summer recess brought a break from that violence, but as we have all been reminded, that break is over because school shootings seem to be something we are unwilling or unable to change. Here is CBS's Jim Axelrod with tonight's "Eye on America."
JIM AXELROD: So now we've got a new name atop the hideous list.
STUDENT: He was a very sweet kid. He did not deserve this. Neither did the coach, or everyone else.
AXELROD: Winder, Georgia, joins Columbine, Newtown, Uvalde, and hundreds of others with traumatized children.
STUDENT: You could hear gunshots, like, just ringing out through the school and you are just wondering which one of those is going to be somebody that you are best friends with or somebody that you love.
AXELROD: And parents who rushed to campus not knowing if they would hug their kids or bury them.
PARENT: I just dropped everything and sprinted to the car. He got a bullet hole from one side of his backpack to the other side.
AXELROD: Winder, Georgia.
STUDENT: The gunshots were so close to me, like, my ears started ringing real bad.
AXELROD: A new name that’s shorthand for senseless tragedy.
Because it's been such a steady drumbeat in the news cycle for so many years, it might be easy to lose sight of the dimensions of the school shooting epidemic. Since Columbine, a quarter century ago, there have been 388 deadly school shootings in the United States, killing at least 526 people. Let that sink in.
JOE BIDEN: But as a nation, we cannot continue to accept the carnage of gun violence.
BARACK OBAMA: We’ve endured too many of these tragedies in the past few years.
AXELROD: Pick your president.
GEORGE W. BUSH: Our nation is shocked and saddened by the news of the shootings at Virginia Tech today.
AXELROD: Even your decade. It's been a problem with no solution.
BILL CLINTON: Perhaps now America would wake up to the dimensions of this challenge and we could prevent anything like this from happening again.
AXELROD: Well, apparently we can. Angel Garza told us that in the days after he lost his 10-year-old, Amerie Jo, in Uvalde.
ANGEL GARZA: Nothing is going to change. I mean, this always happens in a small town, nobody expects anything bad to happen and then it happens and everybody wants to make changes, to prevent it from happening, and then it dies down a little bit, and then it happens again, and then we are just in- it’s a cycle.
AXELROD: Whoever first defined insanity as "doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result" wasn't talking about school shootings. But think about it. Insanity. What better word is there to describe where we are? For "Eye on America," I'm Jim Axelrod in New York.
O’DONNELL: These are our children. And our teachers. Something needs to be done.
This, too, has become a part of the post-school shooting ritual. The national media come parachute into a city, perform their emotive journalism, advocate for gun control, and then fly back to New York or D.C. without ever addressing the true causes of what led to each individual school shooting.
In their view, the problem is always the guns. It is never the litany of breakdowns which always float to the surface in the immediate aftermath of the shooting- most notoriously, “known to authorities” which has become a meme.
But then there are the other breakdowns that go unaddressed, whether these are societal or familial. The media don’t really care about these. They just come in and cry out for gun control. At least they do in most cases.
CBS didn’t even do that, choosing instead to clamor for a fix it is unable or unwilling to mention by name. And so Norah O’Donnell closes out the newscast with the familiar “do something” call to action.
Even if that “something”, civilian disarmament, would ultimately put the whole of our society at risk.
The media have no solution beyond taking the guns. And emoting. Until the next breakdown which leads to a shooting and we do it all over again. Everything, that is, except actually addressing the underlying causes of school shootings.
