We had just stepped into the makeup store when people began running. You could see them through the entrance, in groups of five and six, passing by every second, racing from the mall walkways into a nearby Nordstrom.
I couldn’t tell what was happening. Was the mall closing? Was there some flash sale taking place?
Then the metal gate crashed over the Nordstrom entrance. Then the employees in our store ordered everyone to stay put as they pulled gates across the front of the entrance.
Whispers began. Someone, they heard, brandished a gun at the mall’s food court.
It was all over in about 10 minutes. As it turned out, it wasn’t a gun. It was a fight that allegedly involved a man carrying bricks.
But for 10 minutes, I was worrying about the safety of my 10-year-old, my sister, and my 14-year-old niece, who were in the store with me; and my wife, my 19-year-old, and my 16-year-old, who were elsewhere in the mall, where we couldn’t reach them.
And this was in New York, a state with decent gun laws. In Alabama, where firearm statutes are much weaker and there are high rates of firearm purchases, the odds are considerably better that it would have been a gun and not building material.
And unlike a brick, a firearm can end a lot of lives in a very short window of time. We’ve had terrible reminders of this in Birmingham in September and at Tuskegee in November.
But firearms cause thousands of less prominent tragedies each year, whether through accidents or people dying by suicide. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1,278 Alabamians were killed by a gun in 2022. Firearms are the leading cause of death for children and teens.
This is a crisis. And a preventable one.
But our leaders, who all but tore off the doors of the state’s libraries when they learned books can have gay characters, have tended to do nothing about the problem or make it worse.
To their credit, some legislators are pushing gun safety measures. Rep. Phillip Ensler (D-Montgomery) is sponsoring a bill to make possession of Glock switches — which can turn semi-automatic firearms into something like a machine gun — a state crime. Sen. Rodger Smitherman (D-Birmingham) has introduced similar measures in the Senate.
Rep. Barbara Drummond (D-Mobile) has filed bills over the last two years that would require parents of children to lock up their firearms. We badly need these kinds of safe storage laws. In an ideal world, we would require all gun purchasers to show proof that they can secure their firearm contingent before giving them a gun. But Drummond’s bill – which had not been refiled as of last week – would be a start.
I don’t know if this legislation will get very far. Ensler’s bill made it through the House late in last year’s session and drew some Republican support. One hopes the Five Points shooting would encourage legislators to draw a line against turning pistols into assault weapons.
But I don’t get my hopes up. Over the years, many legislators confronted with the toll of our reckless gun policies have closed their eyes, put their fingers in their ears, and shouted “liberty” until the subject changes.
The subject being the needless deaths of Alabamians.
It would take just a little responsibility and just a little bit of sacrifice to keep those people alive. But our leaders, by and large, have decided that dodging bullets is more tolerable than inconveniencing gun owners.
And so we live our lives hoping that the guy packing heat at the food court doesn’t get mad or feel less than 100% secure in his masculinity.
We don’t have to live like this. If you put some restrictions on gun access, you won’t stop every violent person from doing harm. After all, they could carry bricks into the mall.
But you will cut the risk of that person creating a massacre in an ordinary setting. Force people to lock up their guns and you will make it harder for those with suicidal thoughts to act on them. And harder for their kids to get a hold of them.
And frankly, I’m sick of living in a country where every person can plausibly worry about running for their lives in the supermarket, in the shopping center, or in a school. I’m tired of our state’s laissez-faire attitude toward gun ownership.
I know it will take years, if not decades, to change that attitude. And there will be many more stories — in New York, in Alabama, and around the country — of people stampeding in fear because there’s no telling who has a gun.
That’s a world some gun owners and most of our leaders make us live in. And as long as we let their zeal and paranoia guide our policy, we’ll never be safe.
This article was published by Alabama Reflector, which is part of States Newsroom, the nation's largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
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