ST. LOUIS – “And that’s the shame of it to me, my brother. Every time I see these shootings, and I’ve been all over this country to dozens of them, the sameness. The intractability of the problem,” said News Nation’s anchor Chris Cuomo.
For more than two decades, Cuomo has covered the biggest stories worldwide. On Monday, the deadly shooting at Central Visual and Performing Arts High School returned St. Louis to his radar.
From school shootings at Newtown, Connecticut to Parkland, Florida, Uvalde, Texas and now St. Louis, Cuomo explains what he finds to be the ties that binds these communities.
“Sickening coincidence. Sickening coincidence,” he said. “It doesn’t matter where they happen. The reasons that they happen are usually freakishly familiar and the frustration that winds up pervading this community, because the only thing you can do with the pain is try to put it to some purpose. And the obvious purpose becomes you want less of this. That you want schools to be safer, that you want your kids to be safer. You want society to be less lethal. And it’s very hard to make change.”
Cuomo shared his thoughts about how to have conversation on things like school and gun safety after a tragedy like the school shooting Monday at the Central Visual and Performing Arts High School.
“The first thing is, don’t wait. There’s this article of convenience. Let the families mourn,” he said. “If not now, when? Out of respect to what? To the fact that what, people lost family for no good reason. Is that what we’re giving time to? Or are we going to allow the urgency to be a catalyst for helping this not happen again?”
Cuomo acknowledged there’s no one solution that will prevent these shootings from occurring in the future. He said the action is on us.
“Don’t wait. Have the conversation. Just don’t let it be co-opted by opportunists. You want to talk about what this community feels,” he said. “What they want to see changed. And then you let people come and let the best ideas win. But you put a mandate on action and change if you don’t want to see it again. Nobody is immune to what you guys just suffered. I’m sorry you did, and I hope your community comes to a better place than to where the rest of the country is, which is content to do nothing.”