Kansas’ new ATF gun crime center is nothing to celebrate. It’s a tragedy we need it | Opinion

Is America’s explosion of gun violence a good thing for Kansas?

That’s not meant to be a flip or frivolous question. But it is inspired by a moment of discomfort I had this week when — hot on the heels of Saturday’s neo-Nazi gun massacre at a Texas mall — state and national officials gathered Monday in Wichita to open the new National Gun Crime Intelligence Center of Excellence, a training hub overseen by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

The event played like a civic triumph. Sen Jerry Moran was there. So was ATF Director Steven Dettelbach and Wichita State University President Richard Muma.

There was a ribbon-cutting. There were smiles for the cameras. There were handshakes. There was applause.

All for a facility whose purpose is to be an after-the-fact defense mechanism against the blood-soaked violence that destroys lives and communities across this country every single day.

It was a great moment for the Sunflower State, apparently.

“Time and time again, businesses and government agencies have chosen to locate their facilities, their people and their work in Kansas,” Moran posted to Twitter. “Now, wherever a crime is committed and a criminal needs to be apprehended, the message can be: ‘We’ve got to get this evidence to Wichita so we can solve this crime.’”

I’m not trying to pick on the senator, who is just doing his job by steering federal facilities to Kansas and grabbing a little bit of credit for it. If we need a National Gun Crime Intelligence Center — can we just assume it will be excellent? — then it might as well be built here.

The problem is that we need it.

As of this writing, there have been more than 200 mass shootings — defined as an incident in which four or more people are shot, not including the shooter — in the United States this year. Saturday’s mass shooting in Allen, Texas, killed nine people, including a Korean American couple and one of their children. Their surviving child, a 6-year-old, is now an orphan.

Increasingly, it seems like there is no place to be safe. In recent months, we’ve seen mass shootings in a private Christian school in Tennessee, an Alabama girl’s Sweet 16 birthday party, a Kentucky bank, a Lunar New Year dance in California, a Virginia Walmart and an LGBT nightclub in Colorado. Just about every type of place we Americans gather together to socialize and enjoy our neighbors, to learn and worship with them, even to shop for our groceries, is now a potential target for an outbreak of violence.

And the mass shootings don’t include the smaller but still devastating acts of gun violence that plague our communities. In Kansas City, Kansas, last week, 6-year-old Sir’Antonio Brown was killed by masked gunmen in broad daylight. Another 6-year-old child was injured by gunfire Sunday in Wichita.

This is routine. There were an estimated 20,000 gun deaths in the U.S. in 2022. That doesn’t even include suicides. Americans reportedly bought more than 16 million guns during the year, and that was actually a decline from the peak of more than 20 million guns purchased two years earlier.

We’re swimming in firearms. We’re drowning in violence. Wichita’s new center will have plenty to do.

“This center is going to be a national hub,” Dettelbach said. “It’s going to develop the investigative leads that clear homicides and catch bad guys all over this country.”

Good. But also: How awful.

Maybe a ribbon-cutting wasn’t quite the right way to inaugurate Wichita’s new National Gun Crime Intelligence Center of Excellence. Something more apocalyptic would’ve been appropriate, maybe involving wailing, rending of garments and gnashing of teeth. Sackcloth and ashes perhaps. Penance for the violence we choose to accept, even as we witness — and become numb to — its devastating effects on a near-daily basis.

America needs the new gun crime center. I hope it helps future survivors and victims get some measure of justice.

Just don’t ask me to celebrate it.