Aurora, Uvalde, Parkland, Boulder, Buffalo ... and Half Moon Bay

Get used to it.

In the long hours and longer days since the shootings, familiar concerns rippled out and away from the crime scene. How many are dead? Where is the shooter? How can we help the survivors? TV cameras came. TV cameras went. Money poured in from caring people near and far, and it will help. It will help. But it won’t remove the pin marking Half Moon Bay’s place on that ignoble map.

Mayor Deborah Penrose knows that. She remains hopeful because that is her nature, but she is also a realist. The events of Jan. 23, 2023, might be an anomaly, but they didn’t come out of nowhere. The memories won’t go away, and conditions remain rife today for more violence when we least expect it. There are people living alone and in despair. Inequity is everywhere. And there are likely more guns than people.

Talk to the mayor about the shootings in her town and she quickly and rightly pivots to these societal ills that are not unique to Half Moon Bay and the coast.

“We lack a middle class,” she says. “We have wealthy people and poor people. So much poverty is not seen. There are not social services available. There is a long list of what may sound like liberal complaints.”

Then Penrose paused. On the phone, her struggle for words almost sounded like a struggle to breathe.

“It’s inequality across the board,” she continued. “We complain about trash on the beach. Big (expletive) deal. Pick up the trash if you don’t like it. We hired homeless people to pick up the trash and that helps them a little bit, but it’s not enough. It’s not the answer.”

Penrose has also been vocal about the proliferation of guns. On a televised interview last week, she said, “When are we going to stop allowing people to buy guns? … How many children have to be killed? How many children have to witness their parents being killed?”

Most of the online comments to that interview have suggested people, not guns, are to blame for mass shootings. Some suggest more of us should be armed so that we can engage the next active shooter. I asked Penrose if she had received any more direct feedback.

“I get some emails,” she said. “I just ignore them.”

Penrose isn’t the first to connect guns and inequality to the hundreds of mass shootings that spread across our nation like an unchecked cancer. The Los Angeles Times reported that the United States has the highest gun ownership per capita in the world. There are actually 120 firearms for every 100 people in the land of the free. (Who is second? Yemen, where there are roughly half as many guns per capita.) Late last year, the Center for Economic and Policy Research identified a correlation between poverty and gun violence. UCLA Professor of Social Welfare Mark Kaplan spoke to the relationship between an unequal society and gun violence in a 2017 seminar at the university. “You all hear about poverty, but inequality is another measure of economic well-being. And there is a strong correlation between homicide per million and income inequality,” he said that day.

Penrose thinks the violence of Jan. 23 will linger in the minds of outsiders for a time, but perhaps not forever. She doesn’t think Half Moon Bay will be mentioned alongside Sandy Hook and Columbine forever. But maybe we’d be better off if it were.

“I think Half Moon Bay will be remembered for a while,” Penrose said. “As a general rule, though, I think we’ve become numb.”

— Clay Lambert