Two troubling South Carolina shootings have one common thread
South Carolina set a new record with 571 murders in 2020, a 25 percent increase from 2019. It was the highest number of murders in a single year since records began being kept in 1960. But sometimes incidents that aren’t included in lists as dastardly as that one says more about the state of things. Murder is just the final step in a long societal process.
About an hour and a half after my 17-year-old daughter left work, a colleague of hers at the Hollywood Wax Museum in Myrtle Beach was shot. While I was trying to process what to say or think about that, I came across video of a shooting during a Dixie Youth League baseball game in Charleston.
Though the details remain confusing, a visitor allegedly brought a gun inside the zombie apocalypse section of the wax museum and got startled – startled by design, given he had knowingly entered a haunted house. He dropped the gun, which was picked up by someone else who thought it was a prop and shot one of the “zombies” in the arm. No one was hit at the baseball game in Charleston, though video of the incident captured the sound of several rapid-fire shots going off near the field. Parents and kids scrambled, some dropping to the ground, others running, others performing the kind of belly crawls they practiced during active shooter drills at school.
No one died. None of them will be listed as homicide victims when the 2022 totals are tallied. That doesn’t mean there won’t be life-long psychic scars that will manifest themselves differently in each of those who unfortunately were in the vicinity of flying bullets. I can’t tell you how the parents and young baseball players have been coping since that shooting. But I know the ripple effects of what happened inside the Myrtle Beach wax museum are still reverberating.
Employees had to rethink whether they’d feel safe enough to work there again. Their bosses had to scramble to figure out when it would be OK to reopen and how long and under what circumstances and in what ways they needed to pitch in to help employees in ways they hadn’t needed to before. It wasn’t because they were targeted by a deranged shooter like a Dylann Roof. It’s because of the banality of it. They were simply doing their jobs and because of lax gun laws and an overly-permissive gun culture, someone had the bright idea to bring a loaded gun to a goofy-good time.
Wax museum employees know, like other workers in the area, that though the tourist season hasn’t officially begun, large, rowdy crowds have begun showing up. Myrtle Beach can expect to see maybe 20 million visitors this year, strangers whom they can’t be sure won’t make the same choice the wax museum shooter did. That’s in addition to locals who might be more adamant about their “right” to carry guns into more places, more often, concealed or otherwise.
In Charleston, the shootout near the baseball game allegedly began after a heated argument. Instead of resolving their conflict with cuss words, or even fists, those involved thought pulling out guns was the wisest choice. In Myrtle Beach, a wax museum employee was shot because someone decided they needed a gun while dodging low-wage workers dressed as zombies. Until we acknowledge the throughline between those incidents – the proliferation of guns, which in 2020 became the top cause of death for kids and teens for the first time – we should expect such madness to keep repeating itself in ways we can anticipate, and in ways we often won’t.