Blaming The Gun Is Easy. Fixing The System Isn’t.
- Jordan
- Apr 15
- 5 min read
Updated: May 1
On April 15, 2021, a 19-year-old walked into his former workplace with two rifles and opened fire. He killed eight people and injured four more before turning the gun on himself. The entire shooting lasted less than four minutes, but its impact still lingers for every family who lost someone that night.
As expected, the cycle kicked in immediately. Vigils. Media coverage. A flood of statements from anti-gun organizations calling for bans, restrictions, and reform. But very few of those statements acknowledged what actually happened in this case. The shooter was flagged. Authorities knew he was a danger. They took a gun away from him. And then they did nothing.
This wasn’t a failure of gun policy. It was a failure of enforcement, of accountability, and of every institution that could have intervened and chose not to.
Who Was Lost
The eight victims of the FedEx shooting were:
• Matthew R. Alexander, 32
• Samaria Blackwell, 19
• Amarjeet Johal, 66
• Jasvinder Kaur, 50
• Jaswinder Singh, 68
• Amarjit Sekhon, 48
• Karli Smith, 19
• John Weisert, 74
Four of them were members of Indianapolis’s Sikh community. All of them were simply trying to get through another shift at work.
The shooter didn’t pick these people randomly. He picked them because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and because nothing stood in his way.
The Shooter Was Known. He Was Flagged. He Was Still Armed.
A year before the shooting, the shooter’s mother called the police and told them her son was planning to commit suicide by cop. Officers responded, took him in for a mental health evaluation, and seized a shotgun from him.
This is where Indiana’s red flag law should have kicked in. It would have allowed prosecutors to petition the court to ban him from buying or owning guns for at least six months, maybe more. But the prosecutor never filed the petition. There was no court hearing. No lasting intervention. Just a one-time seizure of a weapon with no follow-up.
Months later, that same young man legally bought two rifles. Not from a shady dealer. Not through a loophole. From a licensed gun store, after passing a background check.
Anti-gun groups barely mention this. They pivot straight to calling for bans, restrictions, and disarmament of the general public. But if a red flag law fails because no one uses it, the problem isn’t that we need more laws. The problem is that the people responsible for enforcing those laws didn’t do their jobs.
The Gun Wasn’t the Failure. The System Was.
It’s become standard procedure for national anti-gun organizations to use mass shootings as proof that the only solution is to ban more things. But in this case, everything they claim to support was already in place. Indiana had a red flag law. The shooter had been flagged. He was taken into custody. His weapon was seized.
None of that mattered. He still bought two rifles and walked into his former job and murdered eight people.
So the question isn’t whether we need new restrictions. The question is why the ones we already have are ignored when it counts.
The answer is simple. It’s easier to blame the gun. It’s easier to demand bans than to hold prosecutors, police, and mental health systems accountable. It’s easier to talk about the object than the institutions. But it’s not honest. And it’s not helpful.
What Would Actually Work
If we want to prevent mass shootings, we have to stop waiting until someone is already holding a weapon. That means focusing on what happens before someone decides to kill.
Here’s where we can start:
Enforce the laws we already have.
Red flag laws are useless if they’re not applied. If someone is flagged and nothing happens, then the law isn’t a solution. It’s a smokescreen.
Make mental health care real.
Not just hotlines. Not just pamphlets. People need access to affordable, ongoing care, especially young people who are isolated, angry, and untreated. We spend billions on law enforcement but can’t fund long-term mental health treatment. That’s backwards.
Create systems that actually respond to warnings.
The shooter’s mom did the right thing. She asked for help. But there was no safety net for her. Families who sound the alarm need backup. They need to know that their call will lead to action, not a dead-end report.
Stop treating violence as a PR opportunity.
Every time a tragedy like this happens, the same organizations show up with the same hashtags and the same empty calls for bans that wouldn’t have stopped the shooting in question. This isn’t about optics. It’s about whether you’re serious about saving lives or just building donor lists.
The Role of the Community
When the state fails, the burden always shifts to the community. It’s the people on the ground who are left to grieve, organize vigils, support survivors, and try to make sense of what happened.
That includes responsible gun owners too. The same people often vilified in national discourse are the ones running training programs, promoting safe storage, and building real harm reduction practices. But because they refuse to play along with the “ban everything” crowd, they’re ignored or attacked.
This is why community-level efforts matter. Not because they replace policy, but because they don’t wait for someone else to fix things. They act. They educate. They support. And they fill the gaps that institutions leave wide open.
What Anti-Gun Orgs Won’t Say
Anti-gun organizations had every opportunity after this shooting to start a serious conversation about accountability. They could have questioned why a flagged individual slipped through. They could have demanded answers from the prosecutor who didn’t file the petition. They could have used their influence to pressure Indiana into fixing its red flag enforcement process.
Instead, they went back to the same playbook: call for bans, hold a press conference, launch a fundraising email.
It’s not that they don’t care. It’s that their approach is stuck. They see every tragedy as another reason to double down on policy proposals that sound good on paper but fall apart when tested in the real world.
People died because of inaction. Because a warning was ignored. Because a law that was supposed to stop this kind of thing sat unused. If your response doesn’t center that, then it’s not a response at all. It’s just branding.
Honor Through Action, Not Optics
We can’t bring the FedEx victims back. But we can refuse to lie to ourselves about what really happened. We can talk about the actual causes, not just the politically convenient ones. And we can start demanding more from the institutions and organizations who claim to be here to help.
If you want to honor the dead, then fight like hell for the living. Fix the systems. Build new ones where needed. Stop using tragedy as a marketing tool. And make sure that when someone shows every sign of breaking, the people who are supposed to act actually do.
That’s what we owe them.
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