SAWANT: TikTok trial reveals true American priorities when it comes to safety
Column: Sincerely Rue
As recently seen in the news, TikTok CEO, Shou Zi Chew, attended legal hearings in which U.S. lawmakers grilled him on the nature of the app, including concerns over information gathering and the potential dangers the app poses to the mental health of its users.
Only a few days ago, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo), referring to TikTok as "digital fentanyl," attempted to force the Senate to vote on legislation that would ban the app in the U.S. Other lawmakers blocked the move, but will still dedicate tremendous time and effort into deciding what should be done about the operation of the app in the country.
In all honesty, it makes me angry, especially because only a few days earlier, three students and three educators lost their lives in a senseless act of gun violence at The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee.
It makes me angry that there have already been 130 mass shootings in the U.S. in 2023 alone. It is only April.
It makes me angry that while Americans must live in fear at school, work, places of worship and more, lawmakers choose to prioritize banning a social media app from the country instead of working to regulate the access and distribution of firearms in a country where people are losing their lives because someone has a gun when they should not.
And because of this reality, the U.S. is largely desensitized to these tragedies as a means of coping with the reality of gun violence.
The U.S. spews out shocking statistics, but it is not so surprising that it has so many to record. Active shooter drills, gun violence at schools and fearing the worst in crowded public spaces are all parts of our daily lives.
We, as a society, have adapted to protect ourselves from gun violence because the government has failed to do so. What makes it worse, though, is that we watch many elected officials not care.
They cherry-pick the issues they want to focus on as long as it serves them and their personal beliefs. I cannot take a lawmaker seriously when they say they want to ban TikTok to "protect kids," even though they find no issue that students are being gunned down in their classrooms. The logic does not line up.
If lawmakers really wanted to "protect kids," they would have done something about the U.S.' obsession with firearms all the way back in 2012 after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, or even before that after the Columbine High School shooting in 1999.
I will never forget what my high school civics teacher told me when I told him I am involved in gun violence prevention spaces. He said that if Sandy Hook did not wake up our lawmakers if it made them feel nothing at all, he could not imagine what else it could possibly take.
No change after that incident likely meant that no change could be expected for the foreseeable future. And now here we are, in 2023, and his words ring true. Morbid, but true.
Nearly 11 years later, you would hope that something has changed or shifted after so much collective trauma, but the most we get from elected officials is trying to ban a social media app.
If elected officials really cared, they would have put their TikTok spectacle on the backburner immediately. They would have realized what 130 mass shootings in only three months really means.
They would take even one moment to watch the news, watch police footage and see the faces of families whose lives changed in an instant, and that is all it would take for them to refocus their efforts on putting an end to what is currently killing Americans.
Because, really, if you compare TikTok and guns, one of those things is not like the other. But the devastating reality yet normalized viewpoint in the U.S. is that one is valued over the other but not the one you would expect.
In all of this, it is clear where America's priorities lie when it comes to the 331.9 million people who call it home, and it certainly is not with the wellbeing of the collective and its children.
Rujuta Sawant is a Rutgers Business School junior majoring in business analytics and information technology and minoring in political science. Her column, "Sincerely Rue," runs on alternate Mondays.
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