Saturday was another bad day in America. El Paso and Dayton have now joined a long list of towns and school names that are synonymous with gun violence and mass killings. This weekend I read and reread the closing lines of a 2017 New York Times article entitled, “What Explains U.S. Mass Shootings? International Comparisons Suggest an Answer” by Max Fisher and Josh Keller.
After Britain had a mass shooting in 1987, the country instituted strict gun control laws. So did Australia after a 1996 shooting. But the United States has repeatedly faced the same calculus and determined that relatively unregulated gun ownership is worth the cost to society.
That choice, more than any statistic or regulation, is what most sets the United States apart.
“In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate,” Dan Hodges, a British journalist, wrote in a post on Twitter two years ago, referring to the 2012 attack that killed 20 young students at an elementary school in Connecticut. “Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.”
I bolded “Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.” That line hurt because it rings painfully true with over seven years of data to support it. We had a little hope that things might significantly change after the Parkland shooting because of the articulate and courageous efforts of a coalition that formed around the surviving students. Improvement also seemed possible for just a little while after the horror and huge number of fatalities and wounded in Las Vegas, but in the end that price of human carnage was only enough to buy the small gesture of the elimination of “bump stocks.” Lately it’s been more of the same as shootings continue to occur at an even faster pace. CNN published an interactive map showing where 31 school shootings have occurred in the year since Parkland, and they were only counting school shootings. They did not include shopping centers, work places, and other public gatherings like El Paso and Dayton. A CBS report reveals just how much carnage goes unnoticed at the national level.
The amount of mass shootings across the U.S. so far in 2019 has outpaced the number of days this year, according to a gun violence research group. This puts 2019 on pace to be the first year since 2016 with an average of more than one mass shooting a day.
We are developing great lists and graphics that are substitutes for definitive action. The LA Times just published a list of all shootings of four or more victims (the list actually goes down to five) going back over four years to July 2015. These lists are ghoulish because with those criteria we just forget dozens, perhaps hundreds, of victims including last week’s shooting at the Garlic Festival in Gilroy, California. The numbers that measure the extent of the tragedies have become so devoid of meaning that the victimization of those just wounded seems hardly to be newsworthy. One event that touched me deeply and was not included in the LA Times list because not enough people were killed was the attack on students in a class at UNC in Charlotte, North Carolina this last April. Like Gilroy, UNC Charlotte did not make the list because there were only two fatalities, but one of those who died was a young man named Riley Howell (pictured in today’s header) who sacrificed his own life charging the shooter. His action is certain to have saved the lives of many of his classmates.
At my church on Sunday, our minister led us in prayer for the victims, and the suffering families and friends of the victims in El Paso and Dayton, but he went a little further than the usual “thoughts and prayers” mantra because he also prayed for the healing of the anger that hangs over our country. He prayed for healing of the deep rifts of intolerance that divide our country, our community, and even our congregation. As he lead the prayer, I realized that in ways that we need to explore, we may all be part of a larger problem and that the gun violence may be a symptom and not the root cause problem. What really challenges us and needs fixing is likely to be much bigger than guns and the NRA. Most of us are not shooters, but perhaps in ways that we do not understand we are enablers, like our president, of the violence that sets us apart from other developed economies. At a minimum we suffer from a collective confusion that we have shared all the way back past the Aurora, Colorado movie shooting in 2012, and perhaps even further back past the twenty years since Columbine.
The New York Times article that I quoted near the top of this note was published on November 7, 2017. The Sutherland Springs, Texas shooting that killed 26 was two days earlier on November 5, 2017. The Las Vegas shooting where the killer had an arsenal of 23 weapons and had used 14 “bump stock” fitted automatic rifles to kill 58 people and wound more than 500 in a scene of horror that persisted for over ten minutes had occurred just a month earlier on October 1, 2017. The authors give us a lot of data about how we differ from other similarly wealthy and “advanced economies.” Their conclusions are debatable, but they put up a good argument that we don’t have more mental illness than other countries as an explanation for our shootings, and the reason for our leadership in human carnage is not violent video games, or a reaction to our racial diversity. They write:
If mental health made the difference, then data would show that Americans have more mental health problems than do people in other countries with fewer mass shootings. But the mental health care spending rate in the United States, the number of mental health professionals per capita and the rate of severe mental disorders are all in line with those of other wealthy countries.
A 2015 study estimated that only 4 percent of American gun deaths could be attributed to mental health issues…countries with high suicide rates tended to have low rates of mass shootings — the opposite of what you would expect if mental health problems correlated with mass shootings.
Whether a population plays more or fewer video games also appears to have no impact. Americans are no more likely to play video games than people in any other developed country.
Racial diversity or other factors associated with social cohesion also show little correlation with gun deaths. Among European countries, there is little association between immigration or other diversity metrics and the rates of gun murders or mass shootings.
Their theory, which deserves some consideration, is that the answer lies in our culture and in the overwhelming number of guns that exist in our society. They contend that as a nation we are more violent, and that our anger coupled with the easy access to powerful guns explains our problem. I may be putting words into their mouths, but if their implication that we have an “anger management problem” that is exacerbated by a gun fascination problem is true, it suggests to me that our recently popular potential legislative solutions that we can just put in a better system of background checks, require a waiting period for purchase approval, and eliminate gun show sales will fix the problem is insufficient. What it suggests is that we need to address the origins of the anger as we simultaneously decimate the number of guns that exist in our society. The reality of our anger and predilection to violence coupled with easy access to guns creates a perfect storm.
Our “gun problem,” like our drug problem, deserves study that it is not getting. We have clues that we are afraid to pursue for what they might reveal. One interesting fact that the article points out is that crime rates here are about the same as in Great Britain, but if you are robbed in New York you are more likely to be shot and killed by the thief than if the crime occurred in London. We have heard time and again that “guns don’t kill people, people do.” It is true that it is people who pull the triggers, but the easy access to guns enables those people who are filled with anger at others to take out their anger on larger numbers of victims. Those of us who feel vulnerable have our own anger and loathing directed at those who cling to their rights of gun ownership. My relationships with friends, neighbors, and even family members who defend their right to have guns, and are caught up in the culture of gun ownership are all distorted by my attempts to “bottle up” my anger. I live in an “open carry state.” Fortunately, I don’t see many people exercising their right, but when I do, I am more offended by the sight of their gun than I would be if they were walking around with exposed genitals. Their display seems to be a mocking presentation of “well what are you going to do about it.”
There were 39,773 gun related death in 2017. It was the third consecutive year of an increasing number of deaths. Almost two thirds of the gun related deaths were suicides. In 2017 there were 47,000 suicides in America. Putting the two set of numbers together over half of all successful suicides utilized a gun. Suicide is often an impulsive act. You can survive an impulsive ingestion of pills. Once you pull the trigger on a gun, the deed is usually done, and there is no opportunity to retrieve you. Guns are easily available for those who want to commit suicide. If there is not a gun in the home, a quick trip to a nearby big box store will put a gun into the hands of a suddenly jilted lover or economically distraught soul who sees no way forward in life. Better mental health screening may help, but there are other possible solutions. Since a significant number of gun suicides are impulsive acts, waiting periods may reduce gun related suicides. We know there are many people who commit suicide using a gun that they bought on the same day that they use it on themselves. In June, Phil Scott, the Republican Governor of Vermont, vetoed a bill that would have established a waiting period for handguns. The motivation for the bill was in part to reduce the number of impulsive suicides with guns. The New Hampshire legislature has recently passed similar legislation. There has been a concern that our governor will veto the law. That has not happened yet, and it is unclear what will happen now in the wake of the latest spate of shootings.
After the shooting in Las Vegas, I wrote a post entitled “Gun Rights and Healthcare as a Right: Where Do We Go From Here?” In early May, just after the UNC Charlotte shooting, I wrote another post entitled “I Am Not Sure How Much More I Can Take.” I began the piece referencing an article published by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times in early November 2017 the day after the church shooting in Texas, and a month after the Las Vegas carnage. In that piece I adopted Kristof’s formulation that we should approach gun violence as a public health issue. The piece begins:
In November 2017 the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof published an opinion piece entitled, “How To Reduce Shootings.” He began the article by pointing out how different our problem with guns is compared to the rest of the world. Since there are more than 300 million guns in our country, at least one for every man, woman and child that lives here, we have a problem that is very different than in any other country. Japan, for example, has about one gun for every ten residents and experiences less than ten gun deaths a year. Even more upsetting is the fact that we have 3 murders per 100,000 people which is six times as many gun related homicides as they do in Canada where there are only 0.5 murders with guns per 100,000. When we start looking at the data from the perspective of all gun related deaths the number jumps to 10.5 per 100,000. When you begin to analyze the data, the problem takes on the appearance of a public health issue, and that was Kristof’s point. Kristof’s thesis was that we treat gun violence, gun control, and gun ownership as political issues when we should treat gun related deaths as a public health problem.
The Times reposted Kristof’s 2017 piece on Saturday after the Walmart shooting in El Paso. One sentence was added at the top of the post for clarification:
There has been another mass shooting, this one in El Paso, where at least 18 people were killed. This essay originally ran in 2017, after a shooting in Texas church killed 26 people, but the issue is still tragically relevant — and will remain so until America tightens its gun safety policies.
40,000 deaths a year from guns. 47,000 suicides with at least 25,000 of those performed with a gun. Over a thousand children die from accidental gunshots and over 5000 are wounded each year. Guns are indeed a public health problem and we all share a potential vulnerability to the issue. My grandsons could have been at the Gilroy Garlic Festival. I avoid Walmart for many reasons, but other family members shop at Walmart regularly. There is no place to hide. Ever since we discovered the “germ theory” of illness we have used the information from epidemiology to drive social policy and medical research in a joint effort to protect the population. Why don’t we use our ability to do research and understand data to solve a problem that seems to be unique to our culture?
One reality of our collective dilemma is that “the deja vu all over again” frustration of the sheer number of these events in the face of well orchestrated political resistance has left many of us feeling that there is nothing that we can do. We feel powerless. That was the point of referencing the disillusionment following the success of the NRA to block all attempts at reform through legislation after the killing of children at Newtown. Perhaps unlike germ driven plagues, this epidemic is a spiritual miasma. Is Marianne Williamson a prophet? Her “Jerehmiac” proclamations during the Democratic debates that suggest that we have a national spiritual problem may hold truth that we reject at our own peril.
I have been reading Jill Lepore’s recent book. It’s a slim volume that examines the history of nationalism in America entitled This America:The Case For The Nation. In the book she examines how we have often failed to avoid self serving illiberal positions and reviews much of our history of avoidance or delay in dealing with our collective sins of domestic terror, racism, and inequality of opportunity, and our confusion dealing with the complexities of immigration. I think she was speaking directly to us today in Chapter 13 entitled “Can This Be America?” In that chapter she reviews the violence against African Americans and Jews in the mid twentieth century. She then states:
The twenty-first-century American reign of terror, its resurgent, illiberal nationalism, the nationalism of the American Nationalist, began not with Trump’s presidency but with Obama’s in 2008, the Brown v. Board of the presidency. “Impeach Obama” read the yard signs. “He is unconstitutional.” In March of 2011, Trump first began publicly demanding that Obama prove his citizenship…
Courage and hope were not the language of Trump’s most vociferous political opponents. Blame and grievance were their language, the language of the times, the grammar of Twitter, the idiom of Trump, the taste of bile in every mouth. Trump’s loudest critics answered Trump’s viciousness with their own viciousness, his abandonment of norms with their own abandonment, his unwillingness to speak to the whole country with their own parochialism, speaking to their followers rather than to the nation, and blanching at expressions of love of country.
But the violence and bloody-mindedness of deranged and broken men can only be countered by principle, and fortitude, and by unerring means. That fortitude includes making appeals to national ends, and making the case for the nation.
A little further on she connects the problem to the bombing of a synagogue in Atlanta in the 50s, the shooting at the church in Charleston in 2015, and the shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh last year. She suggests that despite these tragedies we have had calls to a positive form of nationalism:
In 1963, at the March on Washington marking the one hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, King had said, “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’”
In the next chapter, entitled “The End of Liberalism” she implies that part of our collective problem is a lack of will on the part of those who espouse liberalism to invest our personal time, energy, and creativity to solve problems like immigration, racism, and gun violence in efforts that would achieve King’s vision, and I would add bring forth in the process the vision of the Triple Aim, all part of a more “perfect union.” Her analysis is sometimes confusing to the reader which parallels the reality of our times. Something is wrong. We can identify many things that upset us, but we are having a very hard time figuring a way forward together. It seems that we do have some sort of spiritual problem that prevents us from coming together to even imagine what a better nation would look like, and who would be welcome to be a part of that future state. Williamson suggests that it is a question of love. If those words make you queasy then let’s dial it back to a question of a nation that respects all people, and where all people work together to live without violence. Until we get there, I will join in the prayers for us all, and will vote to free us from terror of guns in the hands of angry people.
