The Fulcrum
We are told that mass shootings are sad and awful but not statistically significant and just blown out of proportion by the media. Why, then, should we care about addressing them?
I have honest, pro-gun friends that have engaged me and asked me critical, thoughtful questions about why I should want such drastic action about mass shootings because so few people have died in comparison to nearly all other forms of death in the US. They argue that they are sad, yes, horrible, yes, but statistically not a huge thing. Suicide is a much bigger issue with guns if deaths are our metric, they’d tell me.
9/11 killed fewer people than gallbladder disease does each year. And yet it changed the entire course of our nation. Why?
I know “stochastic terror” is real, but I’m going to talk about it in different language that appeals to my non-STEM friends who haven’t encountered “stochastic” in its mathematical context.
Random shootings at places where we work, play, dance, and pray have a cooling effect on how we socialize and how we trust strangers. We become more afraid and disconnected, more withdrawn. When Bin Laden appeared in his post-9/11 message, he said (essentially) “you have fear in America from the north to the south, from the east to the west. Thank God for that.”
Those who are shooting for terror reasons want the same thing. They want Black people to be afraid to shop in their own neighborhoods or to go to churches that were themselves formed because of their rejection from white churches. They want LGBTQ+ people to be afraid to be themselves in public or even in private. They want Jewish people to be afraid to go to synagogue.
They also want white cishet Christian Americans who otherwise may not be targeted to be full of fear for themselves and their children, and to move down the chart I posted recently about the Omelas story. The fear about children part is critical, which is the reason for the “groomer” panic around grown queer people trying to live their lives. They want them to stop questioning the reason why there must be suffering and accept its inevitability, or worse, to take pride in how little suffering it takes to keep our good thing going.
The truly mentally ill people or people with individual grudges who don’t care who they hurt are useful. They increase the overall terror and reduce the targeting of true terrorists. And yes, the media shapes stories, but I am not comfortable assuming blissful ignorance is better. Besides, the stories barely make headlines these days. Too common, and no plan to change.
The end result is that a few hundred deaths a year shape the entire society. And that is why it matters.
Now we come to the question of what is to be done. Some people point to evidence that certain types of weapon restrictions seemed to reduce the incidence of this. In a federal system like ours, it’s hard to allow states to experiment with this because adjacent states can always make different choices. Others say that we should hold fast to the 2nd Amendment and let everyone carry, with the goal of “frontier politeness”, where you won’t start what you can’t finish. That gets hard because when the shooting starts and everyone has a gun, how do you know who the bad person is?
I have shot guns before. I didn’t particularly enjoy it, though it’s a skill I may continue to work on since I live here. I don’t really want to end safe enthusiasts’ fun. But if my gun utopia comes at the suffering of a few hundred dead and a few thousand bereaved each year, along with a general increase in societal fear and distrust, I’m willing to make different choices and consider reinstating some of the restrictions that look like they helped in the past.
I don’t believe in conspiracies generally. I believe in emergent phenomena and covert actions, but not in giant truths that require large numbers of secret keepers being hidden from us, generally. But in any political argument about what should be done, one must ask who benefits from the strategy in question. Who benefits from doing nothing about guns or increasing their availability with all this collateral damage? Who benefits from a culture of fear and individualism, where your neighbors are not to be trusted and the government can’t be expected to be helpful? And who benefits from banning or restricting high powered weapons? What would we like to happen, and how do we get there?
These are the conversations we should be having and the questions we should be asking. I’ll tell you my take: I would like to try a restriction on high-powered weapons and progressive licensing requirements depending on the lethality of the weapon. I am concerned about ending the culture of fear most of all.