In the wake of the horrific violence we have recently witnessed at Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, there have been several articles asking whether or not a study of the incident will lead to understanding. I would like to take this opportunity to try and answer that question. Simply put, no. No it won't. It won't answer our questions because we're too busy courting our self-serving ideological motives to understand the problem for what it is. This will be painted as a gun problem, and it's not. It's a culture problem. Please keep reading. Do me the brief, simple justice of hearing me out as I outline six points in defense of my statement.
Political Motivations
I am not a conservative. In fact, I'm exactly the variety of liberal socialist the Tea Party accused Barack Obama of being (if only). On virtually every other issue I skew profoundly to the left. I wholeheartedly support government-paid healthcare, tuition forgiveness, radical defunding of the military/industrial complex, and high tax rates on the top 5% of this nation's wealthy citizens. I'm even cautiously optimistic about the idea of basic income. Whether that's good, bad, or otherwise, I'll leave to you to decide. I'm not saying my position makes me correct, or that you should likewise believe in any of these ideas. Rather, I want to be transparent in my motives as I know ad hominem accusations, like "shill", will be thrown at me for having the nerve to suggest that this is a deeply nuanced issue which defies our justified, if misplaced emotional reaction to the type of horror we've seen entirely too many times in recent years.
On the Nature of Tools
Tools are neither good nor bad. I can use a hammer to build a needy family a house. I can also use it to bludgeon an innocent person to death. The same can be said of knives, cars, stairs, social media if the right (wrong, actually) sort of person is watching, and baseball bats. A tool is possessed only of the intent of the wielder. If a car cannot be bad, and thus worthy of removal from society, by logical inference then neither can a gun.
The Fallacy of Numbers Without Context
I understand the gun control argument is more nuanced than the motivational breakdown I outlined in my last point. I simply cannot do the same amount of damage with a knife that can be done with guns. That's a fact. However, it's fallacious to render this down into a numbers game. If we're going to do that then we logically have no choice but to go after the most serious offenders. Vehicles kill more people each year than heart disease and cancer combined. Numbers simply don't tell the whole story, but rather have been used in this argument as a specious defense of ideological positions, a sort of smoke screen to steer the conversation away from the real problem we have in this nation.(More specifics on these numbers forthcoming)
A Look at the Numbers, Specifically
Mass shootings do not kill many people. That is a highly charged statement to make after a mass shooting, so I will defend it with numbers you can easily verify. I won't be posting links because most publications and many social media sites censor comments that link to their competitors, but I will give names of articles from prominent organizations so you can easily falsify what I say.
In the Washington Post story, "The Terrible Numbers That Grow With Every Mass Shooting", it is fully admitted that we don't have a rigorous definition for what a "mass shooting" even is. In fact, we routinely exclude events of horrific gun violence attributed to gang behaviors and drug crime. This is a political manipulation, every bit as pernicious as anything the NRA is engaged in. (I am not a supporter of anyone who uses these tactics, whether their ends align with my own or not.) The CDC's "Fast Facts" page tells us that there were 11,008 deaths associated with gun violence in 2014. We'll use that as a soft average. The number of people in the US in that year was 318,600,000 people according to the US Census Bureau.
That is an astonishingly low 0.00346% of the US populace; literally thousands of times less than a single percent!
To demonstrate my point, and using the same year and car crash example I cited earlier, Wikipedia's statistics page on vehicle deaths in the US reports that 32,744 people were killed in motor accidents in 2014. That is three times as many people, and the numbers remain pretty similar from year to year for both gun violence and vehicular death since then. We have an enormous vehicle problem in this nation, but we hear so very little about it. This is because there is a concerted effort to paint one issue as a bigger problem than it is.
It unquestionably is a problem and every one of those lost people matters. Do not think I am trying to suggest otherwise. It's just that the problem, in reality, isn't what is painted for us by the media and political ideology brokers in social media.
The Nature of Constitutional Rights
Second Amendment rights are not about hunting or even self-protection. They are about the constitutionally mandated overthrow of the United States government should it fall to tyrannical ends (an issue I would think most of my fellow lefties would be especially concerned with given the fascist leanings of both the current president and this despotic Congress, but I digress). It is, therefore, only logical that the arms available to the public have some minimal parity with the arms being used by the United States military. The argument that modern weaponry and military tactics make an overthrow unlikely is not without merit, but this is evidence that we need said parity more than ever, not that we should willingly cede what little martial leverage we retain.
It is worth mentioning for those who didn't take a civics class in high school that our entire legal system is predicated on the notion that human rights are naturally occurring consequences of having been born a human being ("God-given", as the constitution directly states it), and are not granted to us by the United States government. The constitution limits the scope of the government's ability to abridge those naturally occurring rights; it defends us from having them stripped away.
Attempting to erode the right to bear arms in the middle of what looks suspiciously like a soft-fascist insurrection of our government in the form of the Trump administration's courting of an extremist conservative movement, and in the light of the undisputed legal philosophy under which all US law is predicated, is the very definition of the term "un-American". This does not necessarily mean you're wrong to think that way. But if you do so, you are actively advancing a notion that is part and parcel anti-constitutional in nature.
The Number of Guns is Not a Predictor of Violence
It is true that we have the most guns per capita in the US, amounting to somewhere near 75 per 100 people in the US according to Wikipedia's page, "Estimating Number of Guns Per Capita By Country". However, from the same page we can also see that Canada, Germany, France, and all of Scandinavia is just behind us, yet their gun violence issues are remarkably less numerous. If the number of guns on the streets were a direct predictor of gun violence in a nation then they should be trailing us by only a little.
And yet they're not. In fact, on Wikipedia's "List of Countries by Firearm-Related Death Rate" page we can see that of the countries I used as an example, Sweden has the next highest gun violence rate. Shockingly, it's less than a mere 20% of that which occurs in the US! This is proof positive that taking guns off the street does not inherently mean less death as the number of guns cannot be implicated in how many people are killed. To delve into this further we have to look at another issue.
The Government-Created Mental Health Crisis
In the 1980's, Ronald Reagan destroyed the public mental healthcare institution, such as it was, under the auspices of cutting the fat out of the government's expenditures. He is far from alone, but a chief offender in an ongoing pattern of multi-generation erosion of our national ability to deal with mental health issues, as you can read more about in the Real Clear Politics article, "Fifty Years of Failing America's Mentally Ill". In doing so, the government has cast untold numbers of mentally ill people out into the streets where they had little recourse but to turn to a life of crime, often only too-well equipped with disorders that lend themselves to criminality in the first place. While it is true that the institutions of the time were draconian by today's standard, the correct way to address that problem was not to destroy it entirely but to modernize it through aggressive funding and cautious government oversight. Our nation's failure to do this ensured that there was no infrastructure in place to screen those with deteriorating mental health issues before they became public problems; school shooters, for instance.
The Consequences of Failing to Address this Issue Honestly
Our failure as a society to put in place a modern health care system, with meaningful psychological evaluations, is the problem in this nation. Not guns. We can take guns out of people's hands, and it will lower the immediate death tolls of these incidents, at least momentarily. But how do we plan to shut down the internet? The "Anarchist's Cookbook" has been available online almost since the internet became a thing. For those not in the know, this is a horrid document outlining recipes for scarily-easy-to-produce bombs. The point I'm making is that pressure which doesn't kill an organism triggers evolution.
We created this school shooting issue when we decided it was okay to have a media circus every time someone does this; to give a platform to anyone with a mental illness, the ability to use our public airways as parchment, and our children's precious blood as ink with which to make their sick statements. Are we really so naive as to think that will go away even if we outlaw public gun ownership entirely? No. This pressure will trigger evolution, and the school shooting will become the school bombing. It's bad now, I don't deny, but it can get so much worse. I'd wager it's easier for most teens to make these bombs than it is for them to get a gun. And as we all have seen, it's not particularly hard to get a gun.
We don't have a gun problem. We have a situation in which political interests and ideology brokers are pushing an emotional, but false narrative about gun totals being linked to violence in the US. They do this despite a wealth of well-curated statistic to the contrary, in a nation where healthcare is viewed by our leaders as a thing to be dismissed. We have a culture problem. This is on us. Not the NRA, not gun manufacturers, not conservatives, not this boogie man or that. It's us. It's always been us.
Afterword: I encourage you to share this article, and repost it on any social media site you like. All I ask is that you please link back to this as the original source of the document, and that do not use it as justification for any act of violence or excuse to demonize others who may hold a different view point than we do. Part of how we got here is rooted in our failure as a culture to listen to each other with an open mind. You do pro-Second Amendment activists exactly zero favors by being wilfully obtuse, and cement our philosophical adversaries' opinions of us as being unwilling to listen to reason. We got into this mess as a culture. Not because of boogie men. We will have to either get out of it, or be consumed by it, as a culture. Together.