Note: this used to be a much larger essay that also looked at multiple sources on gun violence and data analysis thereon. That info has been moved to a separate article here.
Recently, there was a high-profile mass shooting in my country of America. The specifics aren’t all that essential to my thoughts. It’s functionally no different than any of the other examples that are going to come to mind, and a similar event is going to happen in the future, inevitably.
*update* Since I first wrote this article in December of 2015, it has happened again. And again. And again…
I presume this would go without saying, but let me just state this explicitly at the get-go: I think innocent people being shot is bad. I don’t like it. I want it not to happen in the future.
As soon as the news hit the airwaves, commentary began. Armchair quarterbacking is America’s favorite sport. We already had our lines memorized. Ascribing blame is hardly a modern cultural phenomenon. It is a very essential part of human nature. We need a “why”. Chaos is unpalatable. Any explanation is better than Nothing.
In the old days, God fulfilled this role, and the prophets and holy people would explain to us the rationale of the divine. Punishment for apostasy and sin was an old standby. What is more, if we changed our ways, things like this wouldn’t happen anymore. But now God is dead. Society as a whole, though hardly atheistic, no longer accepts such a directly micromanaging and present God causing evil to befall the innocent for the sins of the wicked. Frankly, our epidemiological data is too good to fall for that anymore…. There are a few holdouts of course. Like that one Republican who has been in media the last few years and is in no way a serious political candidate anymore so stop treating him like one. Good old His-name-isn’t-important. There’s also that old evangelical fundamentalist. And the guy I always confuse him with. They try the old lines, that God is angry with our nation’s apostasy in some way. It sounds absurd to all but the most fundamentalist religious folks. Even the folks who still go to church every Sunday for the most part think that, say, not mandating prayers in secular schools doesn’t qualify as massacre-inducing apostasy by the divine. So these old holdouts are roundly dismissed–as they should be–and people who fancy themselves as progressive use their words as a condemnation of the religious or conservatives as a whole.
The pious among us say their prayers, and find solace in their faith that there is some variety of better place after this. But that hardly fills our society’s existential hole once filled by God. We don’t have our why. The faithful defer to the “mysterious ways” of God, but that is hardly satisfying to society as a whole. Moreover, we don’t have an escape. If God is not angry at us, we can seek no forgiveness, and we will have no way of allaying disaster in the future. We don’t have God anymore, so we turn to something else that we can consider omnipotent to fulfill our psychic needs: the state, the government, laws. Nota bene this is not a political comment, it is a psychological one. Please do not take that as an anarchic sentiment on my part. The government, etc. is something beyond any of us as an individual. It is a higher power we can defer to. We no longer pray offer sacrifices or prayers to God, but we can clamor that our politicians in the government do this or that, and we can go to the voting booths in lieu of a tabernacle. Our priestly caste is no more, replaced functionally by the Fourth Estate, the intercessors between us and the government. We have made progress with the Enlightenment, but….
After high-profile shooting incidents, a pro and con faction get to work tendering blame, judgement, and prescriptions. From what I’ve experienced, the anti-gun side tends to be initiating the conversation about our nation’s overall piety, with the pro-gun side offering the rebuttal–but not always. “This disaster fell us because of our sin of too many people having too many guns”, goes the side that asks for gun control. If we repent, and pass gun control, we can avert this disaster in the future. But the genie is already out of the bottle: Americans already have a shitload of guns. “Common sense” gun control will have at best marginal benefits and substantial cost to implement. Radical gun control will end in a bloodbath. People don’t want gun control, the want a gun rapture: they want the guns to evanescence without a fuss. But that’s not going to happen, ever, no matter how much people are scolded, no matter what laws we pass.
From the pro-gun side comes the cry, “more guns would have stopped this”–even without much in the way of prodding from the anti-gun side. If only we would simply arm everyone and tear down the heretical laws that prevent everyone from being able to carry a machine gun at all times, then we would be invulnerable.Nevermind that me packing a subcompact 9 millimeter in my 3rd floor classroom isn’t going to do shit if a kid armed to the teeth with long guns opens fire in the cafeteria.
The nation then debates this over the next few weeks, and then goes back to whatever they were doing before. We debate this in our usual manner of mostly just yelling at each other with no intent on having an honest discussion with respectful disagreement, and just have the goal of making sure people know that we’re right and that everyone who disagrees with us is a stupid, Hell-bound troglodyte.
What are essentially emotional arguments are cloaked in a heavy dose of statistics that get bandied about. But a thorough perusal of the statistics should make any honest and relatively intelligent man go, “okay, so these are complicated, and it’s hard to prove something conclusively one way or the other”. Alas, very few people do this. I’ll concede that there are people who may be honestly sharing data analyses, but for the most part the data doesn’t exist as data to be scrutinized, but as a weapon with which to bludgeon those who disagree with you. Data are numbers, objective concepts that transcend arguments, supposedly. Data are thus used to make an argument look more objective. I’m right; the numbers say so. The tedium of slogging through data, looking for confounding variables, hunting down those data, and repeating the process ad nauseam is a lot to bear, so most people tend to gravitate towards small bursts of data published by a news media source that leans their direction that purports to do all that digging for us. Except pretty much nobody does it thoroughly. There’s way too much info to cover in one or two quick articles, and who has time for lengthy reading and digesting? Very, very few people seriously consider the cost-benefit of policy as it may appear in reality. People equivocate law with divine fiat; we don’t want policy analysis, we just want everything to be better.
Aside: if you are indeed interested in a thorough look at the data, here’s what I’ve cobbled together from dozens of sources.
Really though, I think these facts and debates are largely irrelevant. The issue isn’t the guns, it’s the control. It’s not about making bonafide arguments based on data and cost-benefit analysis and the virtues of utilitarianism versus personal freedom, it’s about wanting to feel secure and in control. Even if 150 people died a year in mass shootings, it’d still take over two centuries before the total dead would number how many people die in car accidents in a year. Hell, most of us are just going to die of cancer or heart disease in our 70’s. But these aren’t shocking. Mass shootings are. It’s not supposed to happen. It’s not predictable. Old people dying of age-related illnesses is what’s supposed to happen. Accidents happen, but they’re sporadic, never enough at once to catch our attention. There are no high-profile “mass drowning” accidents at swimming pools. We do not lose hundreds of people in singular building or city fires anymore. So these do not rouse us from our psychic stability. But shootings are loud, disruptive. It thrusts the grizzly specter of death in front of you to deal with. And dealing with death is hard. That is the human condition, after all.
Those of us that can’t turn to God Himself for solace turn to other higher powers. On the gun-control side, this is the law, the government. On the pro-gun side, this is guns themselves. “If only we banned assault weapons!” “If only more good people were armed!” These are two sides of the same psychic coin: my God will protect us, so worship Him! We must repent from our wicked ways! And we will shout at each other with all the fervor of zealots. My faith is strong, and my fight is righteous. Because the reality, that these incidents are essentially no more preventable than a toddler falling in the pool, or an old man’s heart giving out, is too painful, too terrifying to confront. That evil will continue to exist and destroy innocent life, and mentally scar the survivors is, understandably, heartbreaking and frustrating.
This doesn’t change, and can’t change the reality that we cannot stop the inevitability of death, and fortify the frailty of life. Life is fleeting, as it is, was, and shall be. I don’t know how we can deal with that. Maybe we can’t, really. So we pick our sides, say our prayers, proselytize, and cast aspersions on the idolaters, pagans, and infidels. We secure God’s blessing, and then go back to our lives in due time. Inevitably, the boulder will return back down the hill, and the cycle will be repeated.