One of the obvious obstacles to gun control over the last several years, despite a series of mass shootings that could potentially have catalyzed this movement, is the argument that no law, or even handful of laws, will have much overall effect on gun violence. As I noted last week, many people are beginning to challenge the fatalistic assumptions built into this thinking — since when is doing even a little not better than doing nothing, and wouldn’t even some movement open the way for larger reforms and begin to change the culture around the role of guns in our society?
The necessity of changing our collective cultural perceptions around guns seems undeniable, and new legislation can both embody those perceptions and drive further change. For instance, laws that require a high degree of responsibility in gun owners not only have the potential to cut down on their use in criminal activities, but would also be a way to encourage people to reflect on and change how they think about guns, such as in the importance accorded to gun ownership. Restrictions on magazine capacity and a ban on the sale of semi-automatic weapons could reduce mass shootings, while also reflecting a larger cultural change about the appropriateness of civilians owning weapons of war.
But as awful and important to prevent as they are — both in terms of lives lost and a more generalized terrorization of our populace incompatible with the most basic definition of a free and open society — mass shootings represent a tiny fraction of gun deaths in our country. As Eric Levitz writes at New York Magazine’s Daily Intelligencer, over-emphasis on mass shootings as the primary gun control issue could well have effects contrary not only to progressive values, but arguably to values dear to any member of a democratic society, regardless of party affiliation.
And a focus on mass shootings only in schools presents a distorted view not only of the problem — if by problem we mean mass death by gun violence — but of what are considered to be legitimate solutions to gun violence of any kind. Levitz quotes a mother of a teen killed in the Parkland shooting, who essentially puts forward an argument for turning schools into fortresses. It’s revealing to think about this “school fortress” idea a little more. After all, making a school into a de facto prison is rational if your sole concern is to stop a mass shooter from ever killing another child. I would even say that arming teachers is on its surface a rational response to the desire to kill shooters before they can kill our kids. But apart from the depressing way they assume that there’s either no will or no legal way to prevent potential killers from acquiring weapons of war, such ideas share a common belief that security flows primarily out of a restriction of personal freedom and the literal barrel of a gun. That such ideas are receiving at least broad public consideration shows the degree to which our country’s notion of security has been broadly poisoned by these basic misconceptions.
After all, it’s not just in our current gun debate that we find ourselves enmeshed in bad assumptions about how violence and restriction of civil rights is necessary to our security. At New Republic, Jacob Bacharach makes the case that cultural tendencies in this direction are embodied in government policies, which in turn feed certain cultural assumptions about the role of violence and state power in America:
The political and economic choice to allocate so many of our society’s resources to endless, expanding war-making, to armed cops and barbaric prisons, has a deranging influence on our cultural life. Among other things, it makes warfare—a gun culture—quotidian and banal; it makes weapons of war perfectly ordinary tools; it makes TV cops taking body shots at suspects who are, obviously, always guilty, normal; it makes the idea of turning teachers and principals (and custodians! and guidance counselors!) into armed agents of the state, there to protect children against equally armed citizens, a topic for political debate rather than a notion as insane as fake moon landings and a flat Earth. And this, in turn, makes the billions and trillions we spend on warfare, at home and abroad, likewise seem like something other than the craziness that it manifestly is.
To consider the preponderance of gun violence in American society in isolation from the broader questions of how we allocate our collective resources—of how we determine social value—is inherently self-limiting [. . .] But in the absence of a larger leftist agenda to move guns and war from their central position in our government and political economy, I find it hard to imagine that there can be really fundamental change, and I fear we will continue this slow drift toward more armed guards, more locked doors, more checkpoints, and more professions—educators now, then what: nurses? doctors? transit workers?—simply deputized as armed agents of a violent state whose citizens in turn enact in ever greater numbers the gun-happy antics in which they marinate every moment of their waking lives.
Bacharach is taking an important swing at an issue that’s difficult for many of us to articulate, a larger cultural and political context that makes straight talk about gun violence feel so essential, but also so often cut off from a larger cultural discussion. Here's my swing at posing some ancillary question: Why have so many Americans divided the world into perpetrators and the innocent? Why do so many of us feel powerless and under assault? And why do so many tacitly accept that violence is the only way to feel secure?
