Mass Shootings and Gun Control

Policy Preferences are the Result of Differing Views on Human Nature

[This was originally written in response to the Buffalo, NY shooting in May 2022]

The basic model of partisanship that most people have responded to positively is that the Smashing Pumpkins got it right in the lyrics to ‘Bullet With Butterfly Wings.’ To paraphrase, “Despite all our rage, we are sill just rats in a cage.” Lefties tend to look at the cage from a top down approach, noting all the places that society’s cage benefits some groups and harms others, and they feel a moral imperative to change it, either by little reforms or drastic foundational alterations. Righties tend to look at the cage from within it, accepting that this cage, like every single possible cage, is going to be imperfect, because it’s designed by fallible humans. The liberal, capitalist model based on negative rights isn’t perfect, but it’s the least bad imperfect cage we’ve figured out how to live in so far.

So the gun debate, which happens after every mass shooting, centers around the question of malleability of human nature. If Lefties are correct that human nature is changeable, we should embrace laws that make it harder to commit violence by getting rid of the weapons that make it easy to kill large numbers of people quickly. If the Righties are correct that fallen humans are and will always be violent, the best response for an individual Righty is to arm themselves to the teeth in case of criminal trespassing or governmental tyranny.

(Sidenote 1 - I know multiple Righties who have this image on t-shirts.)

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Thoughts on Gun Violence in General

Question 1 - What is the root cause of gun violence in the cases of school and mass shootings?

The deepest root of any violence is in evolutionary pressures that exert themselves across almost all species.  Guns just make it really easy to do a lot of harm and to do it quickly.  

For school and mass shootings the biggest drivers are urban gang culture and a subculture that emerged in the 1996 in the Columbine HS massacre.  They're separate phenomena, with the former rooted in violent criminal behavior that spans all cultures and across time - pursuit of territory, money, sex, and power via the elimination of rival groups.  The latter is more rooted in an expression of rage against society and a sense of belonging to a group of people who feel that they've been rejected by society and so society must pay.  

I actually had Eric Harris's (Columbine Killer) best friend in one of my classes at Arapahoe Community College in Littleton, Colorado.  He planned the attack not knowing that his friend was serious about carrying it out, got investigated by the FBI, proceeded to hide in heroin addiction for over a decade to cope with the guilt, and then was in college trying to start life over.  He had studied the psychology of these types of killers as part of coming to terms with what had happened, and according to him, there's a building process - 

A. They collect reasons to be angry, they encourage each other, they look for inspiration.  This pressure builds and builds and builds.

B.  They make the decision, then begin collecting things (guns, bombs, etc.) and making concrete plans.  This pressure builds and builds and builds.

C.  They set their date, attack, and then there's always this moment of calm after the killing is over and that anger-pressure has dissipated.  That's when a lot of them commit suicide.  Some of them will just sit down in a daze.

I also was teaching in Aurora when the theatre shooter hit, and I had a lot of students involved directly and indirectly in that event, including people who had friends who were hit and EMTs and police officers who responded, one of whom told me that they make child-sized body bags, which was a helluva thing to learn.  So I am sympathetic to the pain of mass shootings and their impact on entire communities.

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Question 2 - How do we reduce gun violence in mass shootings?

Depends on the root problems - deterioration of the family, poverty, police policy, lack of resources, lack of opportunity, etc.  contribute to mass shootings in urban settings. To address that we need some serious policies to rebuild families and communities and to make accessible pathways out of poverty for children who are born into it. 

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A Note to Righties - How Lefties view lone young, White gunman attacks like Columbine, Aurora, South Carolina, and Buffalo through the lens of White racial anxiety and rage:

1. Whites are beginning to feel racial anxiety. Referred to as ‘The Great Replacement Theory,’ the number of White people in America and Europe is declining, while number of non-White people is increasing. There are already more non-White than White children in America, and White Christians in Europe will be out numbered by Muslims in 13 countries between years 2085 and 2215: Cyprus (in year 2085), Sweden (2125), France (2135), Greece (2135), Belgium (2140), Bulgaria (2140), Italy (2175), Luxembourg (2175), the UK (2180), Slovenia (2190), Switzerland (2195), Ireland (2200) and Lithuania (2215). Source: Rostan and Rostan (2019). The anti-semetic version of this plan is known as ‘The Kalergi Plan.’ That’s pretty dark territory, so I’ll let you go down that particular rabbit hole by yourself.

2. Anti-White sentiment is very popular in academia and Leftwing media. Lee Jussim, Ph.D. does a great job explaining the bias in academia here. I would just add these images from a pamphlet from the National Museum of African American History & Culture on Whiteness and White culture:

From my dissertation on Schorr’s research. My article on Critical Race Theory can be found here.

Schorr’s (2020a) research suggests that Critical Race Theory’s focus on the negatives of ‘Whiteness’ is actually making White people more racist.  Schorr (2020b) explored the impact that Critical Race Theory-based articles on Whites and Whiteness, looking at articles such as “White Men must be Stopped, the Very Future of Humanity Depends Upon it,” “10 Ways White People are More Racist than they Realize,” and “21 Things White People Ruined in 2015, Besides Everything” might be having on White people.  Schorr’s research suggests that the steadily increasing salience of White social identity is due in part to this kind of antagonism towards Whites, saying,” Insofar as white identity polarization is a reciprocal process, critical race theory and company likely advance the cause of white nationalism:” (Schorr 2020b)

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Summary:

From a Leftwing perspective, we can make a safer and more racially just cage by understanding Whiteness and Toxic Masculinity from a Critical Theory perspective, by having improved mental health access, and by making it as difficult as possible to buy guns.

From a Rightwing perspective, there is no making a safe cage, and as long as there are violent criminals, lone gunmen, and tyrannical governments. Therefore, the best way to navigate the cage is to be ready to use lethal force to defend one’s self and one’s family, and the more firepower available to the citizenry, the better. Improved mental health access is acceptable because it doesn’t make it harder for them to live their lives. They would make the argument that a disarmed citizenship would be less likely to face mass shootings, but they’d also forever be at the mercy of the government to protect them, and sometimes that hasn’t gone particularly well.

Also, good luck disarming the US population against their will. According to this, 32% of Americans, some 81.4 million people, own firearms, and 56% of households contain at least one gun. Throw in Conservatives fear of government tyranny, gun culture, and a large percentage of gun owners having very large personal arsenals, and I would not want to be the one going door to door confiscating guns.

The more conspiracy minded Right believe that they’ll push for population disarmament through freezing financial accounts. If the government knows you have a weapon and you refuse to surrender it, then they’ll turn off your credit cards. Hence the common joke about losing all of one’s guns in boating accidents.

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If you enjoy reading legal briefs on the constitutionality of gun ownership outside of militia participation, the amicus briefs for District of Columbia V. Heller (2008) can be found at SCOTUSBlog here.

Further, the nine most relevant SCOTUS cases on firearm ownership can be found here.

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Update - I talked about inner city gang culture, but apparently that deserves more attention than I gave it. I actually found a really great article with those statistics from Nick Cotter at Public Source (A Pittsburgh newspaper), and according to him,

“From October 2001 to October 2018, 520 people were killed in mass shootings in the United States, according to the book “Bleeding Out” by Harvard criminal justice scholar Thomas Abt. But during that same period, at least 100,000 people were killed in urban gun violence (fatal and non-fatal shootings that occur in the public spaces of cities and towns).

Both mass shootings and urban gun violence must receive the necessary public and political urgency to reduce them. However, I can’t help but feel that urban gun violence in the Pittsburgh region, and in the nation at large, does not receive the same public attention as mass shootings.

I’m not the only one: One 2016 survey showed 80% of Black respondents in the United States said gun violence was an extremely serious problem but 57% of Black respondents thought that most people in America don’t care about the gun violence that affects communities of color. Gun violence was also a primary concern of several long-term Black Pittsburghers I interviewed during my neighborhood walks for the Pittsburgh Neighborhood Project.”

It’s fairly lengthy, but I recommend the whole article.