On the War Against Ourselves:

Or, This is me breathing

In the past few weeks, Atlanta and Colorado have both played host to one of our most enduring national pastimes: the mass shooting. In addition to national conversations about what constitutes a hate crime or whether or not it’s possible for a middle eastern person to commit a shooting for reasons other than Islamic fundamentalism, we find ourselves once again, debating gun control.

At this point, I feel like we must enjoy this absolutely fruitless endeavor. Liberals demand common sense gun reform like universal background checks and banning assault style weapons. Conservatives insist the problem is that there are not enough armed citizens around to stop these shootings in the moment. Some conservatives insist on a more cosmic explanation--that a lack of proper Christian worship is to blame. People yell at each other. Conspiracies proliferate. Depending on which party is in power, there may be some changes to the laws. And yet this keeps happening. 

I don’t think liberals are serious about guns in this country. This is not to say that conservatives are. But the liberal inclination to “do something” about guns is often an expression of cultural antagonism against what they consider a right wing fetish, rather than a thoughtful attempt to mitigate the damage and death dealt by firearms. Liberalism loves a good test of virtue, and the gun debate is a very neat example. If you feel like your hobby of collecting and shooting guns is more important than the lives lost due to the proliferation of easily obtained firearms, then you’re a bad person. Simple as that. But social ills are never simple, either in explanation or solution.

The old conservative adage goes: “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people”. This is, in part, the justification for believing that a more explicitly Christian nation would reduce gun violence without the need for banning guns. Given the amount of violence committed by Christians, up to and including several illegal wars in the Middle East, I don’t believe this to be a viable solution. However, I do believe that this particular right wing aphorism is mostly correct. It just needs one small appended statement. 

Guns don’t kill people. People kill people. But, guns sure do help a lot.  

Liberals point to countries like England, New Zealand, Japan, and Australia where strict gun control has resulted in much lower rates of gun violence and death as compared to America. They don’t typically mention countries like Germany, France, Norway, Finland, and Denmark. Places with high rates of gun ownership that nonetheless have low rates of violent crime, comparable to states with strict gun laws. Also of note are countries like late period Soviet Russia which saw high rates of violent crime despite having strong gun restrictions. They merely used other kinds of weapons. It would seem that the availability of guns may not be the determining factor in the level of violence committed within a country. Societal factors like inequality, dilapidated social infrastructure, and social stratification may play a larger role.

America, the exceptional snowflake that we are, is sort of unique. We have a high rate of violent crime and the highest number of guns per capita in the developed world. We also don’t have a national policy when it comes to gun ownership. We have elected for a patchwork system of states creating localized regulations around private firearms. Conservatives often invoke the city of Chicago as proof that gun control does not reduce violence crime. As strict as gun laws are in Chicago, the neighboring states have less strict regulations and it’s pretty easy to transport guns across state lines. 

Chicago is kind of key here. Most of the liberal conversation around guns and gun reform center around the phenomena of terrorist mass shootings. These are random acts of violence committed in service to some demented ideological world view combined with a healthy dose of mental illness. But the majority of gun homicides in this country occurs in poor communities of color, often over interpersonal disputes or criminal gang conflicts. Conservatives often invoke this fact as a “gotcha” against liberal arguments for gun reform, since this kind of gun violence is thought to be endemic to cities run by Democratic administrations. The inference here is that Democrats have developed a culture of poverty in poor urban areas and have abdicated the responsibility to curtail the violent inclinations of their culturally impoverished inhabitants. Of course this doesn’t explain the 11 cities run by Republicans that as of 2016 had higher murder rates than Chicago. 

All 11 of those cities had at least an A rating from the NRA. 

It would seem that both within the country and in the rest of the world, the answer to gun violence is more complicated than “LESS GUNS” or “MORE GUNS”. And yet the entire conversation revolves around whether or not people should be able to buy firearms, and if so, which kinds. While I tend to dismiss the conservative position on gun ownership as it relates to violence, there are some very serious but undiscussed issues with the liberal strategy as well. 

Liberals love to point out that no one is coming to take all of your guns. They do this because as of now, a complete and total ban on private ownership of any firearm is extremely unpopular. So they say that they want “common sense” gun reform. They propose that no one should own an assault style weapon. But as conservative gun rights activists are quick to observe, the vast majority of gun homicides are committed with handguns. The 1994 assault weapons ban did result in fewer mass shootings and fewer deaths when such shootings occurred. And after the ban was repealed, the number of mass shootings and deaths shot up drastically. But the overall rate of violent crime was relatively unaffected. As a result of the focused attention on the macabre and tragic spectacle of random mass shootings, liberals have constructed a gun policy designed to prevent a small percentage of all gun-related homicides. This has put them in as much of a rhetorical bind as the Republicans, who have resigned themselves to three or four mass shootings a year as the regrettable price to pay for a free and armed society. Conservatives were able to make the gun debate a part of the larger culture war because the liberal platform on guns was based around highly publicized and visible gun death rather than the violence we take for granted in poor and minority communities. The only real way out of this conundrum is to advocate for gun laws that would curtail all kinds of gun violence. Unfortunately this would mean some sort of national gun buyback or confiscation program that is politically untenable. 

Just ask Beto O’Rourke.

Another problem with proposed liberal gun laws is that they are laws. Laws are always enforced much more on the poor and marginalized than they are on the wealthy and privileged. Mike Bloomberg's war on Black and brown people in New York City, otherwise known as “stop and frisk,” was a part of his effort to curtail gun violence. Ronald Reagan signed an assault weapons ban into law when he was governor of California as a direct response to armed Black Panther neighborhood patrols. Some of the very first gun control laws on the books were aimed at preventing newly freed slaves from owning weapons. Gun laws allow courts to extend already illegitimate sentences imposed on people for nonviolent drug crimes if they are arrested with a firearm in their possession. If the history of our justice system proves anything, it’s that laws meant to protect vulnerable communities from crime almost always serve to marginalize the inhabitants of those communities even further. 

Maybe the biggest problem with the liberal narrative around guns is that liberals fundamentally don’t understand the nature of our country’s love for projectile weapons. America is a settler colonial nation. The first Americans came here with little understanding of the terrain and the people whose land they were stealing. The only thing preventing their swift and violence expulsion from their new home was the fact that they had guns. The gun became more than a tool for hunting and defense. It was the protector and guarantor of civilized society. It was the symbol of divine right and manifest destiny. The gun was etched into our national consciousness as the trusty companion of the brave and just American explorer, the righteous lawman and the rebellious outlaw. It's not a coincidence that the gun debate is highly racialized. White mass shooters are described as lone wolf aberrations, suffering from mental illness or just “having a bad day,” while non-white shooters are seen as indicative of the inherent violence of Black and Brown cultures. This is because guns are the primary defender of white hegemony. Given the discourse around Critical Race Theory and other counter-hegemonic projects in defense of marginalized identities, it’s important to reckon with that truth and include it when talking about guns.

A majority of people killed by guns are white men. However, those deaths are mostly suicides. Gun ownership is yet one more piece of pyrrhic compensation contained within the wages of whiteness. Given that white people and white men in particular constitute the majority of reactionary antagonism to the prospect of gun control it might be helpful to respond to news of mass shooters being taken into custody alive with more nuance than posting pictures of Betty White. White America will gladly accept their own death and destruction at the hands of guns if those guns continue to provide the illusion of control and domination over the uncertain and scary version of the world they have created for themselves. This is part and parcel of the conservative (and sometimes leftist) belief that an armed populace is necessary for resisting tyranny. This idea ignores the fact that the state has since evolved more subtle and efficient methods of violence and control, while still maintaining a healthy advantage in traditional modes of brutality. 

Long story short, we are never going to shame America into giving up it’s guns. 

So what can we do? I don’t have a great answer. For all the faults I just described, liberal gun control laws like gun bans and universal background checks will reduce some forms of gun violence--if for no other reason than the fact that the harder it is for people to obtain a gun, the less likely they are to follow through on a potential attack. Maybe there are ways to ensure that new gun laws won't disproportionately affect poor and marginalized people. I doubt it, but who knows? We could try and treat guns more like cars, with mandatory insurance requirements and licenses that need periodic renewal. But these measures don’t address the underlying problem, which isn’t so much guns but Americans. We come from a culture where if you have a problem the most direct way to deal with it includes bullets. Whether you believe Mexicans are ruining America, or you blame Asian massage workers for your sex addiction, or you were simply disrespected by the wrong person on the wrong day, the American impulse is to tame the savages with gunfire. It’s going to take a massive cultural and societal shift to get away from that. 

In 2013, a childhood friend of mine was shot and killed as an innocent bystander in a landlord-tenant dispute. None of the proposed Democratic gun reforms would have prevented his death. Maybe a system where housing is decommodified and we don’t have “lords” would have prevented it. If we are going to have guns in this country, and I don’t see how we can realistically not have them, then we must understand the causes and multipliers of violence. The term intersectionality is extremely buzzy and fraught with negative connotations for the reactionary right, but it is useful here. Gun violence is not about guns. It’s about a whole host of societal factors from poverty to social atomization and isolation. Fixing this does not mean admonishing the public about personal responsibility and sending them to church while reverting to the Wild West. Ironically, many of those famed towns and settlements had stricter gun laws than a lot of open carry states. 

If there is to be a solution, it will revolve around addressing poverty and building social infrastructure. We could try to prevent mentally ill people from buying weapons, but in the end mental distress is complicated and not easily diagnosed and categorized. Just ask the police. We could probably put a huge dent in the amount of gun violence in poor urban areas by simply ending the drug war, decriminalizing all drugs, and treating addiction like a public health issue. Maybe decriminalizing and destigmatizing sex work would go a long way to curb the almost completely ignored problem of violence against sex workers. 

These are difficult conversations, but we really should be having them. We must resist the temptation to reduce this problem to a binary of guns or fewer guns. Because until we elevate this discourse and account for the complexities of our society, we will continue to be unable to prevent this. In the only nation where this routinely happens.  

Solidarity with those who have lost loved ones in this war against ourselves. Solidarity forever.