Way Past Policy

I write this at a time in which the United States has had more gun related mass deaths, and mass shootings, than days in the month of January. We have had 40 mass shootings. And so, as America holds the numerous vigils and ceremonies in remembrance of many times mindless, many times preventable deaths, I am required by some sense of duty, academic/ethical/personal, to write on it. I do not have the space or mental capacity to write a full book on this topic so I will leave the discussion as brief as possible. To even attempt to say everything about gun violence in America would be exhausting.

Of these mass shootings, an alarming amount are just guys shooting their families and then themselves. Such a statistic might point out that the question of gun violence is more about us than the guns themselves. The guns are just a means to achieve some outcome, namely the death of self or another. We do not have mass brickings. We do not have thousands of incidents per year of men wandering into crowded areas with spatulas and killing a dozen or more individuals. The problem here is guns. I will not allow the discourse to pretend that it could be anything else.

I once got into a long and tiresome debate with a classmate regarding opinions on violence in the United States. Her position, eloquently stated, was that violence is an innate quality of the American citizenry. We live in a culture that lionizes, in fact encourages, violence. Our sports are violent. Our interaction styles are violent. Our history is rooted in not only violent acts but we remind ourselves of those acts every single day. In her argument, she stated that we first of all equate violence with victory and that whoever wields the most capacity for violence is capable of the most victory. Therefore, violence is how we measure winners and losers. I pushed back slightly. I held that violence cannot be inherent in our society as it is not accepted as common behavior. We may “worship” those with the capacity for great violence in the same way that our ancestors revered the best hunters or soldiers but we abhor the use of violence within specific context. You will not be rewarded for starting a fight at a gas station. We reprimand children for getting into spats on playgrounds. We recognize that violence causes harm. What she described, I countered, was a culture not of violence but of death. What she suggests, I interpret, is that there is some kind of emotional logic to a culture of harm. But, violence is not logical. Reasoned perhaps but there is no set ethic in which if/then for mass shootings sits. The question of violence is not a scientific one, it is philosophical and it is our attempts to explain it that lead us into dead ends.

So what exactly are we trying to prevent then? If violence in America be this normalized and ostensibly encouraged thing then what incentive do we have to even attempt to prevent it? Can it be prevented in the first place? I intuitively want to say yes.

To wit, we have vastly accepted non-violent cultural norms. We do still (luckily) live in a country where violent acts, unwarranted against the public, are punished severely. No sane human being praises the acts of a mass shooter. There has yet to be a mass shooting that was justified. There is no justifiable mass killing. We do not praise athletes (of so called violent sports) for enaging in their sport with non-athletes.

But there remains the problem of the gun. It is here that most attempts at reasoned inquiry seem to just fail. If the gun be a symbol of power, which we may reasonably ituit it is, then it is power that must be examined. As my classmate stated, violence is the effect by which we measure winners and losers and other cultures measure this differently. When you’re from a country that has one back to back world wars, you might praise your soldiers for being good enough at killing things to bring you victory. There’s power there. Absent of the larger overarching confounders of capitalism and systemitized violence in our culture, the gun industry takes advantage of a persons need to possess the ability to win. Defense, protection, sport, these are all just terms for winning. The frail woman afraid of living alone in her neighborhood has power with a gun in the nightstand. The police officer arguably only possesses authority because they carry the literal ability to kill at will. So then how do we even initiate conversations about guns? Are we actually intiating conversations about power when we talk about guns? Are conservatives so hyper sensitive to gun control because there is a chance they understand this better than I do, and that they are in fact hearing that gun control is limiting power?

Who should even have guns is fierce debate. Although guaranteed in the Constitution (arguably; my interpretation is that the second amendment does not guarantee the right to private arms), we have generally agreed on a basic level that some people should not have access to firearms. Just as we agree that anyone who engages in a dangerous activity can be sanctioned by society into no longer participating in that activity (legally), we have agreed that guns fall into that category. But whereas preventing a drunk driver access to a vehicle is relatively easy, preventing someone from shooting their family proves more elusive. Because, to stress, we are trying here to prevent a type of power and and a specific kind of violence. What indicators would we even look at? We could blanket state that anyone with a mental illness that puts them at risk to themselves or others shouldn’t be able to own a gun. We can say that people who have been convicted of violent crimes, abused family members or others, or have declared that they are going to engage in a violent act should be banned from getting a gun. But as has been humorously pointed out to me, those are questions that can be checked legally. The policing of sincerely held beliefs is more difficult; an avowed terrorist could walk into a wal-mart and purchase a gun off the shelf right now that he plans to use tomorrow to kill whomever and there’s really nothing we can do about that. So then how do we stop these mass shootings?

Easy. Ban guns. But we want realistic answers so I will make a few recommendations based on opinion and on attempting to follow what I would believe to be my classmates logical conclusion.

• Create a culture of liability. By this I mean doing the difficult work of changing America’s perspective on gun violence to that of all violence being reprehensible. Allow the victims of gun violence to directly sue gun manufacturers for the improper use of their products.

• Enhance the barrier to entry to gun purchases and ownership. The reason it is so easy to buy a gun now is not because there is a legal statute saying it has to be, but because gun sellers are incentivized to make sales. They want as few barriers to purchase as possible because that maximizes the number of customers they can access. In many cases the salesman is firmly rooted in the ideology that customer has some divinely given right to be purchasing his finely crafted hunting implement. We can hypothesize that many mass shootings would have been prevented had the owner of the gun needed to acquire specific licensure or complete some kind of training. This is a limit on freedom, yes, but the entire reason we create governments is to limit our freedoms in exchange for collective safety and public good. Imagine if in order to own a firearm you had to have a college degree.

• Require that households containing firearms require regular audits and mental health screenings. As I stated above, an alarming amount of gun violence deaths are domestic related; guys killing wives. We could perhaps prevent a lot of violence against women by intentionally placing this burden.

If I must live in a society that has admitted it has a problem, then I want the problem to be difficult to reach. I want guns difficult to access, inconvenient to possess, and hard to use. We can keep all the other legal and conservative stuff in place. We aren’t going to solve this problem with policy, we must go past it.