It's The Guns. But It's Not Just The Guns

We can sleepwalk through this. At this point, we can recite all of the arguments from all the sides. The unfolding of news from the latest school shooting is barely denting social media. Hell, we're not even on track to beat last year's all time high of 82 school shootings (only 45 so far).

There are of course an assortment of details emerging. The shooter was questioned over online threats last year. A warning yesterday morning. The student who didn't let the shooter back into the classroom because they saw the gun. An AR-platform weapon (cue gun folks mansplaining what AR really does or does not mean, as if that matters in this context). Fast word to authorities because teachers had only just been given Centegix cards--basically a panic button you can carry in your pocket.

On social media yesterday, the usual thoughts and prayers from Georgia GOP legislators, led by Governor Kemp, followed by thousands of people pointing out that these same legislators, this same governor, had rolled back virtually every gun regulation in the state. Kemp's campaign ad resurfaced--the one where he playfully chats with a kid who wants to date his daughter, including threatening the boy with a gun. Har.

We could trot out the same old stats. The US leads the industrialized world in gun violence, gun possession. The states with more gun regulation have fewer gun deaths. The same old cartoons. That Onion headline, released yet again ("No Way To Prevent This," Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens). But today, less than 24 hours later, everyone (except the people in Georgia directly affected) has moved on. 

It's the guns. It has always been the guns. It's the worship of a distorted view of the Second Amendment that says your right to own the means of killing other humans matters more than my child's right not to be killed. Your pursuit of happiness beats my life and liberty. Heck, just last week, a conservative federal district judge ruled that there's a Second Amendment right to own a machine gun. We're about to mark the anniversary of 9/11, an event so shocking that we still tightly regulate riding on an airplane. 

It's the guns. No fourteen year old was going to school yesterday and killing four and injuring nine more with a knife. But we know that. Some of us just don't care enough to do something about it.

It's the guns. But it's not just the guns.

According to CNN, the three years with the most school shootings are 2021, 2022, and 2023. Which certainly tracks with the mental health crisis among young people that we've been talking about. And while lots of folks have theories (phones! absent fathers! space aliens!), we haven't really got a handle on it yet. Of course, the same people who love the Second Amendment and blame school shootings on mental illness also voted against expanding mental health services. (And if you think it's mentally ill people with guns who are responsible, wouldn't it make sense to put rules in place to make it harder for mentally ill people to get their hands on guns).

I have to believe that it's past time to look hard at our own culture. It's not just that the past fifteen or so years have seen the country more divided and polarized. It's how some of us talk about that polarization.

We're going to destroy the opposition, obliterate them, use power and force to dominate them and silence them, drive them out of the public arena. So many of our conflicts are discussed with the language of violence and war. This is not new, but the intensity and frequency is. There was a time when most folks understood that much of this was figurative language; nowadays, we have too many people who don't. The MAGA narrative is that we are living through apocalyptic times and the Enemy has to be stopped by any means necessary. We've seen a violent attack on the Capitol. We've seen so many campaign ads featuring guns blowing away some Bad Thing. We've heard leaders, nominally Christian ones at that, suggests that a revolution is coming and there might be blood.

We don't talk about how to get along with people that we think are wrong. We talk about how to wipe them out.

And if you are young, it has been like this for most of your life. 

I fear that we are mostly numb to the constant rhetoric of violence, the tendency to frame everything as a war or a battle or a fight rather than simply a debate or disagreement. Debate and disagreement are not strong enough to stir the hearts of potential donors or supporters. So we get constant high drama, calls to action, declarations of doom unless we fight back hard.

Most of us kind of know better. Some of us do not. In a culture that glorifies violence, even presents it as a path to glory and achievement, some people buy in. Some just accept a worldview of existential dread and battle, like Lindsey Graham explaining that "joy doesn't exist in the real world." Some hunker down into angry powerlessness. And a few pick up a gun.

It's one of the things I appreciate about the Harris-Walz campaign--not just the hopefulness (I've been promised "hope" before, and I'm skeptical) but the minimal violent rhetoric, the absence of rhetoric suggesting that we face an apocalypse and we must be prepared destroy those who are a threat. 

It's ironic-- as much as we love throwing around hypothetical and figurative violence, we've stopped trying to have meaningful conversations about the real stuff. Since Sandy Hook, when school children die in another shooting, we move on. Well, all of us who didn't lose someone. Nothing is going to happen; we've established that as a country we don't have the will to address the problem, the guns.

Because it's the guns. It's also a culture that makes violence seem like an excellent solution to conflict. 

Shifting a culture may be even harder than trying to get politicians to show the will to get common sense gun regulation. But as citizens we need to work at both. I'm not about to look at another shooting and argue that this is not who we are; it very clearly exactly who we are. But that doesn't mean we couldn't become something better.