If my blog had a flag, it would be at half-mast today. For the third time in recent memory, a friend of a friend has been killed in a mass shooting, marking the sixth such event to which I’ve had some kind of personal connection. The victim, in this case, was a father, the sole breadwinner for a family with special needs, who moved in the same communities as I do. There is now an open question as to how the mother, who has so far stayed home to manage the children’s health, will make ends meet with the cost of life support.
This is, of course, only the latest tragedy in a series of horrors, about which I have made my feelings quite clear: this is unacceptable. It is a national disgrace that we allow this level of violence, which would be unacceptable even in a failed state, to continue with only token measures taken against it, in what is allegedly the greatest country on earth. Our continued inability to act decisively is an affront to the victims and survivors.
I believe I have already made my position on guns and regulations about them quite clear: we need to do a lot better in a hurry. There is little more for me to say that isn’t beating a dead horse. But the lives of my comrades demands, at the barest minimum, a societal conversation more in depth than mere thoughts and prayers. And since I have little faith that the powers that be will fulfill this obligation, I suppose it falls on me to add to the conversation.
One of the things I have heard said in recent weeks is that shootings are a meme issue- that is, they generate a disproportionate amount of attention and media compared to the number of actual deaths in context. This is a hard claim to argue against, epistemologically. After all, how do you argue that something isn’t receiving too much attention? Relative to what? Claiming that the news spends not enough time on boring, everyday items seems to misrepresent the function of news- to report things that are newsworthy.
But beyond this, I feel it ignores a larger point. Saying that shootings are a meme issue requires an acknowledgement that it is, at the very least, a thing that happens. It is an issue, not just a one-time tragedy, (or, for that matter, a two, three, or so on -time tragedy). It is arguably not an issue of the same numerical scale as global poverty, or food prices, or nuclear proliferation. But even if shooting deaths are not as numerous as, say, cancer deaths, it is an issue that causes an unacceptably large number of totally unnecessary deaths.
And the deaths are unnecessary. There is no such thing as an unavoidable death by shooting. Mass shootings, terrorism, assassinations, accidents, even ordinary crime where guns are involved, are totally preventable with far more stringent restrictions on civilian weapon ownership, and better training and resources for law enforcement and intelligence services to enforce these measures. Proliferation of weapons is not some unavoidable part of human nature, it is a hallmark of a failed state.
What really bugs me, though, isn’t knowing that we could and must do better, but seeing how we do, for other issues. It’s not that Americans have some deep and inflexible fixation with libertarian ideals, that we are willing to stoically accept that it is ultimately the price we pay for a just and free society, to have some people die from the abuse of freedom rather than engage the slippery slope of restricting it. That would be an argument that I would ultimately disagree with on the basis of moral priorities, but could at least acknowledge for its self-consistency. But it isn’t that. Americans aren’t absolute in their freedom. We set aside our principles all the time, for all different causes, from having working roads and schools, to letting police and intelligence agencies treat our online lives as having none of our rights as citizens, to anything involving any kind of travel.
Air travel is the most obvious example. We, as a society, decided almost twenty years ago that no act of airline terrorism on American soil was an acceptable price to pay for individual liberty. As a result, we took drastic actions to prevent a relatively rare scenario that not only kills fewer than guns, but fewer people than lightning strikes. We didn’t have to declare War on Terror; we could’ve tracked down the individual perpetrators, and then said that trying to prevent every madman from getting onto a plane was an impossible task in a non-totalitarian country. But we decided instead that this was a matter of principle. That we couldn’t afford to do anything less. We decided to treat a meme issue, and we dealt with it.
It would not be beyond our capacity to eliminate gun violence. If we were committed, in the same way we are committed to stamp out terrorism, it would not be difficult. Instead, we are told that scores of schoolchildren, teachers, fathers, mothers, friends, and first responders being killed every year is unavoidable, while those saying so live and work behind checkpoints and soldiers to ensure they will never face the consequences of failing to act.
