Welcome to BASED, a new Prospect newsletter.
A shooting at Michigan State University, my alma mater, is the last thing I expected my first contribution to BASED to be about. In fact, I already had something planned to write on Michigan politics. I will likely revisit that story in the future. Either way, I felt it would be remiss of me to not give my condolences to the three young people who had their lives taken away too early, the five who sustained life threatening injuries, and the rest of the campus community who will forever be burned by Monday’s tragedy.
In January 2017, I arrived on Michigan State University’s 5,200 acre campus, and it quickly became a home away from home. For those outside the Great Lakes State, MSU is often overshadowed by its counterpart, the University of Michigan, or MSU’s reputation is sullied by association with the sexual predator and former doctor Larry Nassar and the university administration’s role in enabling his crimes.
But for ordinary Michiganders, MSU is a melting pot in the truest sense of the phrase’s meaning. It is home to more than 50,000 students, and countless alumni across the globe. “Perhaps more than any other school in the state,” Jordan Acker, a regent for the University of Michigan said on Twitter, “[MSU] has tons of students from every county. This is a statewide tragedy.” The closest comparison I can think of is the outsized impact the CUNY system has for the residents of New York City. Michigan State and other Big Ten schools play that role for tons of young people across the Midwest, a clear upward ladder for socioeconomic mobility.
One of the injured students exemplifies this. Guadalupe Huapilla-Pérez, a junior at Michigan State University, is enrolled in one of the university’s most valuable programs, the MSU College Assistance Migrant Program (CAMP). This is specifically geared toward putting the children of migrant farm workers into colleges and universities. Huapilla-Pérez’s older sister arranged a GoFundMe goal of $50,000 for the family. At time of writing, they have raised more than $374,000. My first year at Michigan State, I lived in Holden Hall, where MSU CAMP services were located and where all CAMP participants lived. The first friends I made at Michigan State were some of these students. It’s a very tight-knit community.
As an alum, I am heartbroken. I nearly puked while watching the national press list the locations where victims were transported from—my old stomping grounds, places where I had some of my best early adulthood memories. Classes are supposed to resume on Monday, and I have no idea how anyone comes back after that. One early report revealed that one of the survivors at Michigan State, his brother, survived a gunshot wound in November 2021 in a previous school shooting.
When discourse around gun control enters popular conversation, usually after a mass tragedy of this type, I typically stay quiet—not because I’m some sort of closeted gun-loving nutjob, but because the extremity of the mass shooting eclipses how gun violence is a modern feature of everyday life in the United States. The AR-15 has come to symbolize the most dastardly of all weapons—and don’t get me wrong, I am not downplaying its life-ending capabilities.
Witness the numerous mass shootings where law enforcement officials had warnings prior to their crimes—the system we have governing firearms clearly does not work.
However, the majority of gun violence happens with a handgun, which is exactly what the Michigan State University shooter used (two of them to be exact). Even though mass shootings get overwhelming media attention, the most common form of gun violence is suicide. The MSU shooter, as it happened, was both a mass shooter and died of a self-inflicted gunshot. According to Pew, in 2020, 54 percent of all firearm-related deaths in the United States—24,292 of them—were suicides. By comparison, 38 to 513 gun deaths were from a mass shooting, depending on how one defines them.
The reality of deaths from gun violence in the United States is a thousand times worse than the instances that grab the most media attention. And aside from deaths, there are the countless people who are survivors of gun violence, and their friends and loved ones who must move forward one way or another. We’re a deeply sick country.
It does seem that state Democrats will attempt to pass some modest gun safety reforms. Following the mass shooting at Oxford High School (located in Michigan) in November 2021, Michigan Democrats have rallied around three main gun law reforms. Those include red flag laws, safe storage laws, and universal background checks. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer included the trio as a priority under the state’s newly acquired Democratic trifecta. Still, Michigan Republicans are still trying to block even these measures by reframing the debate as being solely about mental illness.
It’s a sleight of hand operation. Of course, everyone wants more mental health services. But even if it were the case that every perpetrator of gun violence were mentally ill, it would still be a problem that such people can get access to lethal weapons so easily. Witness the numerous mass shootings where law enforcement officials had warnings prior to their crimes—the system we have governing firearms clearly does not work.
Now, Democrats in Michigan have the opportunity to prove that “Spartan Strong,” “Uvalde Strong,” "Oxford Strong,” or “insert-whatever-next-tragedy-happens Strong” isn’t just a whitewashed “thoughts and prayers.”
On Wednesday, more than a hundred Michigan State University students sat outside the Capitol in Lansing. Their demands are pretty simple for the Democratic trifecta. Paige Lawson, a sophomore at Michigan State, told the Detroit News, “No more people need to die. We just need to have more gun reform and legislation to protect children.” In a country with as many guns as ours in circulation, no single law could possibly curb every instance or potential instance of gun violence. But at least pushing forward something that begins to address the violence would be far better than the blithe inaction that follows the typical American mass shooting.
