Jae C. Hong/AP Photo
Joseph Avila prays while holding flowers honoring the victims killed in Tuesday’s shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, May 25, 2022.
I can pinpoint when I reached my peak anger about our lack of interest in doing the absolute minimum to prevent the epidemic of gun deaths in this country. It was 15 years ago, after the mass shooting at Virginia Tech, at the time the deadliest massacre in U.S. history (which has now been surpassed twice). I fulminated and fumed and spent most of the energy I have to spend. I reached the sobering conclusion that nothing would ever be done on gun violence, and I’ve spent the past decade and a half sadly being right. I haven’t been able to muster up much outrage since.
There’s a difference between being numb to the suffering, though, and being realistic about the road this country has gone down, a spiral that we must pull out of.
The Virginia Tech shooter, Seung-Hui Cho, used two semiautomatic handguns to kill 32 people, but since then, the murderers in numerous other mass shooting attacks, from Sandy Hook to the Pulse nightclub in Orlando to Parkland to Las Vegas to El Paso to Buffalo last week and Robb Elementary School in Uvalde this week, used AR-15 or AR-15-style assault rifles, which actually were banned in this country between September 13, 1994, and September 13, 2004.
However, the category of guns known as assault weapons were only involved in 3 percent of all firearm murders in 2020, the last year of data available. And “gun murders” only accounts for less than half of all gun deaths; the majority of those deaths are attributed to suicides.
So I’m not so much numb to the tragedy of uninterrupted gun violence in America as I am numb to the warmed-over gruel that passes for solutions, which themselves never get enacted.
Bleating about the abominable inertia of Congress when it comes to “commonsense” reforms like universal background checks is definitely cathartic. I watched Steve Kerr, his own father a victim of gun violence, shake with rage and demand Mitch McConnell and Republican senators end their craven, power-hungry blockade by passing the background check bill. But American University’s study of one state, Massachusetts, that implemented a stronger state-level background check law showed no real change in levels of crime, and furthermore an inconsistent level of increased background checks, because of privacy restrictions and haphazard data collection. That’s not to say that background checks are useless, but it’s worth admitting that the research is mostly questionable.
If we were trying to solve things, rather than just taking up something inoffensive enough to survive the significant veto points in the American system, we would concede that background checks are a tiny, tiny step. But surely, taking a vote and displaying to America who opposes a near universally endorsed policy would make a difference! Alas, this has not been done, not just on gun controls but also on voting rights and abortion rights and a host of other policies. I’m not sure anyone who might actually vote in November has any confusion about where Democrats and Republicans are on the gun issue. And even if such votes were clarifying, they haven’t moved the needle in the past.
There is no solution to death by firearm without reducing the total amount of firearms in the country.
We hear that the pathological power of the NRA prevents common sense from prevailing. But while gun rights groups in general still spend tremendous sums in lobbying, the NRA filed for bankruptcy last year, and faces the forced removal of its leader Wayne LaPierre by the New York attorney general. Its board president and chief lobbyist have left. There is an NRA convention this year, in Houston, the same state as the Uvalde murders; it still attracts big-name Republicans. But this is a tail-wagging-the-dog scenario. You don’t need a powerful NRA anymore, when the Second Amendment is conservative gospel. The NRA could dissolve tomorrow with no functional difference.
We also hear that the anti-majoritarian Senate, and its tyranny of the minority, blocks solutions on this and practically every issue. That’s certainly true, as my colleague Ryan Cooper writes today. Abolishing the Senate would do more for American progress than practically any other reform. But in the case of guns, even the messaging bills destined not to pass would do exceedingly little. Even in a majority-rule environment, I am thoroughly unconvinced that there would be any critical mass of politicians willing to say what might need to be done to meaningfully reduce gun violence to a level commensurate with the rest of the developed world.
If they did, here’s how their statement would have to begin: America contains more guns than people, with nearly half of the world’s guns despite having just 5 percent of the planet’s population. There is no solution to death by firearm without reducing the total amount of firearms in the country. If you want to stop people dying from guns, you have to have fewer guns around to kill people.
This is the mathematical reality, and no other policy intervention comes close.
As a magazine editor who doesn’t face multimillion-dollar attack-ad campaigns, I can say that because it’s true. But in the decades I’ve been following politics, I can think of exactly one politician willing to say that. He happens to be running to represent Uvalde and all of Texas as governor this year. You would think that the murder of 19 children and two adults would galvanize that campaign. Yet nobody has given Beto O’Rourke much of a shot, and they point to the one statement he made about guns as the moment that his future career as an elected official ended. “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47,” O’Rourke said in a debate for the presidential nomination in 2019.
O’Rourke’s declaration wasn’t even all that radical; it was still in the comfortable space of singling out assault weapons for confiscation, rather than handguns or other firearms. But proposing a policy solution that directly is simply not done in the United States of America, very much outside of one crotchety democratic socialist from Vermont, and on this issue even he lapses into using language like “commonsense gun reforms.” O’Rourke’s statement on confiscation wasn’t focus-grouped enough, or sufficiently calibrated to attract subgroups like soccer moms. Proposing something meaningful was just off the table, and easily dismissed.
O’Rourke is still speaking out against gun violence. He’s running against an incumbent, Greg Abbott, who literally expressed disappointment in 2015 that Texas was only number two in the nation in gun sales, who responded to a dozen other mass shootings in the Lone Star State by enabling public carry of firearms without a permit and pronouncing Texas a “Second Amendment sanctuary state.”
Abbott should be vulnerable on this issue. He is likely not. O’Rourke boldly confronted Abbott in the middle of a press conference in Uvalde on Wednesday, saying to his face that he has done nothing to make Texans safe. It will likely not matter. “We have the power to change this and we will,” O’Rourke tweeted. We will likely not. And O’Rourke himself will likely never be in a position to pass a single law ever again, because he committed the mortal sin of telling the truth.
I don’t want it to be this way, of course. And the question everyone has, of course, is why. Is it something native to the American psyche? I doubt it. Is it because ideological conservatives broke the country? Sure, but I would broaden that out. Conservatives broke the country because they had precisely the political system that would allow them to break it, and precisely the adversary that would watch it happen without much resistance.
The system, in other words, is responsible for continuing epidemics that cannot be solved. The formal rules and the indirect norms politicians have built as a corollary to those rules are to blame. Some issues enable elaborate work-arounds to get the system tilted in the direction of progress. But we have not found that work-around with the gun issue, no matter how much money or popular support favors reform. We can’t fix our problems because we’ve decided to live with a system that can’t fix our problems. And that system has become so toxic that we would be pleased with ineffective solutions even if the systemic restraints were kicked away. We’ve been deluded by this system into forgetting what actual solutions look like. We’ve been down so long it looks like up to us.
And so nihilistic realism has set in. It has led to a profound alienation from what passes for American democracy for a generation or more of Americans. I feel it too. “What are you going to do about the fact that we all know you can’t do anything?” is the right question to ask. As long as we place ourselves in handcuffs and straitjackets and define politics as wriggling out of the restraints, frustration and despair will breed and multiply. We accept the death of children because we accept a politics that enables it.
