I was baptized at the church where kids were murdered. It's a canary in the coal mine for a dystopian America, where people blame everything but the real cause: a country awash with unlimited guns.
There's no excuse for the continued mass slaughter by firearms of people in the USA. It continues because it's politically expedient for the Republican Party to advance the myth that the Second Amendment disqualifies any attempt to regulate an individual's right to bear arms. It's useless to point out to Republicans that -- when the Second Amendment was passed -- there were no such firearms as AK-47s available for the populace to wield. And so -- with the Republican Party still remaining politically viable (however insane) in the electorate, the carnage continues.
I begin to feel, more and more, that the United States of America, which began as a noble experiment (however flawed) in self-government, has become an experiment that is moving rapidly towards failure. A nation that continues to privilege any nut with a burning resentment and access to a gun over a seven year old kid's right to grow up and live his or her life is a nation that has descended into psychosis. Need further proof of that assertion? Look at who is sitting in the Oval Office. A mentally sound polity would never have allowed Donald Trump to get anywhere near the White House in the first place, let alone electing him... twice.
Excellent essay. Thank you. It always amazes me that duck hunters can only hunt with shotguns limited to three shots, but those hunting people can employ the highest-capacity magazines available. I suppose there is something nice about a society that cares so much about waterfowl, but it might be nice to see evidence of similar concerns for humans.
Michael Moore made a case like this with his film Bowling for Columbine, 23 years ago. The data has been presented many times since, and is (or should be) very widely known. The answer is obvious — right in front of us, staring us in the face. If we want the answer.
We don't want it.
We don't care whether x-thousand Americans are shot to death each year, every year. The headline question is *why* we don't want to stop it.
I agree to an extent, but for what it's worth, international comparisons are a lot less common than a totally broken national debate that's about around-the-edges solutions and state/city comparisons within the United States. I don't think most Americans understand how much of an international outlier it is, not just on mass shootings, but on run-of-the-mill gun murders. It's national news if *anyone* gets shot in the UK. And as I write, the entire US national discourse is about whether Democratic cities are violent hellholes that warrant Trump's authoritarian National Guard deployments. It's all so insular.
One thing I never hear discussed is that pretty much every single American city has a higher murder rate (due to the gun violence epidemic) than any comparable major European city. Fox News goes crazy about London all the time, but London is *way* safer than any major US city. And within a lot of the data comparisons that are used, they compare gun control internally within the US to itself (which is why I explained how that logic is totally mistaken in the essay).
Anti-gun control arguments in the U.S. are made in bad faith.
Trump's complaints about crime in U.S. cities are made in bad faith.
Fox News complaints about London are… made in bad faith.
They're really lies, put forward either to obfuscate the true motive of Americans wanting the right to be armed… for some opaque reason; or put forward to obfuscate the rationale for wanting to seize direct control over U.S. cities, for the purpose of asphyxiating political opposition and resistance; or to promote U.S. nationalism to viewers who yearn for such content, for the purpose of commanding a larger audience which is more valuable to advertisers.
These purported arguments are not genuine national discourse. They're conjectures. They're smokescreens. They're fictional distractions. They're Spectacle…
In addition to the matter of why Americans don't want to control guns, a second headline question in the U.S. is why — *why* do we allow ourselves to be enchanted by such disingenuous, off-topic, non-answer, logical pivots which masquerade as replies to the first question? *Why* are we lead so easily away from such an important point which Michael Moore demonstrated in 2002, during a whole segment he dedicated to the discontinuity between American and Canadian gun owners, and policies on gun ownership in Bowling for Columbine — or which you asked with your comprehensive survey, published today?
What are we hiding, when we hide behind such distractions?
Why — why are we so *ashamed* of our own true desires, with regard to this topic, that we feel a need to *constantly* hide from them, again and again…?
Thank you. You do a good job of laying the argument out, and you're completely correct. But, as a political scientist, I wonder how you see change unfolding on guns in the US. It seems very unlikely that there will be an incident so horrific that it will cause the country to change course as the UK and Australia, for example, did. There are already well funded gun control groups, and most Americans already agree with some form of gun control... So how do we get from here to there?
I think it has to be made an explicit part of rebuilding America from the ground up, which is what we will need to do once T and his minions are finally thrown out of power (and that now means getting rid of R congressional control and having the actual mandate to reform the Court and the constitution to allow voters to have real power (getting rid of Citizens United, the Electoral College, the disenfranchisement of DC, the return of a voting rights act with teeth) and encouraging states to have voting rules that encourage participation (same day registration, mail in ballots, ranked choice voting, etc). If voters actually could vote their preferences for government, we’d have national gun purchase and ownership regulations. And mental health services. Both are poll-tested majority positions nearly everywhere. Congressional rules and practices that return to open debate in subcommittees and committees before bills (on specific issues) come to the floor. And if voters had a voice, we’d also have restrictions on media monopolies and fair use rules again.
The symptom is guns being treated as symbols of Red team membership, masculinity, and power and all three of these driving an insane culture of anger and disconnection. And thus fear multiplies the desire for guns that the antidemocratic deregulation then allows to be fulfilled however inappropriately.
Start at the root and make a functioning democracy again and several “cultural” things that are destroying us - opposition to gun regulation, scientific public health measures, climate change policies - become marginalized and culturally questionable (like overt racism and sexism and sexual bigotry used to be). The preferences of the minority begin to be reshaped by conformity to cultural rules (normative standards) into fitting in with “how things are.” The present “how things are” is one that distorts “freedom” into license for the powerful to display their dominance and for others to turn to guns and violence and drugs to show that they are not really so subordinate.
Yeah, it often does feel like we almost need a hard reset to fix our politics on a larger level in order to allow the political system to meaningfully address issues like this. But then again, to open up the current United States to some sort of broad re-envisioning of our politics could be an absolute shitshow!
I think it truly depends on the voters, Mr. Dillard. If we continue to give the Republican Party our votes we may expect no change in gun laws. If the mass shootings of the past decades have not budged Republicans' opposition to gun control to even a degree, it's time to convince the nation to abandon the Republican Party. Given the right wing's poisonously effective control of dominant media outlets, I don't see that happening. Is it time for the Union to "hang it up?" It may be.
The current state of our country would not be possible without the voters. I’m old enough to have been horrified by the rhetoric of Ronald Reagan while witnessing all around me venerating him. Reagan lit the fuse for the Republican Party that exists today and established a permission structure for Republican voters to claim entitlement to their skewed perceptions of reality and to double down on them when there’s even a whiff of challenge in the air. Good luck to us all.
1. After Sandy Hook, when nothing changed, I realised that America had decided to live with the routine acceptance of mass murder including children
2. Firearm-related injury is now the leading cause of death in U.S. children and adolescents, having surpassed motor vehicle crashes — as documented in The New England Journal of Medicine (Goldstick et al., 2022).
3. Just read in WAPO today that In Tennessee, the state’s 5-year-olds will also learn to identify a trigger, a barrel and a muzzle as they’re introduced to rudimentary gun safety.
"The door to a church being locked during services by default is also a dystopian canary in the American coal mine." Not to mention metal detectors at schools (and churches?) and prohibitions about entering the classroom areas, not that ICE is paying any attention to those.
It seems to me that one reason we have a higher rate of, say, stabbings, is that the constant "too many to report" instances of gun violence" simply has normalized violence. You don't have to think about gun violence in the UK, and I suspect you don't dwell too much on other kinds.
Ironic that trump's idea of preventing crime in, say, Chicago (which did have a bad Labor Day Weekend) is to send in a bunch of military with--guns.
That was a heartbreaking essay that still contextualized how much of an anomaly America is. Unlike other countries, news in America is only about America and the elitism I see around me doesn't take unflattering comparisons well. I am not saying that the comparisons are pointless, but it sure falls on deaf ears.
The question I've wondered is : why?Comparison can also be the driver of gun ownership - keeping up with the Joneses gun collection ; after all the UK is an ocean away but the Joneses live nextdoor. So I tried to solve the problem in the most American way possible - marketing & branding. Why do Americans think guns are cool? More importantly how do we make them uncool ( yes I used cool deliberately). How can gun ownership be classified as a boomer thing or the socially iconoclastic thing? How can gun ownership be inextricably linked to mental-unwellness? Larger the collection, greater the degree of unwellness?
You mentioned below that you grew up shooting guns at the range - your peers likely did as well. Activities with parents like this tend to have an outsized impact on what psychological safety comes from. The safety from parents to transfers to guns & people stick to them like a security blanket. Maybe calling guns security blankets that adults who've yet to get their thumbs out of their mouths is a branding direction? Infantalize gun ownership maybe?
It's eminently possible - after all we live in a world where vaccines have been made to sound bad and policy action has happened around it!
Another idea that occurred that's not specifically about gun laws is vocab : instead of stating shooter's names, turn them into a statistic. Example : 2025MN-x where x is the nth mass shooting or a gun incident in the state that year. And refer to the killer everywhere - news, Wikipedia using only that as their name & identity. That takes away the 15 mins of fame for the killer and puts their violence front and center. News should be required to state every victim who was killed, or injured, state their name, details about them and their families and observe 2 mins of silence per victim with no ad breaks. If it goes for an hour, it goes for an hour.
Thank you, Brian, for a well-considered, well-stated, and thoroughly researched presentation of a uniquely American issue. Unfortunately, in the U.S. when political sides get involved, facts seldom matter. On issue after issue in the U.S., there are those—and many with loud voices—who either just don’t care about facts or prefer to push their own agendas regardless of the facts. Consider, as just one example, people’s opinions on vaccines, particularly given the views of RFK, Jr. our Secretary of Health and Human Services. The politics of anti-intellectualism are overrunning American thought and policy. Given your vast knowledge and extensive research on political science matters, I’d be interested in your thoughts on how an open society can effectively address and perhaps solve this extremely unfortunate political riddle.
I too lived in Minneapolis for many years, but no longer live there. Reading about the other shootings, most of which occurred near Lake St.--a street I'd lived near and traveled regularly-- was deeply disturbing. The United States is unwell.
I am 76 years old and in my entire life have seen only one person holding a gun on another. I was getting off the subway/train at an exit in the heart of downtown Chicago. I didn’t wait around to see what happened next. It is stunning to know a reality that I have lived in and with that has never touched me. Your article is an outstanding manifesto as to how far off track this country has gotten through misinterpretation of the second amendment. You clearly demonstrate why we absolutely must get rid of the guns if we want a sane country.
I looked up the CDC recommendations for gun safety and found "safe storage" and none other of the common sense preventatives implemented by the apparently more rational cultures mentioned in the article.
Shame on the CDC but that said, I also get a little frustrated with defeatists who believe there are only bad choices in this dilemma.
Mayor Frey and Chief O'Hara could work to add reasonable provisions to the already on the books "Concealed Carry" operators permit that would encompass most, if not all, of the preventives other countries have implemented. The permit would not restrict gun ownership any more than a pilots license restricts aircraft ownership but it would set standards for public use and for safe operation of a device and accessories that could be hazardous in unskilled hands. In addition to the preventatives mentioned I'd include bi-annual competency reviews. I'd also have the permit include incentives & privileges providing a status incentive for licensed operators. Suburbs, Exurbs, and Rural areas could use Minneapolis as a template and ultimately a statewide standard, much as a state drivers license, would follow and similar interstate recognition. This suggestion is not new. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune published a more extensive version of this comment years ago.
Another interesting statistic is that you are twice as likely to be shot to death by an acquaintance as you are a stranger. (If you include suicide as homicide your chances of being killed by a stranger with a gun are only around 10%) If any of my loved ones, friends, or neighbors owned firearms I'd feel much safer if they also held a current valid operators permit.
I am sending this to all my friends. I recently learned of a family, American, moving to Japan, permanently. They are busy learning Japanese. Looking at Brian’s statistics I now understand the “why”. Thank you Brian!
There's no excuse for the continued mass slaughter by firearms of people in the USA. It continues because it's politically expedient for the Republican Party to advance the myth that the Second Amendment disqualifies any attempt to regulate an individual's right to bear arms. It's useless to point out to Republicans that -- when the Second Amendment was passed -- there were no such firearms as AK-47s available for the populace to wield. And so -- with the Republican Party still remaining politically viable (however insane) in the electorate, the carnage continues.
I begin to feel, more and more, that the United States of America, which began as a noble experiment (however flawed) in self-government, has become an experiment that is moving rapidly towards failure. A nation that continues to privilege any nut with a burning resentment and access to a gun over a seven year old kid's right to grow up and live his or her life is a nation that has descended into psychosis. Need further proof of that assertion? Look at who is sitting in the Oval Office. A mentally sound polity would never have allowed Donald Trump to get anywhere near the White House in the first place, let alone electing him... twice.
Excellent essay. Thank you. It always amazes me that duck hunters can only hunt with shotguns limited to three shots, but those hunting people can employ the highest-capacity magazines available. I suppose there is something nice about a society that cares so much about waterfowl, but it might be nice to see evidence of similar concerns for humans.
Michael Moore made a case like this with his film Bowling for Columbine, 23 years ago. The data has been presented many times since, and is (or should be) very widely known. The answer is obvious — right in front of us, staring us in the face. If we want the answer.
We don't want it.
We don't care whether x-thousand Americans are shot to death each year, every year. The headline question is *why* we don't want to stop it.
Why.
I agree to an extent, but for what it's worth, international comparisons are a lot less common than a totally broken national debate that's about around-the-edges solutions and state/city comparisons within the United States. I don't think most Americans understand how much of an international outlier it is, not just on mass shootings, but on run-of-the-mill gun murders. It's national news if *anyone* gets shot in the UK. And as I write, the entire US national discourse is about whether Democratic cities are violent hellholes that warrant Trump's authoritarian National Guard deployments. It's all so insular.
One thing I never hear discussed is that pretty much every single American city has a higher murder rate (due to the gun violence epidemic) than any comparable major European city. Fox News goes crazy about London all the time, but London is *way* safer than any major US city. And within a lot of the data comparisons that are used, they compare gun control internally within the US to itself (which is why I explained how that logic is totally mistaken in the essay).
Anti-gun control arguments in the U.S. are made in bad faith.
Trump's complaints about crime in U.S. cities are made in bad faith.
Fox News complaints about London are… made in bad faith.
They're really lies, put forward either to obfuscate the true motive of Americans wanting the right to be armed… for some opaque reason; or put forward to obfuscate the rationale for wanting to seize direct control over U.S. cities, for the purpose of asphyxiating political opposition and resistance; or to promote U.S. nationalism to viewers who yearn for such content, for the purpose of commanding a larger audience which is more valuable to advertisers.
These purported arguments are not genuine national discourse. They're conjectures. They're smokescreens. They're fictional distractions. They're Spectacle…
In addition to the matter of why Americans don't want to control guns, a second headline question in the U.S. is why — *why* do we allow ourselves to be enchanted by such disingenuous, off-topic, non-answer, logical pivots which masquerade as replies to the first question? *Why* are we lead so easily away from such an important point which Michael Moore demonstrated in 2002, during a whole segment he dedicated to the discontinuity between American and Canadian gun owners, and policies on gun ownership in Bowling for Columbine — or which you asked with your comprehensive survey, published today?
What are we hiding, when we hide behind such distractions?
Why — why are we so *ashamed* of our own true desires, with regard to this topic, that we feel a need to *constantly* hide from them, again and again…?
Thank you. You do a good job of laying the argument out, and you're completely correct. But, as a political scientist, I wonder how you see change unfolding on guns in the US. It seems very unlikely that there will be an incident so horrific that it will cause the country to change course as the UK and Australia, for example, did. There are already well funded gun control groups, and most Americans already agree with some form of gun control... So how do we get from here to there?
I think it has to be made an explicit part of rebuilding America from the ground up, which is what we will need to do once T and his minions are finally thrown out of power (and that now means getting rid of R congressional control and having the actual mandate to reform the Court and the constitution to allow voters to have real power (getting rid of Citizens United, the Electoral College, the disenfranchisement of DC, the return of a voting rights act with teeth) and encouraging states to have voting rules that encourage participation (same day registration, mail in ballots, ranked choice voting, etc). If voters actually could vote their preferences for government, we’d have national gun purchase and ownership regulations. And mental health services. Both are poll-tested majority positions nearly everywhere. Congressional rules and practices that return to open debate in subcommittees and committees before bills (on specific issues) come to the floor. And if voters had a voice, we’d also have restrictions on media monopolies and fair use rules again.
The symptom is guns being treated as symbols of Red team membership, masculinity, and power and all three of these driving an insane culture of anger and disconnection. And thus fear multiplies the desire for guns that the antidemocratic deregulation then allows to be fulfilled however inappropriately.
Start at the root and make a functioning democracy again and several “cultural” things that are destroying us - opposition to gun regulation, scientific public health measures, climate change policies - become marginalized and culturally questionable (like overt racism and sexism and sexual bigotry used to be). The preferences of the minority begin to be reshaped by conformity to cultural rules (normative standards) into fitting in with “how things are.” The present “how things are” is one that distorts “freedom” into license for the powerful to display their dominance and for others to turn to guns and violence and drugs to show that they are not really so subordinate.
Yeah, it often does feel like we almost need a hard reset to fix our politics on a larger level in order to allow the political system to meaningfully address issues like this. But then again, to open up the current United States to some sort of broad re-envisioning of our politics could be an absolute shitshow!
I think it truly depends on the voters, Mr. Dillard. If we continue to give the Republican Party our votes we may expect no change in gun laws. If the mass shootings of the past decades have not budged Republicans' opposition to gun control to even a degree, it's time to convince the nation to abandon the Republican Party. Given the right wing's poisonously effective control of dominant media outlets, I don't see that happening. Is it time for the Union to "hang it up?" It may be.
The current state of our country would not be possible without the voters. I’m old enough to have been horrified by the rhetoric of Ronald Reagan while witnessing all around me venerating him. Reagan lit the fuse for the Republican Party that exists today and established a permission structure for Republican voters to claim entitlement to their skewed perceptions of reality and to double down on them when there’s even a whiff of challenge in the air. Good luck to us all.
All true. But if Columbine, Newtown, etc etc etc did not lead to meaningful action, how can we make the shootings in Minneapolis be any different?
Newtown was the one that made me realize gun control will never happen without superhuman effort.
Word.
Dear Brian,
Such a powerful article
Three brief comments
1. After Sandy Hook, when nothing changed, I realised that America had decided to live with the routine acceptance of mass murder including children
2. Firearm-related injury is now the leading cause of death in U.S. children and adolescents, having surpassed motor vehicle crashes — as documented in The New England Journal of Medicine (Goldstick et al., 2022).
3. Just read in WAPO today that In Tennessee, the state’s 5-year-olds will also learn to identify a trigger, a barrel and a muzzle as they’re introduced to rudimentary gun safety.
I do not sadly see a solution
"The door to a church being locked during services by default is also a dystopian canary in the American coal mine." Not to mention metal detectors at schools (and churches?) and prohibitions about entering the classroom areas, not that ICE is paying any attention to those.
It seems to me that one reason we have a higher rate of, say, stabbings, is that the constant "too many to report" instances of gun violence" simply has normalized violence. You don't have to think about gun violence in the UK, and I suspect you don't dwell too much on other kinds.
Ironic that trump's idea of preventing crime in, say, Chicago (which did have a bad Labor Day Weekend) is to send in a bunch of military with--guns.
That was a heartbreaking essay that still contextualized how much of an anomaly America is. Unlike other countries, news in America is only about America and the elitism I see around me doesn't take unflattering comparisons well. I am not saying that the comparisons are pointless, but it sure falls on deaf ears.
The question I've wondered is : why?Comparison can also be the driver of gun ownership - keeping up with the Joneses gun collection ; after all the UK is an ocean away but the Joneses live nextdoor. So I tried to solve the problem in the most American way possible - marketing & branding. Why do Americans think guns are cool? More importantly how do we make them uncool ( yes I used cool deliberately). How can gun ownership be classified as a boomer thing or the socially iconoclastic thing? How can gun ownership be inextricably linked to mental-unwellness? Larger the collection, greater the degree of unwellness?
You mentioned below that you grew up shooting guns at the range - your peers likely did as well. Activities with parents like this tend to have an outsized impact on what psychological safety comes from. The safety from parents to transfers to guns & people stick to them like a security blanket. Maybe calling guns security blankets that adults who've yet to get their thumbs out of their mouths is a branding direction? Infantalize gun ownership maybe?
It's eminently possible - after all we live in a world where vaccines have been made to sound bad and policy action has happened around it!
Another idea that occurred that's not specifically about gun laws is vocab : instead of stating shooter's names, turn them into a statistic. Example : 2025MN-x where x is the nth mass shooting or a gun incident in the state that year. And refer to the killer everywhere - news, Wikipedia using only that as their name & identity. That takes away the 15 mins of fame for the killer and puts their violence front and center. News should be required to state every victim who was killed, or injured, state their name, details about them and their families and observe 2 mins of silence per victim with no ad breaks. If it goes for an hour, it goes for an hour.
Thank you, Brian, for a well-considered, well-stated, and thoroughly researched presentation of a uniquely American issue. Unfortunately, in the U.S. when political sides get involved, facts seldom matter. On issue after issue in the U.S., there are those—and many with loud voices—who either just don’t care about facts or prefer to push their own agendas regardless of the facts. Consider, as just one example, people’s opinions on vaccines, particularly given the views of RFK, Jr. our Secretary of Health and Human Services. The politics of anti-intellectualism are overrunning American thought and policy. Given your vast knowledge and extensive research on political science matters, I’d be interested in your thoughts on how an open society can effectively address and perhaps solve this extremely unfortunate political riddle.
I too lived in Minneapolis for many years, but no longer live there. Reading about the other shootings, most of which occurred near Lake St.--a street I'd lived near and traveled regularly-- was deeply disturbing. The United States is unwell.
Dear Brian,
I admire your amazing literary contextualization skills!
What would a Venn diagram of all the "costs" to Americans look like?
(For me, a fast glance at a Venn diagram INSTANTLY reveals true focal points and root-cause epiphanies.) Perhaps with innocent deaths at the center?
I am 76 years old and in my entire life have seen only one person holding a gun on another. I was getting off the subway/train at an exit in the heart of downtown Chicago. I didn’t wait around to see what happened next. It is stunning to know a reality that I have lived in and with that has never touched me. Your article is an outstanding manifesto as to how far off track this country has gotten through misinterpretation of the second amendment. You clearly demonstrate why we absolutely must get rid of the guns if we want a sane country.
I looked up the CDC recommendations for gun safety and found "safe storage" and none other of the common sense preventatives implemented by the apparently more rational cultures mentioned in the article.
Shame on the CDC but that said, I also get a little frustrated with defeatists who believe there are only bad choices in this dilemma.
Mayor Frey and Chief O'Hara could work to add reasonable provisions to the already on the books "Concealed Carry" operators permit that would encompass most, if not all, of the preventives other countries have implemented. The permit would not restrict gun ownership any more than a pilots license restricts aircraft ownership but it would set standards for public use and for safe operation of a device and accessories that could be hazardous in unskilled hands. In addition to the preventatives mentioned I'd include bi-annual competency reviews. I'd also have the permit include incentives & privileges providing a status incentive for licensed operators. Suburbs, Exurbs, and Rural areas could use Minneapolis as a template and ultimately a statewide standard, much as a state drivers license, would follow and similar interstate recognition. This suggestion is not new. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune published a more extensive version of this comment years ago.
Another interesting statistic is that you are twice as likely to be shot to death by an acquaintance as you are a stranger. (If you include suicide as homicide your chances of being killed by a stranger with a gun are only around 10%) If any of my loved ones, friends, or neighbors owned firearms I'd feel much safer if they also held a current valid operators permit.
I am sending this to all my friends. I recently learned of a family, American, moving to Japan, permanently. They are busy learning Japanese. Looking at Brian’s statistics I now understand the “why”. Thank you Brian!
Thank you, Brian! You are the rare voice pointing out the obvious.