There is a cycle where, after a tragedy like a school shooting which gathers massive national media attention, people say things like: "Don't tell me that we can't pass a law to prevent this. We've cut car deaths by 50% over the last forty years by making cars safer. We can make guns safer and stop tragedies like this if we can stop the gun lobby!"
Of course, one key difference with the "making cars safer" scenario is that usually, people do not intend to cause injury with their cars. That's why we call them "traffic accidents". When people do intend to kill people with their cars, the improvements in air bags and crumple zones do not necessarily make things any better.
There are some proposed laws that might help to some extent. "Red flag laws" which allow people to report someone to law enforcement for unstable behavior and have their guns temporarily confiscated (or have them temporarily added to a list of people who will not be able to pass a gun-purchase background check) show a certain amount of promise. We already have laws that keep felons and people who have been involuntarily committed for mental illness from buying guns. Having a way to "flag" people who have frequently threatened those around them and acted unstable (as many mass shooters do) seems basically sensible. Though of course, the issue is: will fallible people do what they need to do to make the system work? New York State has a red flag law on the books, but no one bothered to "flag" the Buffalo shooter, even though he had check himself into a hospital talking about killing people and scared people at his college with weird and threatening behavior.
Other suggestions seem rooted in ignorance about how guns work. For instance, some people are very committed to the idea of banning "high capacity magazines", often meaning magazines that hold more than ten rounds. This doesn't strike me as particularly helpful in fighting crime because 1) most crimes don't actually involve shooting lots of rounds, though mass shootings do and 2) changing magazines is really fast and easy, so while it might make a difference in an active shootout (this is why police favor large magazines -- they don't want to be the first to have to change mags in a gunfight) most mass killings involve the murderer going around shooting unarmed people, which means having to change mags more often probably wouldn't save lives.
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| 30rd vs 10rd AR magazines |
But here's what I find myself wondering: To what extent is the feeling that terrible things happen and "we're not doing anything" corrosive on the body politic?
To me, with the view that decisions about laws are often balances between bad alternative, and the basic idea that human nature is deeply flawed and our society sick in many ways, it is not particularly shocking to think that there are terrible things that happen which cannot be easily prevented by some new law.
However, for many people I see online, the idea that something terrible happens and we don't immediately come together to pass a law to prevent it seems like it breaks something in their view of the world, and they conclude that tragedies must happen because the other 50% of Americans are so evil that they want them to happen.
Which got me wondering about a question so cynical that even as a cynical person I find it pretty appalling, but here it is:
The political script seems to be that after a major shooting, a majority of people desperately want to "do something" while the minority of people who are very committed to voting based on guns rights point out that most of those things wouldn't work very well, and since deeply committed minorities willing to vote on the basis of one issue carry more than the usual electoral weight, nothing happens. This makes a lot of people think that the political system is broken and that their political opponents are evil people who want innocent people killed, and our culture and politics just keep getting worse.
What if, instead, gun advocates agreed to collaborate in passing some measure which would not significantly restrict legal use of guns by law abiding gun owners, but which would be "doing something".
What would be different?
Well, for one thing, people would no longer feel like we're a country which is incapable of "doing something" about mass killings of innocent people. Given that the extent to which everyone in society hates each other has corrosive effects on our country, this in itself might have some benefits.
But it might also cause the opinion-making industry to obsess over mass shootings less, which, perversely, might actually result in fewer mass shootings since it appears that to some extent mass shootings result from a sort of "social contagion" where troubled young men hear about mass shootings because of our society's obsession with them and then proceed to follow the mass shooting script in order to express their own unhappiness and anger at society.
I'm not ready to propose this as a solution. The idea of proposing that we do something that I don't think would work for the purpose of gulling the public into feeling like we as a society are addressing major problems is just too cynical for me to get behind right now. But given that gun control advocates themselves frequently seem to propose actions that would arguably to little or nothing to reduce crime, and then get everyone very upset about the idea that "we as a society are not willing to do anything", I can't help wondering if picking some kind of measure which wouldn't cause inconvenience to law abiding gun owners and getting behind it in a big way just to make people feel like "something" is being done would do less harm to society than refusing to do anything (even if for the righteous reason that all of the "somethings" proposed are harmful or useless.)
Look, after all, at the frankly silly things we go through every time we get on a plane, which almost certainly do not make us any safer from terrorism. And yet, we don't have the corrosive effect of half the populace being convinced "we don't care enough to do anything about terrorism". Maybe that's the entire purpose of the security theater in airports, and maybe in some appalling sense it's valuable to society.
One counter-argument to the idea that some security theater might be healthy safety valve for us as a body politic is that we did a ton of security theater after 9/11–much of which is still here, as you note—and that still didn’t stop us from invading Iraq.
ReplyDeleteAlso of note is that in Tom Brokaw’s book “Boom”, which consists of interviews with people who were at least somewhat significant players in the events of the 1960s, there is a recurring theme: when he asks counterculture figures what made them decide that The Establishment was totally rotten and not worth bothering with, a lot pointed to the Duck and Cover drills of the 1950s. So whether or not security theater is a good idea in part depends on whether or not you want a generation of people where a critical mass is utterly mistrustful and contemptuous of the mainstream establishment. I could be convinced. The 1960s counterculture scene gave rise to some really great music after all.