Let's Just Accept It: We're Gunfire Nation

First Baptist Church, Sutherland Springs, Texas

Too soon. Old news. Repeat. We’ve heard this cycle before. After one nut riddled a Connecticut elementary school with semi-automatic weapons fire; after a distraught, drunken gambler tallied over 600 casualties at a Las Vegas country music concert; now we’ll probably hear it again following the Baptist church shooting in Sutherland Springs, Texas. Clearly we Americans have no intention of doing anything about this. When do we admit: this is apparently just who we are?

If we use the DoJ’s favored definition of a “mass shooting,” meaning a total dead or injured of four or more (not counting the shooter), then by one count, Sutherland Springs was the 377th mass shooting in America in 2017 alone—a year with nearly two full months remaining. It was the thirty-eighth mass shooting since Las Vegas, over one per day. The previous day saw four mass shootings, for one dead and twelve injured.

According to published FBI statistics, the incidence of mass shootings continues to rise, while almost every other category of violent crime has enjoyed (if that’s the word) steady decline since 1991. You’re safer from murder, rape, armed robbery, arson, and aggravated assault, than at any time since before current traditional-age college students were born. But mass shootings have become so common, they don’t even make national news until the death toll climbs into double digits.

Frustratingly, we know reams of information about these events. The shooters are mostly white, almost entirely male, and generally suicidal. Target choices generally fall into two categories: shooters who attack their own families, and shooters who attack public places. Schools, shopping malls, cinemas, concerts, and evangelical churches make tempting targets because they involve large numbers of people packed into confined spaces with limited access to exits… and the shooters don’t much care who they hit.

We accept the necessity to hang “no guns” signs on schools, churches, and other gathering places, because some people consider it their God-given right to take guns anywhere they aren’t specifically forbidden. Starbucks? Really? This despite the demonstrable fact that guns make hostile situations worse, not better. I’ve submitted to pat-downs and bag searches going into concerts and festivals, because I know I’m not packing iron, but security cannot tell in advance who might be.

The now-iconic file photo of concert-goers escaping carnage in Las Vegas, Nevada

One man attempted a shoe bomb, and now we must strip to our socks to get on a plane. One jackass attempted an underwear bomb, and now we must permit TSA agents making minimum wage to hit second base. Many American schools and shopping malls have metal detectors and a permanent police presence like a permanently occupied Belfast housing estate. Yet 2017 has been among America’s worst mass-shooting years ever, and nobody asks about guns.

(I have friends who, whenever violence like this happens, inevitably note that these aren’t the worst shootings in American history; the massacres at Sand Creek and Wounded Knee were far worse. And they’re not wrong. Those historic catastrophes took considerably more lives, and are regarded now with shame. But those mass murders were American troops acting in unison. That’s like saying Chancellorsville was worse than a modern urban gang skirmish: they’re not the same thing.)

Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t support blanket gun bans. Even if I considered that a good idea, it’s deeply impractical, because there are currently more firearms than adult citizens in America—and we don’t know where they all are. A well-maintained gun can last decades; American soldiers in Afghanistan recovered working Enfield rifles from the Second Anglo-Afghan War. Gun roundups would require invasive police actions that even the staunchest “Blue Lives Matter” types would despise.

But we’re not discussing every gun, or every gun owner. We have the technology and manpower to spot, and investigate, most people stockpiling weapons, without violating the Constitution. The Aurora, Colorado, cinema shooter was reported to law enforcement, who did nothing. That story repeats itself. Despite “Broken Windows” promises and street-level crackdowns, the police, a primarily bureaucratic institution, will do little until blood spills. Any woman who’s ever filed a stalking report already knows that.

Yes, we have the technology to fix the problem. But we don’t have the will. We’ve accepted a massive proliferation of weapons of war as the apex of American freedom, more important that having faith that we won’t die because we attended a concert. That’s the face we present to the world, and we need to be brave enough to stop lying about it. America has become Gunfire Nation. And apparently we’re okay with that.

Follow-up to this essay: Gunfire Nation, Part II