Dead End
Why America Can’t Take Action on Guns
April 24, 2023
Sandy Hook Elementary School, Newtown, Connecticut, after the massacre on Friday, December 14, 2012 (Reuters via CNS)
The sound of gunfire thunders through the building as the perpetrator — a calculating, merciless killer — roams calmly through the halls, training the weapon on their next victim.
That line evokes a number of images. Perhaps, upon reading it, you think back to the thriller novel you finished last week about a crazed murderer. Perhaps you picture scenes from the horror film you just watched. Or perhaps you imagine a bloody battlefield from halfway around the world, in a country ripped apart by war.
If you guessed any of those, you wouldn’t be wrong. That line could perfectly well describe a brutal act of violence from a book or a movie or a war. It could be plucked right from the lines of a thriller novel or a history textbook. Yet we need not be that imaginative in our answers. This scene could also be coming from another place, one we don’t need thriller authors or movie directors or historians to bring us: a school.
Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Parkland, Florida, on Wednesday, February 14, 2018 (Associated Press)
I am twenty-two years old and part of the “run, hide, fight” generation. I’m not sure if anyone has ever said that before, but it seems like an apt characterization. For people in this sorry generation, it seems as if gun violence has spilled into every facet of our lives, never letting us break free of its twisted grasp.
About a decade ago, when I had just finished elementary school, a gunman stormed into another elementary school, one called Sandy Hook, where he brutally murdered twenty six and seven-year-olds right in their classrooms. I don’t remember hearing much about Sandy Hook. Perhaps my teachers hid the news from us because we were too young, or perhaps because they were too petrified themselves.
The first time I really thought about gun violence came five years later, on Valentine’s Day, when a teenager wielding a semi-automatic, military-style weapon walked into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and murdered seventeen people. I was a junior in high school at the time, seventeen years old, the same age as three of the students killed. I remember watching the massacre unfold on the living room TV, some thirteen-hundred miles from the ghastly crime scene, as I arrived home from school.
Gun violence in this country has become as predictable as it is jarring. It’s only a matter of when, and where, it hits next.
In the hours that followed, as the true scale of the carnage came into focus, as fire trucks and ambulances whisked the victims away on bloodied stretchers, as news reporters from across the country converged on the scene, I would learn, slowly, of the horrors that had shattered the peace in Parkland. I would learn of the victims, of their names and stories, of the wrecked hopes and dreams — some of which were not all that different from my own. And I would learn of the perpetrator, that he had used a weapon meant for a battlefield, and that he had bought it legally.
Five years after that — one day shy of the Parkland anniversary, actually, and during my senior year of college — gun violence once again struck a school in America. This time, however, the target was Michigan State University. I remember shuddering from my apartment in Ann Arbor as the cameras caught shots of horrified students, college students, running for their lives in a town right around the corner.
In the wake of the rampage at Michigan State, a sense of shock pierced through my body, the same shock I had felt after Parkland and the same shock most probably felt in the hours after Sandy Hook. Yet for all of that shock, one emotion was strikingly absent: surprise. I had no trouble understanding why: gun violence in this country has become as predictable as it is jarring. America’s nonstop nightmare of mass carnage has played out virtually everywhere — in malls and grocery stores, at holiday parades and music festivals, in nightclubs and houses of worship. It has targeted communities both large and small, rich and poor, red and blue. It’s only a matter of when, and where, it hits next.
Survivors of the mass shooting at Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, after the attack on Monday, February 13, 2023 (Reuters)
You might think the point of this essay is to make an impassioned plea for gun control. It’s not. Around the time of the Michigan State shooting, when our politicians in Washington started to go through the usual motions, I realized the question to ask wasn’t whether we need more gun control. As far as public opinion is concerned, that debate was settled long ago. The real question is why, in spite of the broad support for change in this country, we aren’t getting any — why we’ve hit this maddening dead end.
By now, we all know the drill. After another high-profile mass shooting rocks our wary nation, our lawmakers in Washington follow a familiar ritual, one that’s become so predictable it almost bears no repeating. On the left, Democrats propose a new round of gun safety legislation that everybody knows is all but certain to fail. And on the right, Republicans offer heartfelt thoughts and prayers to the latest victims before dismissing any gun reforms and pinning the blame on issues like mental health. Some in the GOP even suggest the problem is a lack of guns.
There have been a few exceptions to this depressing routine. Last summer, after a shooter gunned down twenty-one people, including nineteen children, at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, a group of Republicans finally gave in and joined with Democrats to pass the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the first major gun control package at the federal level in three decades. But the rather modest legislation appeared to placate gun safety advocates more than it actually enacted change. The Pew Research Center found in a poll that only seven percent of Americans thought the legislation would do “a lot” to curb gun violence, while nearly two-thirds wanted Congress to do more. In any case, the package fell miserably short of the sweeping reforms pushed by gun control advocates.
At the state level, there is a little more hope. After the Parkland rampage, lawmakers in Florida swiftly raised the minimum age for all firearms purchases from eighteen to twenty-one. The state also enacted a “red flag” law under Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican, that has been used to seize guns from thousands of people who pose a risk to themselves or others. And across the country, states from coast to coast have advanced a spate of other reforms. In Michigan, after news of the Michigan State shooting broke, lawmakers pledged almost immediately to tighten the state’s gun laws, and have since taken decisive action to do so.
At any rate, without comprehensive reforms at the federal level, the current hodgepodge of state laws can only do so much. Until Congress acts, there’s little standing in the way of the next mass shooter.
Yet other states are pushing just as hard in the opposite direction. In Texas, after a school shooting in 2018 that claimed ten lives and a 2019 rampage at a Walmart in which twenty-three were killed, lawmakers enacted a “constitutional carry” policy, which made it legal for most residents to carry a handgun in public without any prior training or a permit. Now, lawmakers in Florida have done the same, with Gov. Ron DeSantis signing into law a controversial permitless carry measure in his own state. Rep. Paul Renner, the speaker of Florida’s Republican-controlled House, declared that the policy would “remove the government permission slip to exercise a constitutional right.” The step comes against the backdrop of the Parkland massacre and a string of other mass shootings to strike Florida in recent years, including an attack on a nightclub that killed almost fifty people and another at an airport that left five dead.
These moves by lawmakers may seem ludicrous, but they are hardly out of the ordinary. Across the country, conservative state leaders have repeatedly relaxed gun restrictions in the wake of mass shootings, leading many to rightfully sound the alarm. Yet even where restrictions are tough, gun violence rages. California, which has some of the strictest gun laws in the country, suffered three mass shootings in less than forty-eight hours this past January. The story is no different in New York, where a gunman murdered ten people at a supermarket last summer despite the state’s exacting gun restrictions.
At any rate, without comprehensive reforms at the federal level, the current hodgepodge of state laws can only do so much. “In this country,” said Nick Suplina, senior vice president for law and policy at Everytown for Gun Safety, “a state’s gun laws are only as strong as its closest neighbor with weak gun laws. It’s important to remember just how easily weapons are bought and sold in neighboring states.” Until Congress acts, there’s little standing in the way of the next mass shooter.
Demonstrators at a "March For Our Lives" protest on Saturday, March 24, 2018 (Reuters)
Gun violence is not a uniquely American phenomenon. The U.S. is far and away the world leader in mass shootings, yet the crisis in America has merely been magnified by our inaction. Other countries have, in fact, faced similar acts of violence on a comparable scale. In 1996, Australia suffered its worst mass killing on record when a twenty-eight-year-old gunman went on a shooting rampage in the town of Port Arthur, leaving thirty-five dead and twenty-three wounded. Several years earlier, in Canada, a student gunned down fourteen people on a college campus in Montreal. And in Europe, a mass killing in the United Kingdom left seventeen people dead in 1996; another brutal attack, this one in Norway, killed more than eighty in 2011. Yet while America is far from alone in its epidemic of gun violence, it is completely alone in its response to it.
In Australia, mere days after the Port Arthur massacre, lawmakers quickly moved to tighten the country’s gun laws. In a sweeping agreement, the nation’s leaders nearly outlawed semi-automatic rifles and created a buyback program that took more than half a million assault weapons off the streets. What is most impressive is that Australia did all of this alongside a powerful gun lobby. In the two decades that followed these decisive reforms, Australia didn’t suffer a single mass shooting, and gun homicide rates fell precipitously.
America can put an end to its twisted story of gun violence if it sets itself to the task. But until then, we remain a lonely outlier on the world stage, helpless to prevent the next shooter from scripting the latest scene in our national nightmare.
Canada also instituted sweeping gun reforms following its own tragedy in Montreal. Soon after that senseless killing, the country’s lawmakers imposed severe restrictions on semi-automatic and military-style weapons, a lengthy waiting period for firearms purchases, and stringent training requirements for gun buyers. And following another mass shooting in 2020, the deadliest in the nation’s history, Canada moved to outlaw the sale of most handguns. “Other than using firearms for sport shooting and hunting,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said of the new measure, “there is no reason anyone in Canada should need guns in their everyday lives. We need only look south of the border to know that if we do not take action firmly, it gets worse and worse and more difficult to counter.”
Canada’s reforms mirror those undertaken in Europe. After its mass killing in 1996, a rampage at a Scottish primary school that left sixteen children dead, the United Kingdom moved swiftly to ban most handguns, adding to an earlier measure that outlawed semi-automatic firearms. Those reforms appear to be working. An attack in 2021 that killed five people in Plymouth marked the first mass shooting to hit the U.K. in over ten years. In the same period, the U.S. suffered more than three thousand mass killings.
The situation isn’t hopeless. America can put an end to its twisted story of gun violence if it sets itself to the task. But until then, we remain a lonely outlier on the world stage, helpless to prevent the next shooter from scripting the latest scene in our national nightmare. There’s only one question to raise at our inaction: why?
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Monday, May 30, 2022 (Bloomberg/Getty Images)
“Hell, yes,” Beto O’Rourke once shouted boldly, “we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47.” O’Rourke’s pronouncement, delivered on the stage of a Democratic presidential debate in 2019, came in the middle of a bloody year in the politician’s home state of Texas. Mere weeks before those comments, a gunman slaughtered almost two dozen people in El Paso. In the same month, another shooter, this one in Odessa, killed seven more.
Both attacks were perpetrated with the kind of semi-automatic, military-style weapons that O’Rourke gestured toward in his comments. Still, his proclamation on the campus of Texas Southern University instantly drew the ire of the right. One Texas state representative, a Republican, hit back at O’Rourke over Twitter with an apparent threat: “My AR is ready for you.” Another, U.S. Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo., posted a clip to the internet in which he brandished an AR-15 in his Capitol Hill office. “If you want to take everyone’s AR-15 in America, why don’t you swing by my office in Washington, D.C. and start with this one?” And then-President Donald Trump called O’Rourke “Dummy Beto.”
In the years after that debate, O’Rourke would go on to temper his stance, perhaps in response to public opinion in gun-heavy Texas. Still, the rage his comments provoked on the right threw a spotlight on the growing contingent of Republicans willing to defend guns at all costs.
Back in 1994, almost fifty House Republicans joined with Democrats to pass the Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act, an ambitious federal measure that barred the manufacture and sale of assault weapons across the country until 2004. Yet last year, when the much more restrained Bipartisan Safer Communities Act came up for a vote in the House, only fourteen Republicans supported it. And when Democrats made a failed bid in 2013 to reinstate the assault weapons ban, after a gunman used a semi-automatic rifle to murder twenty-six people at Sandy Hook, it garnered a single Republican vote. Even attempts at passing something as basic as universal background checks have chalked up little Republican support.
The right’s resistance to even incremental reform puts Americans in grave danger at their schools, on college campuses, at shopping malls, at churches and synagogues, and on city streets.
Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., perhaps best captured the right’s hard-line stance in a recent speech from the House floor: “The Second Amendment is absolute, and it’s here to stay.”
That kind of intransigence, paired with the grinding partisan gridlock in Washington, has made compromise improbable and progress virtually impossible. And with mass shootings now becoming a weekly or even daily ritual in America, the right has earned itself some much-deserved flak.
Some have put their criticism bluntly: those standing in the way of gun reform have blood on their hands. Others have resorted to anger. Gov. Gavin Newsom, D-Calif., seethed after a gunman massacred eleven people at a dance hall near Los Angeles in January: “Nothing about this is surprising. Everything about this is infuriating. The Second Amendment is becoming a suicide pact.”
Still others have made spirited emotional appeals. David Hogg, a survivor of the Parkland school shooting, pleaded with lawmakers from a barricaded classroom to “Forget the NRA, forget all the political backing. Take a stance. For human lives. For children’s lives.” And after the recent shooting at the Covenant School in Nashville, in which three children were killed, U.S. Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., shouted down Republicans in the halls of Congress: “They're cowards,” he bellowed. “They're all cowards.”
That pummeling is well deserved. Republicans do have blood on their hands. The right’s resistance to even incremental reform puts Americans in grave danger at their schools, on college campuses, at shopping malls, at churches and synagogues, and on city streets. For that, those politicians deserve to be called out in the strongest of terms. Yet when we rebuke the people who call the shots in Washington, we tend to ignore the ones in America who put them there: the voters.
Gun safety protestors near the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday, November 3, 2021 (Getty Images)
Survey after survey finds that voters on both the left and the right overwhelmingly favor practical gun reform. The Pew Research Center revealed in a poll that a wide swath of the American public — more than eighty percent — would support a measure to tighten background checks, a prospect Republican lawmakers have killed repeatedly. Broken down, that includes ninety-two percent of Democrats and, notably, seventy percent of Republican voters. In other polls, the support for background checks is even stronger. A survey from last summer found that more than nine in ten Americans back the measure. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said quite aptly that “there are few things more popular than universal background checks — not even apple pie.”
This extraordinary degree of consensus does not hold universally. Yet Americans have reiterated time and again their support for a host of sensible gun reforms. Almost two in three favor the return of the assault weapons ban, according to the Pew Research Center, while about the same number would support a new federal database to log every gun sale. And in the poll from last summer, an overwhelming majority — seventy-four percent — said they’d back a move to raise the age for all gun purchases to twenty-one.
Gun control activists cite these numbers ad nauseam. They claim that, of course, if such overwhelming majorities want change, that politicians are obliged to provide it. But such an argument rests on a subtle assumption: that people who want gun control will actually elect politicians who can deliver it, that they will actually hold accountable those who don’t. In a perfect world, perhaps that’s a reasonable claim to make. But in ours, it’s dubious at best, if not downright ludicrous.
Take, for instance, universal background checks. If the polls captured voting behavior as well as we’d like to think, we’d expect more than ninety percent of the country to vote for people who support them. Yet the actual number isn’t even close. In the midterm election cycle this past November, voters installed a majority-Republican House while granting Democrats a razor-thin edge in the Senate. And in a hypothetical presidential matchup, according to recent polling data, Donald Trump would beat Joe Biden by a few points.
It’s tempting, based on these numbers, to conclude that Americans are simply numb to the horrors of gun violence. But Americans do care — enough, at least, for more than ninety percent of the country to support a common-sense step like universal background checks. Yet these numbers do call into question how much we Americans care about gun violence — how much we are willing to sacrifice to stop the endless stream of blood spilling from our classrooms, our workplaces, and our streets. And if our voting behaviors tell us anything, it’s that we care — just not very much.
That might sound jarring, but it shouldn’t really come as much of a surprise. A survey from the Pew Research Center released days before the 2022 midterms asked voters which issues were top of mind for them, and the economy, energy policy, and crime came out on top. Gun violence, meanwhile, earned the eighth spot.
Perhaps it’s perfectly rational to value our bank accounts, our grocery store bills, and the prices we pay at the pump over a new gun law that will probably stop the occasional mass killer from carrying out their twisted plans, but might not.
This apathetic attitude is echoed in most other polling. In one survey, an exit poll from NBC News, also from the midterms, just over ten percent rated gun violence as the most important issue driving their vote. Whether we like it or not, we’ve all made a collective determination that other problems are just more important. Former U.S. Rep. Steve Israel, D-N.Y., put the point bluntly: “Your heart [breaks] with the [grisly] news of the massacre of America’s children. But it will mend. It will mend as quickly as you click to another story; turn the page of the newspaper; see the next flash breaking news about Ukraine, gas prices, Trump.”
Perhaps, we like to tell ourselves, we’re not wrong to do this. The high-profile mass killings that dominate the headlines on TV are, after all, not all that common. The massacres at Sandy Hook, Parkland, and Michigan State are unspeakably horrifying, but that kind of violence — a cold-blooded murderer firing upon people at random inside a school — remains relatively rare. Perhaps it’s perfectly rational, we reason, to value our bank accounts, our grocery store bills, and the prices we pay at the pump over a new gun law that will probably stop the occasional mass killer from carrying out their twisted plans, but might not. Certainly, it won’t stop all of them.
This kind of logic is tempting and dangerous, and it’s exactly why our lawmakers have yet to take substantive action on gun violence, and why they probably won’t do so anytime soon. And what’s more, if our collective indifference toward mass killings isn’t jarring enough, consider this: mass shootings are a tiny speck — a mere drop in the bucket — against the bloody backdrop of gun violence in this country. Indeed, mass murders in public spaces consistently account for well under one percent of total gun deaths every year. The toll from other forms of gun violence is much higher — and we barely ever even talk about it.
Last year alone, according to the Gun Violence Archive, there were more than forty-four thousand firearms deaths in this country, most of which were homicides or suicides featuring plain old handguns. If that weren’t horrific enough, gun violence has now surpassed car crashes as the leading killer of our children.
None of this is to say that mass shootings aren’t horrific. They are, and the present moment calls for our utmost attention toward them before more innocent lives are lost. But if our apathy toward mass shootings isn’t enough of an indictment of where our priorities lie, this certainly should be. At best, we only care about the most brutal, extreme acts of violence — and we’re not even that interested in stopping those.
At any rate, the solution to our country’s epidemic of gun violence isn’t a political one, but a moral one. If we don’t care about the issue enough ourselves, how can we expect our leaders — those who represent us — to act any differently? The answer: we can’t, and until we make a change ourselves, we shouldn’t expect any out of Washington.