Suns Out - Guns Out: Why America Can't Stop Gun Violence
And What We Can Do to Change That
This wasn’t the post I was planning to share this week, but the mass shooting in Georgia this week by a 14 year old kid, yet another tragedy that feels both easily preventable and completely inevitable in America, tabled my other draft for another day. Here’s why its impossible to do anything about mass shootings in America, and a few ways that may finally break our cultural paralysis.
In the late 1980s, when I 15 years old, I spent days writing personalized letters to every one of my representatives in the US House and Senate. Thankfully, I had an electronic typewriter to help expedite the task, but most of the words were not my own. They came from pages of talking points mailed to me by the National Rifle Association.
At the time, I was a member of the NRA because I learned to shoot in the Boy Scouts and had a natural aptitude for it. I grew up shorter than average for my age, and in middle school I was often picked last because of my size, despite being relatively agile, coordinated, and fast. That reality created a doom loop of disinterest and dislike of sports for me. Then, when I was 12 years old, attending my first year of summer camp as a Boy Scout at Crossett Lake, NY, I was given a .22 caliber rifle and taught to point it at a paper target 25 yards away. The first shots of my young life formed a cluster near the bullseye. That feeling of being good at something larger than myself thrilled me at the time and I was hooked. By the end of that 2-week camp I would go home with 1st place in the scout shooting competition, earn a Sharpshooter certification, and a free 1-year membership in the NRA. Talk about a recruitment funnel!
I would remain a member of the NRA until my late 20s, and to this day I enjoy shooting targets with both rifles and handguns, and I’m still quite good at it. But back to me as a 15-year-old kid, in my bedroom in Maplewood, NJ, asking my elected representatives to vote against a bill that would have, in my letter then, “taken away my constitutional right to bear arms.”
For the life of me I can’t tell you what bill I was so adamantly trying to stop at the time, (I’d bet that it was relatively benign overall) but I can tell you that every month, for years, the NRA would mail me 10 page letters of dense copy loaded with desperate warnings that the government was on the verge of voting for X bill that would inevitably take away all guns, from everyone. Further, they claimed that only I could stop those wannabe dictators by writing letters to my elected officials, and mailing donations to the NRA. While I didn’t have any money at the time, I was damn sure I could write letters, and you can be damn sure that I did.
This, even though I didn’t own any firearms at the time and raised by parents who grew up in the thick of WWII Europe and passionately opposed to all forms of violence. (Being held against a wall by Nazis wielding machine guns, as my mother was with her family, can do that to a person.)
I’m sharing this story because I understand the allure of gun culture, the fun and excitement of shooting (especially if you’re good at it), while also acknowledging the obvious need to do something, ANYTHING, about mass shootings that seem to happen weekly in America and yet, strangely, nowhere else on earth. It’s especially insane when we have 14-year-old kids being able to walk into school like they are cosplaying a scene from John Wick. And yet, and yet, I have friends who have honestly been convinced that “there’s nothing we can do”. Even the current candidate for Vice President, JD Vance, is resigned to living in a society where mass shootings are “a fact of life” and “the reality we live in.” Well, I think I can honestly speak for most people when I say, “fuck that.”
This casual acceptance of mass murder and death by and of children is madness, and anyone not drinking the right-wing Kool Aid can see that. No one actually wants to live in a hyper-secure dystopia where we’re surrounded by metal detectors, armed guards, CCTV cameras, and fear, especially where we send our children to learn. And yet this is exactly the “only” solution Republican leaders are offering instead of dealing with a culture that allows and empowers the worst few to force the peaceful many into living in a prison of our own making. Meanwhile, Democrats don’t seem to know how to identify different types of firearms, let alone speak about ways to curb gun violence without triggering a wave of forceful and effective opposition from a sliver of the population (<3%) that is obsessed with gun and gun culture.
But what can be done?
While other countries have figured this out, America is unique in that we have fetishized guns and gun culture for generations. The problem also feels at an intractable impasse because our society, including our media, presents the argument in an us vs. them paradigm. It’s urban, out of touch lefties trying to kill the culture and freedom of people they don’t know and don’t understand. It’s either all guns or no guns, and it’s all bullshit. Worse, these paradigms only reinforce the paralysis and prevent the more rational and sane of our society – majorities from both parties – from finally tackling this problem. In the meantime, organizations use this issue to fire up both sides of a donor base that has us shouting at and fearing one another, all the while consultants and media outlets get richer on the problem while politicians get famous performing about it, while no one does anything about solutions.
For gun enthusiasts, the feeling of being ‘under siege’ by “lefties who are scared of guns, don’t understand or use them, and hate us” creates a cultural environment that entrenches and hardens oppositions against all regulations. Even the most meek or reasonable reforms are argued to be the beginning down the slippery slope of a total ban on owning any guns.
I understand the feeling of confidence and strength and thus “freedom” that guns can empower. I remember how it felt as a teenager, being able to control such power with precision. Guns are empowering and instill a sense of confidence. Couple that with a mindset that may be inclined to be fearful of others, especially outsiders, and assume civil society is a fragile concept with only inertia temporarily holding chaos at bay at best, and you have the perfect conditions for a subculture inclined to distrust any laws and especially urban politicians that may take away any semblance of being able to “protect” themselves and their loved ones.
For those horrified by the ongoing slaughter, especially of children, they can’t understand the need to own what looks like an arsenal meant for war, not hunting or home defense. Nor can they understand why there is so much resistance to reasonable gun laws in the first place. The left looks at gun lovers as crazy because all they see are the crazies, when the vast majority of gun owners simply aren’t.
All the while, a billion-dollar firearm industry is happy to continue selling the 5th, 6th, and even 20th thousand-dollar firearm to the same few people, and all the accessories that go with it. The business side of this cultural identification with firearms cannot be stressed enough as a source of our problem. But it’s not just gun manufacturers, their marketing budgets and the NRA that are the problem. America loves guns and violence, and that obsession begins in the most liberal place of all: Hollywood.
And Hollywood’s fetishization of guns and violence isn’t new. In the 1980s I didn’t grow up with posters of cars or women on my walls, but Sylvester Stallone holding an M-60 machine gun.
Once Stallone and Schwarzenegger made killing cool, it really went mainstream into the late 1990s, when we watched Keanu Reeves shooting up an entire army of faceless men in super sexy, super slow motion to the swelling sounds of uplifting music matched to the mesmerizing, plodding “pop….pop….pop…” of bullets tearing the bad guys apart. In the modern era we have generations of young men and women raised playing first person shooter games since grade school and, again, Keanu Reeves making death and violence look awesome as John Wick.
Culturally, we freak the fuck out over a woman’s nipple and yet allow all sorts of wild graphic violence to a degree that’s just… weird if you aren’t already drinking the Kool Aid. And I’m not a pearl clutcher; I don’t think a top-down content ban on violence is going to be a pragmatic or even possible answer amid the culture we’re living in today. But you are kidding yourself if you think that all this social conditioning to extreme violence, coupled with a society that allows and encourages easy access to all guns, all the time, isn’t a big contributor to creating the very reality we are living in today.
Hollywood is selling movies and TV shows glorifying violence, all while gun makers reap billions selling the tools of violence to the same people. On our TV and social media feeds we are bombarded with anchors and pundits telling us that our cities and communities are war zones, when they aren’t, all while making a fortune keep us scared of each other and the future. Is it any wonder that some people feel anxious and powerless to do anything but arm themselves so that they can defend ourselves?
Our real fight isn’t right vs left, but the big business of an elite few and their vocal minorities vs. our shared safety and sanity.
Subculture Club
But before we can begin to pass sensible gun laws, the biggest hurdle that we must overcome, by far, is the fact that our culture of guns has become so meshed with the subcultural identity of a vocal few. This is not an issue that people think rationally about; it’s cultural. Cultural identity is a powerful force and becoming more so across the political spectrum. So long as people see gun laws as an attack on culture and not access or safety, it will remain all but impossible to tackle this relatively simple problem.
I was a member of the NRA for years, and to this day still shoot as a hobby. What didn’t stick with me was this weird gun fetishization that I see all over the country. Families send out Christmas cards holding enough firepower to take down a police station, and it’s been reported that the Georgia shooter’s dad gave him an AR-15 for Christmas. This isn’t normal – it’s a form of obsession bordering on mental illness. Gun ownership has become not just a hobby, but a core tenant of many people’s life and identity. Looking at it from the outside, in, it’s… again… weird.
Democrats also do themselves a disservice focusing on “assault weapons” when so many weapons look intimidating but are no more powerful than your average hunting rifle with a magazine. Many hunting rifles, in fact, are far more powerful than an AR-15. By focusing on “scary looking” weapons instead of structural access, safety, and culture, Democrats lose legitimacy among the very people they need to reach.
My hope is that we just get over this really idiotic era of American culture, because a cultural rejection of America’s firearm fetish while rejecting, at the box office, graphic gun violence as entertainment, will be much more effective than a top-down approach in the law. But laws are needed, and the national conversation can break the deadly paralysis of gun safety if we break free from the false choice of either “all guns” or “no guns” as a narrative set by the same vocal minority obsessed with guns.
While we wait for this delusional firearm fever to break, what can we do practically to slow the killing and stop the bloodshed?
In the short term, one practical approach, at a minimum, is requiring that anyone who wants to purchase anything more powerful than a normal hunting rifle, shotgun, or handgun with a limited capacity magazine (buy all the ammo and magazines that you want, but you gotta reload often) – any of which are suitable for hunting, home, and self-defense, should be required to go through some type of comprehensive background check, training, and certification process. We already do this, to a degree, for specialized firearm equipment like suppressors, short rifle barrels, and other niche firearm equipment. In the least, we can require the type of training I did for my concealed carry permit in Arizona.
The certification process for a concealed weapons permit (CWP) wasn’t intense, maybe 6 hours of online instruction and some testing at the end of it, but it cost a few hundred dollars for what was, (at the time) a mandatory process. To me, the most impactful aspect of the training was that so much of the course was focused on the many, many legal risks you expose yourself to when even just carrying a gun, never mind all the liability that comes with drawing or worse, pointing a firearm at anyone. This information alone gives me great pause in even considering carrying a weapon unless I’m on the way to the range. The course covers safety and storage and again, legal liabilities for transport, theft, etc., as well as how to deescalate before drawing a weapon at all, with “walk away” being the #1 rule. The course is a vital well of information for anyone owning a firearm, never mind deciding that wearing one in their day-to-day lives is necessary. You would think something like this would be standard, mandatory information for handling such an easy to use, deadly weapon – or any object that can kill so easily at all. We don’t hand out driver licenses – why we hand out firearms like candy is insane.
We should also make it illegal for anyone under 18 to own or have access to firearms outside of the direct supervision of an authorized adult, be that a parent, instructor, or family member, and that person MUST have the up-to-date certifications necessary to allow an underage child to handle and operate said equipment under direct and constant supervision. And we must back that law up with severe punishments for those that willfully violate those laws or ignore those requirements. We don’t give kids cars until they are trained, tested, and licensed, all under the supervision of a structured system of laws, requirements, and documentation. Stores can’t sell kids cigarettes and beer. This can easily be the same for deadly weapons that can fit in your pocket or backpack.
Penalties for violating these laws must be severe and enforced. No parent wants their kids to die or to kill and creating the legal framework to first actively train and prepare parents to handle deadly firearms in their homes before they can purchase one, while also punishing those that aren’t smart or engaged enough to care what happens to them once they have them shouldn’t be controversial. Of course some will scream about “slippery slopes”, and we should create checks and balances, as this system must apply strict criteria for denying licensing, but the slippery slope we’ve slid down already is a culture of fear, death and bloodshed where kids are shooting kids. We should let the paranoid have their say and then do the commonsense thing with or without their support.
Red flag laws need to be more robust, and interstate connected in the same way that driver records and arrest warrants are across most states. Gun shops and gun shows should be forced to fund a national system that can comprehensively and accurately cancel or clear someone for purchase in minutes. This can be done in a way that protects privacy: a simple yes or no may be all the gun seller sees. We have the technology, all we need is the will, because someone who beats their spouse to within an inch of their life in Montana shouldn’t be able to drive to Idaho to buy the gun that finishes the job.
Normal, everyday gun owners need to stand up and speak up against these delusional few, while our culture needs to start calling extreme gun subcultures what they are, out of touch enablers of the murder and death of our fellow Americans and our kids.
People need to reject extreme, graphic violence as empty entertainment and Hollywood will stop producing so much of the garbage.
The mainstream media must host rational voices on the national stage as part of a sane debate and call out those carrying the water for a radical agenda benefiting the few at the expense of the rest of us.
From my experience talking with good, normal people who hunt and shoot as a hobby, I believe most gun-owners will see required firearm training and safety certification as a modest, practical, and reasonable start. Because the NRA is right about one thing: most gun owners are responsible, sensible citizens. They don’t want to live in a gun-crazed, prison-like dystopia any more than the rest of us do. We just need to start ignoring a much smaller minority of loud, gun-fetish crazies who punch way above their relative weight when it comes to influencing the national discourse on guns. If we don’t, we’ll remain at an impasse and nothing will change, the carnage will continue, and the fear, suspicion, and hate that both sides have for the other will only continue to fester until it’s too late for rational dialogue.
Do I think we can do even more? Of course, this pragmatic start acknowledges that most gun owners aren’t nuts, but also that more gun laws aren’t all terrible ideas that will lead to us living in a dictatorship. Because make no mistake, we currently live in a country that is ok treating our schools like warzones and our kids like collateral damage in service of a radical agenda and extreme ideas that only a few Americans believe. This is its own kind of dictatorship. Living in fear is not freedom.