Barrel Vision

The horrific mass shooting events in the Atlanta area and Boulder, Colo., just days apart have once again shown a spotlight on how frequent this type of violence is in the United States compared with other wealthy countries.
Gun Violence Deaths: How The U.S. Compares With The Rest Of The World

The article goes on to compare the United States to several other nations around the world in terms of gun violence, rather than mass shootings. Which raises the interesting point that despite the relatively small number of deaths due to mass shootings, for many people, they are the face of firearms violence in the United States.

The Gun Violence Archive, which maintains a database of shootings in the United States, defines a mass shooting as any incident in which four or more people other than the shooter(s) are shot. (So there are mass shootings on their list with no fatalities.) In 2018 they listed 373 deaths in such incidents. There were 14,414 gun homicides that year. So about 2.6% of shooting homicides were the result of mass shootings. Why doesn't the other 97-plus percent of shootings shine a spotlight on things? For that matter, why is there such selectivity about which mass shootings become the face of gun violence? When one Malik Halfacre shot his girlfriend and four members of her family (killing the other four) "because he wanted a share of her federal COVID-19 relief money" why not that hold that up as the face of mass shootings in America?

As I've noted before random guys with "assault weapons" shooting up stores or spas represent a sort of random, portable violence that can't be mitigated simply by moving to the right neighborhood or being careful about who one enters into a relationship with.

The people who were shot and killed by 21-year-olds Robert Aaron Long and Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa were "righteous victims," people randomly gunned down somewhere that they, and society at large, deemed should have been "safe." That's what made their deaths shocking, and prompted flags being lowered to half-mast, despite the fact that many more people killed by guns are like "J.M." and her family members or Angel Anthony Faz or True Vang.

Every time there is a mediagenic mass shooting in the United States, the new media goes into full swing, the hand-wringing begins anew and someone in Congress starts in with legislation. People in the United States and other parts of the world ask why the problem can't be solved, and cast accusatory looks at gun owners and conservative politicians. But when has any culture been able to define, let alone solve, a problem when it ignores more than 95% of it?

When people's fears are the immediate problem one is attempting to solve, when the fear subsides, the need to find a solution subsides with it. And mass shootings of the sort that Robert Aaron Long and Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa simply aren't common enough to keep people motivated for long enough to do something about the immediate fear they create, let alone try to tackle the bigger problem. And the bigger problem, which is typified by gang and domestic violence, doesn't drive enough eyeballs to advertisers to dominate the news cycle. It's little more than background noise. Lives are shattered and people left to grieve, but the rest of the public chalks it up to random chance or people's poor life choices and the broader culture of violence as a means of solving personal problems rolls on unabated.

The FBI has a couple of interesting statistics on their website concerning 2019:

• In 2019, 28.3 percent of homicide victims were killed by someone they knew other than family members (acquaintance, neighbor, friend, boyfriend, etc.), 13.0 percent were slain by family members, and 9.9 percent were killed by strangers.
• Circumstances were known for 58.8 percent of murders for which supplementary details were reported in 2019. Of those, 43.2 percent of victims were murdered during arguments.

Allowing rare events to define the view of a phenomenon results in a skewed picture. And a skewed picture of the problem results in misplaced efforts. I've heard people say that changing the laws in an effort to eliminate mass shootings by strangers with "assault weapons" is a necessary first step in tackling the greater problem. But if for many people, the intrusion of violence into only a certain subset of "safe" places is the whole of the problem, it seems unlikely that the intense focus will allow for a step two.