Unconcerned

A lot of people outside of the United States wonder why Americans seem willing to tolerate so many mass shootings. A simple answer is that while mass shootings generate loads of scary headlines (especially in new outlets that cater to liberal, urban audiences) the actual number of people killed in the events is fairly limited.

Consider the following chart, which came in an e-mail from The Economist.

In 2017, the single worst year on the chart by a pretty good margin, somewhat fewer than 120 people were killed in mass shootings in the country. And a bit more than half of that number came from a single event, the Route 91 Harvest music festival shooting in Las Vegas.

The total tally of firearms related deaths that year was 39,773. Most of those weren't of the sorts that make headlines. The largest portion of them were suicides. The rest, the sort of person-on-person homicide that has become so commonplace, that no-one bothers to talk about it. Sure, it's fodder for political grandstanding when murder rates climb to the point that middle-class suburbanites start to worry about it. But tens of thousands of "deaths of despair" and gang killings every year don't really break through the noise to the public consciousness on anything approaching a regular basis.

An as much as magazine capacity limits and and "assault weapon" bans strike many people as "common sense" (i.e., obvious to them) ways of curbing the violence, their actual impact on anything other than the news cycle would barely be noticeable if nothing else changed. For all that much has been said about the fact that there are more guns than people in the United States, the fact of the matter is that many of those are in the hands of collectors. And they sit around in cabinets and gun safes. Maybe the owner goes hunting with them or takes them to a range for target practice or shoots bottles from the top of a fence. But most of them are never used to shoot people. If every gun-related death were carried out with a different weapon, only about 1 in every 10,000 firearms would be used to kill someone.

And so what we wind up with are headlines that frighten a certain class of people; the suburban and urban well-to-do who have come to think of guns as synonymous with the human, or American, really, capacity for violence. But even they have a hard time remaining focused on the problem for long enough to really lobby other people effectively. And their concentration in America's cities works against them in a nation where the legislature is organized not around the individual voters, but the states in which they live.

The exurban and rural voters who have an outsized voice in the way government works at the national level don't spend their time worrying about whether some disaffected young adult with a grudge and a credit card is going to buy a rifle and shoot up some event in their small town. They aren't even all that worried that a friend or neighbor will shoot themselves, or their family members; even though more than half of all of the mass shootings that result in 4 or more deaths stem from domestic violence.

It's said that Congress tends to have two ways of responding to a problem: doing nothing, or overreacting. And the reason why Congress does nothing here is that there is a sizeable constituency of people for whom this simply isn't that big a problem. For all that headlines may paint of picture of a nation in which the streets run red with blood on a daily basis, for most people, that's simply not their reality, and they have no real concern that it ever will be. I spent 20 years as part of a demographic where the leading cause of death is homicide. For a time, it concerned me. But then, I came to understand what the actual risk factors were, and realized that I had pretty much none of them.

It's difficult to get people to agree to pay a price to solve what they've come to regard as someone else's problem. Telling people that if we don't all hang together we may all bleed out separately is easy. Getting people to really see this as something worth giving something up for is difficult. More so than people are willing to credit, I suspect.