Factor of 10

I was reading a story today on gun violence in the United States, or rather, a story about one of the many people killed by gun violence in the United States. It ends, like many such stories do, with the author wondering why people are still allowed to keep and bear firearms, especially the semi-automatic replicas of military weapons so favored by mass shooters. The story was reasonably well-written, although I found it maudlin in places, which is also typical of the genre.

Semi-automatic "assault weapons," to borrow the media misnomer for them, are common bogeymen because they represent random, portable violence. A sudden hail of gunfire in places where there shouldn't be any gunfire. Places where, in the vast majority of cases, there isn't any gunfire. And that may be why the stories about them fail to gain traction. Because while it might be easy to frighten a suburban parent who imagines some unhinged student coming into their child's school, or a an urban sophisticate who believes that their money should buy them safety from random violence, the mass shootings that take up so much airtime when they happen are not the primary drivers of firearms-related deaths in the United States. Suicide holds that spot.

But they aren't even the primary drivers of gun homicides.

Among African Americans, the rate was 26.6 deaths per 100,000, a 39.5% increase over 2019. For white Americans, the rate was 2.2 per 100,000.

By raw numbers, there were 19,350 gun homicides in 2020, with African Americans accounting for 62% of the total and white people 21%.
U.S. gun deaths surged 35% in 2020, higher for Black people - CDC

The shooting at the Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo, New York was an outlier. Not only in the sense that mass shootings are still rare occurrences, but in the fact that it brought attention to Black people killed by guns in the United States. But even then, it was only because of the circumstances of the shooting. Most of the nearly 12,000 Black people in the United States killed by gun violence are much less photogenic, or respectable, to the affluent Americans who drive the gun control debate.

The ones and twos of domestic violence, gang conflicts and petty crimes don't commonly create targets who can be easily and unambiguously canonized by media outlets looking for clicks. For many, it seems, the problem isn't that large numbers of homicides are committed with firearms; it's that the wrong people are dying. And once the coverage runs out of the people who the public thinks should be above being slain by high-velocity bits of metal, it goes silent. It does not attempt to marshal public sympathy for those that are widely seen as expendable, if not outright undesirable. And so the problem seems smaller than it is.

But this is the way of things. The United States is both geographically large, and humanly diverse. The physical and social distance that this often leaves between people can be vast. And that distance, more than anything else, is the primary enemy of progress, for a remarkably large set of definitions of "progress." People are unwilling to give up something that's important to them to protect people they care nothing, and know less, about, whether they place importance on the value of physical assets, some piece of their identity or even simply how they feel about the world around them.

And without being able to bring the United States closer together, the collective action that's really needed to solve the problem will be absent. Forcing a solution, and holding it in place until everyone decides that they like it is harder than it's given credit for. And therefore, not a good starting plan.