This Week In Gunplay

So last week, a young man, sent to collect his brothers, went to a home on the wrong street. The homeowner, claiming to be frightened out of his wits by someone who literally walked up and rang the doorbell, fired through the door, seriously injuring the young man.

A few days later, a group of young people were out in the boonies, looking for a friend's home. They pulled into the driveway of the wrong house. Realizing their mistake, they turned around to continue their search. The homeowner, maybe figuring he couldn't miss this chance to make international news, shot at the retreating car, killing a woman passenger.

After that, a cheerleader, on her way home with teammates, was dropped off in a parking lot. She walked up to what she mistakenly thought was her car, and opened the door. There was a man inside and he shot at the young women, injuring two of them, and then followed them out of the parking lot when they fled.

Some children were playing in their neighborhood when a basketball rolls into a neighbors' yard. A six year old girl and her father are shot when the homeowner comes out shooting.

To be sure, these incidents are not the typical patterns of shootings in America. Most fatal gunshot wounds in the United States are self-inflicted, and most homicides are young men opening fire on one another. But unless someone famous in involved, or something genuinely out of the ordinary happens, those sorts of circumstances are far too common to be newsworthy.

Here in Washington State, Governor Inslee signed House Bill 1240, The Scary Headline Reduction Act. Sorry, AN ACT Relating to establishing firearms-related safety measures to increase public safety by prohibiting the manufacture, importation, distribution, selling, and offering for sale of assault weapons, and by providing limited exemptions applicable to licensed firearm manufacturers and dealers for purposes of sale to armed forces branches and law enforcement agencies and for purposes of sale or transfer outside the state, and to inheritors; reenacting and amending RCW 9.41.010; adding new sections to chapter 9.41 RCW; creating a new section; prescribing penalties; and declaring an emergency.

Not that I think the "assault weapons" ban is a bad idea on its face. But it doesn't really get at the heart of the problem. Mass shootings using semi-automatic rifles with detachable magazines make headlines, but, just like the four items at the top of this post, they aren't part of the typical pattern of shootings in the United States.

But they have something in common with the more typical shooting; and that the understanding that violence is a suitable tool for dealing with problems, even trivial ones. One wonders what someone has to be thinking when, after a week of headlines about shootings, they decide that an errant basketball is an appropriate event to be met with deadly force.

Don't get me wrong, it was a nice Jeep, but I don't know that it's worth shooting someone over it.

The willingness to use violence (or to express approval of its use), often in situations in which it seems completely uncalled-for, has become entrenched in American society as a marker of manliness, and all that this entails. Someone unfamiliar walk up to your door? Rather than wait to understand what they might be up to, shoot first. Show that you're ready, willing and able to defend what's yours. Someone open your car door while you're hanging out in a parking lot? Chase them down and open fire. Let everyone know that you and your ride won't be messed with by a bunch of tired teenagers. Live in a boring suburb where nothing ever happens in a solidly blue state? Let everyone know just how macho, Republican and ready for a crime wave you are by slapping a sticker on your car that tells everyone you're ready to shoot to kill. That will show them.

And then, when something does go sideways, just explain to everyone that the random teen whom you've just shot multiple times was obviously a deadly threat to life and limb and you were so utterly terrified that deadly force seemed the only option. The problem isn't that Americans are stupid. It's that there always needs to be an enemy and someone whose skin color, politics or last name is different from one's own is a good enough candidate. And that enemy always has to stand ten feet tall, such that the slightest hesitation can spell doom.

The United States is supposedly one of the wealthiest nations on Earth. Even Mississippi, the state with the lowest per-capita income, surpasses France on that score. But a good chunk of the nation is too busy being frightened of, angry at or disgusted by the other chunk of the nation to enjoy any of it. Granted, legislating guns, either for or against, is cheap; growing the pie, or even altering the relative sizes of the slices, tends to be expensive. Virtue signalling is always less expensive than concrete action.

Rage, anxiety, ignorance and distrust directed at one another are not recipes for peaceful coexistence. But they do seem to be the ingredients of political success in the United States. Even when violence follows in their wake.