Dead kids are acceptable now.
Every policy has trade-offs. The trade-offs of unregulated gun ownership is more school shootings, and Republicans should be honest that they believe that's okay.
Every time there is a mass shooting in America, the satirical news site The Onion will re-publish one of its most famous articles: “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.” Even writing those words — every time there is a mass shooting in America — elicits a strange reaction that we have ritualized our collective mourning. A mass shooting happens. We grieve. We say never again. We forget. We move on.
But The Onion has a point. America is the only nation where mass shootings regularly happen. In 2018, CNN did a comparative study of school shootings in other nations and the results were grim. There had been 288 school shootings in America since 2009 (school shootings, not even mass shootings.) In the same time period, there had only been 2 school shootings in Canada, 2 in France, and 1 in Germany. Even in developing nations, the contrast was stark. Mexico had 8 school shootings in that time frame, South Africa had 6, and India had 5. Nothing compared to the volume of gun violence and death that American children have faced at their schools.
Ted Cruz was asked about this disparity by Sky News, and his answer was deeply stupid, accusing Sky News of all outlets of “propaganda.”1 But it’s a fair question. There has to be a reason for this difference, even if every school shooting is fundamentally different in some way with different motives and contexts. A holistic view of the data points to the United States as the clear outlier.
Conservatives have blamed fatherlessness — and while it’s true that America has a higher percentage of children living in single-parent homes than any other developed nation, that number is only 2% higher than in the United Kingdom. There have only been two fatal shootings in the United Kindom in the 21st century. Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin recently blamed the secularization of America, but America ranks as one of the most religious developed nations in the world. Others have pointed to men feeling alienated and alone as well as social media, but those phenomena are not limited to America. They have Twitter in Germany.
While every single shooting is different, the most likely answer is the most obvious: the United States leads the world in gun ownership. There are 120.5 firearms for every 100 residents in the country. 79% of all homicides in the United States were gun-related. That number is 37% in Canada, 13% in Australia, and 4% in the UK. Guns are now the number one killer of American children.
Yet for a variety of reasons, Republicans have refused to even entertain the idea that guns could be the source of America’s mass shooting epidemic. To do so would mean admitting that there are trade-offs to America’s cultural obsession with guns and that their preferred policy objective had downsides. Even unsaid, politicians know the data and have decided that the status quo is working. To conservatives, school shootings and dead children are an unfortunate but acceptable trade-off to largely unregulated gun laws.
POLICIES HAVE TRADE-OFFS
Almost every policy that is enacted has some sort of trade-off, and it’s our jobs as citizens and the jobs of politicians to decide whether or not those trade-offs are acceptable. A tax cut allows people to keep more of their income but also limits the revenues available for social services. Increasing the budget for social services may allow greater investments in social programs, but also will burden some part of the population with higher taxes.
Some of these trade-offs are deemed acceptable. That is inherent in the nature of politics, and we vote for the politicians who share our views on which trade-offs to make. But those trade-offs almost always exist. I support single-payer health insurance, but I’m not naive enough to think that there wouldn’t be trade-offs with our current system. I’ve deemed those trade-offs acceptable and continue to support single-payer because I believe it’s a better system than any of the alternatives, even if it has drawbacks.
Republicans have not and cannot admit that there are any trade-offs with unregulated gun access. The post-mass shooting ritual of attempting and failing to find some bipartisan solution is never about balancing liberty with common-sense safety measures but instead denying that lax gun laws could play any role in the sheer volume of mass shootings we see in the country. Even today, former Vice President Mike Pence trotted out the line that guns are not the problem, bad people with guns are the problem.
Okay. But what explains the disparity in shootings between America and other nations? Surely there is something that is different. The truth is that conservatives view unregulated gun laws as part of the American cultural identity, and any infringement on that right is in opposition to what it means to be an American. Dead kids might be painful and unfortunate and sad, but Republicans have viewed their deaths as an acceptable trade-off against any perceived intrusion on personal liberty. That’s why instead of talking about gun control, they list increasingly tortured and unrealistic means to mitigate school shootings, such as having fewer doors.
WHY DO CONSERVATIVES CARE SO MUCH ABOUT GUNS?
The reality is that many Americans do not view guns as mere weapons, but instead as a cultural signifier of Americanism. 39% of gun owners believe that being a gun owner is important for being a “true” American. To own a gun is part of what helps creates the American identity — to be Christian, to be native-born (usually white), and to believe that owning a gun makes you free. A trip to rural America will inundate you with signs that read “GOD GUNS & TRUMP”.
Why guns are intertwined with the American identity is a longer story, but there’s a growing body of research on how the frontier culture imbued in our collective American myth led to guns being this cultural signifier of traditional values. This signifier escalated in the 1960s in response to the Civil Rights movement, as gun rights became more fully entwined with white resentment politics.
That’s one of the reasons why the response to set up more stringent background checks for guns or require training to use one is met with such hostility on the right and frustration on the left. The idolatry of the second amendment and guns as the antithesis to liberal cosmopolitanism closes the door to any compromise from the right on gun control because that compromise would compromise perceived Americanism. Give me liberty or give me death, or maybe: give me liberty and give me death.
Maybe Republican gun owners don’t know how rare mass shootings are in other nations. Maybe they’re unaware of how many guns are in America compared to other countries. But Republican politicians have surely seen the statistics. Yet to save those children would mean giving an inch to people viewed as cultural enemies who they believe want to destroy rural American culture. To these people and their voters, rural American culture is viewed as true American culture and the ties that bind the idea of American nationhood together.
Ultimately this is a decision of policy. And like I said, policies have trade-offs.
Dead kids are the trade-off.
Instead of avoiding it and saying that the problem is too many doors, I would prefer Republicans be honest about what they mean: that the ability to own a gun is worth the screams of parents learning they’ll never hug their child again. That’s your actual position. Own it.
Sky News is owned by Rupert Murdoch.
Dead kids are acceptable now.
Excellent piece. Great work.