It’s simple, really: It’s the guns
America has added a predictable routine, a tradition becoming as reliable as Memorial Day or Labor Day or Independence Day: the thoughts and prayers, the short-lived horror and the search for motive in the aftermath of another mass shooting. According to the Gun Violence Archive — which defines a mass shooting as one in which at least four people, excluding the shooter, are wounded — there have been more than 300 mass shootings in the United States so far this year.
The massacre during a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Ill., which left seven people dead, wasn’t even the deadliest. Nineteen children and two teachers were killed in Uvalde, Texas, in May, 10 days after 10 people were shot and killed in a supermarket in Buffalo.
Gun violence is ubiquitous in this country. While mass shootings get the most attention, they aren’t the only signs of a culture in a downward spiral of violent lunacy. The parade massacre dominated headlines, but the city of Chicago also saw a bloody holiday weekend, with 10 people killed and 62 others wounded in several shootings.
Nor is the madness limited to major cities. Gun violence is up in big cities and small ones, major metropolitan areas and rural hamlets. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, homicides rose 30 percent in major cities in 2020, while rising 25 percent in rural areas. (More recent statistics are not yet available.) Most of those homicides were committed with firearms.
The United States, a nation of slightly fewer than 333 million people, is awash in guns — an estimated 393 million in civilian hands, an average of about 120 firearms for every 100 citizens. No other Western democracy permits such widespread civilian ownership of guns, and no other Western democracy has such a high rate of gun violence.
While other nations have figured out that the way to reduce gun deaths is to reduce the number of guns, too many Americans seem unable to grasp the obvious. They search for other answers. Mental illness? Alienation? Poverty? Pandemic-related stress?
The suspect in the Highland Park shooting is a 21-year-old white male, broadly fitting the profile of most of the shooters in the nation’s gun massacres. Though he apparently has no diagnosed mental illness, he had left a trail of clues to his apocalyptic state of mind. His
social media accounts were stocked with violent images. Moreover, in 2019, police searched his home after a family member called to report that he had threatened “to kill everyone.” Police confiscated 16 knives, a dagger and a sword.
(For those who believe stronger “redflag” laws could curb the violence, Bobby Crimo Jr., father of the Highland Park suspect, serves as a red flag of a different sort. Despite the 2019 episode, he signed a consent form later that year allowing his son to purchase firearms.)
Many researchers believe alienated young men can be easily seduced by what they see as the glamour of highprofile violence. “Since Columbine, they have tended to study and emulate each other. It’s a growing problem,” criminal justice professor Jillian Peterson told The New York Times.
But alienation and a desperate need for recognition in a subset of young men fail to explain the everyday carnage that Americans have come to take for granted. In late June, a worker in an Atlanta sandwich shop was shot dead after a customer became enraged because she had put too much mayonnaise on his sandwich. As Interim Police Chief Darin Schierbaum noted, “We can take down drug operations that breed violent crime, we can dismantle gang organizations that breed violent crime, we can stop robbery crews that breed violent crime, (but) we cannot stop someone who is mad because there is too much mayonnaise on their sandwich.”
He is right about that. But we can do so much more to make sure such easily enraged customers can’t get their hands on a gun. Other Western nations are home to alienated young men and restaurant customers who cannot control their rage. But they don’t suffer the gun violence that we do. Why is that?