The honest way to talk about guns

We’ve been here before. Another American has brutally murdered scores of people, wounding hundreds more. As almost always, he was a man; as often happens, he took his motives with him. We are left behind with his wreckage, the bodies, the broken lives. With the fear — the certainty — that this will happen again. And with agonizing questions. How could we have stopped this? What do we do next?

The debates over these questions can feel exhausting, and the tired answers can provoke despair. Short of disappearing all 300 million-plus firearms in America, or locking down all public spaces with metal detectors and countersnipers, there is no single guaranteed solution that could stop all mass shootings before they start.

Those who study such violence know all too well that there is no simple A-then-B logic, no guaranteed calculus for prediction and prevention. Instead, it arises through the interplay of multiple factors coming together and raising the odds — a dynamic system, like the weather. Hoping for a single fix to mass shootings is like wishing for a tool to predict precisely where a tornado will form, or for the power to stop a hurricane.

But, as with the weather, just because we cannot absolutely predict and prevent a phenomenon doesn’t mean we should do nothing about it, or about the broader environment that produces it.

Research and dialogue between people of good faith has made abundantly clear that human behaviors and policy choices make disastrous weather events more frequent and worse. Although some of the same people who reject climate science oppose the findings of gun violence research as well, anyone paying attention knows that mass shootings are but the horrifying tip of the iceberg of the much broader crisis that is American gun violence.

We have a serious cultural problem, and we must confront it.

In any given year, well over 30,000 Americans will have their lives ended by a bullet — a figure comparable to the number of Americans who will die in car crashes. The story of those deaths is like an atlas of violence in America more broadly.

Where despair and self-harm looms; where gangs feud; where men abuse their partners; where suffering is ignored and life seems cheap: Those are the places that, when you add guns to the mix, you are likely to get bodies.

Two-thirds of gun deaths are suicides. The bulk of gun homicides are young men, overwhelmingly black. Women who are the victims of domestic abuse are vastly more likely to be shot by their partners. And so on. Our conversations about those deaths are sporadic. Like many of the deaths themselves, they are often shrouded in stigma and social indifference. But these are the ubiquitous, daily gun deaths that are the backdrop against which high-profile and nightmarish rampage killings like the massacre in Las Vegas unfold.

The aftermath of a mass shooting, we are told, is not the time to talk about guns. The people who say this, more often than not, are being cynical. They don’t want to talk about guns ever, and are counting on something else to distract us soon enough.

But their words carry a grain of truth: In the wake of mass shootings, many of us don’t really talk about guns. Instead, we talk about mass shootings to the exclusion of talking about guns. Our justifiable horror at single episodes of mass death sucks our energy and attention away from the daily toll that surrounds us, even though, in raw numbers, the deaths from mass shootings are but a tiny fraction of the overall national toll of gun violence.

We have to resist this temptation, because there are things we can do about the broader problem. It used to be we could say we didn’t have the data, and that the congressional ban on gun research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was to blame.

But recent years have seen an explosion of research and the development of proven strategies, if not for “gun control” per se, then for directly lowering gun deaths. Rather than sweeping, single answers, these are instead targeted interventions, aimed at specific high-risk groups.

We can pursue gun purchase restraining orders for domestic abusers. “Violence interrupter” outreach programs for gang members. Suicide prevention programs. All will help save lives.

These measures may not feel emotionally cathartic in proportion to the horror we feel witnessing events in Vegas. The grim truth is that, whatever guns we ban or background check bills we pass, America will see yet more mass shootings.

But through other, unglamorous measures, we can save lives. If now is not the time for us to talk about them, when will we?