A look at America’s ‘psychic numbing’ to gun violence

In 2020, there were more than 45,000 gun deaths in the United States — the highest number on record, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But there was no major push for gun safety legislation. Why?

Last year, there were nearly 700 mass shootings in America — the highest number ever recorded by the Gun Violence Archive — and again, there was no major push for gun legislation. Why?

Dr. Paul Slovic, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon who has explored popular indifference to genocide and other mass atrocities, may well have the answers.

His work has led him to the disturbing truths of “psychic numbing” and the “false feeling of hopelessness.”

Basically, some people get overwhelmed by the scale of so much death and become convinced that there is little they can do to change it.

As Slovic has written, “Through my research, I’ve learned something disturbing — and that is, ‘The more who die, the less we care.’” In fact, as more people die, humans can experience a “compassion collapse” in which “as the number of lives in danger increases, we sometimes lose feeling and we value those additional lives even less.”

I reached out to Slovic to help me better understand why we haven’t yet acted to curb gun violence and why, even when our society has grown numb to the death toll, tragedies like those in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, can still break through.

One of the first things he underscored about the gun control debate is that a political dynamic is operating alongside the basic human psychology. “There are some people who are so aggrieved in our society that they don’t care” about the violence, he said. “They want their guns to protect themselves.”

But, he explained, when there are mass shootings like the one in Uvalde, it “wakes us up, and we’re charged up and we want to do something.”...

Uvalde, he said, has created a window of opportunity, but it will close. In fact, the opponents of action, I contend, will use the inevitability of that window closing as an important battle strategy . ...

Washington must act quickly to pass gun safety legislation — senators are reportedly in talks about a few narrow measures — or else our society will once again grow numb to the carnage . ...

I asked Slovic if anything — such as publishing pictures of the slaughtered children, as some have proposed — could overcome the numbing and break us out of this cycle of inaction.

He said that while he is personally a proponent of making those images public, he understands that the opponents of change would attack the disclosures as emotional propaganda. The pictures might move a few votes, but as a political tool, could backfire disastrously.

Some proponents of showing images of the slaughtered think they could spark an “Emmett

Till moment.” In 1955,

Till’s mother insisted on an open coffin, so that the world could see what had been done to her son, but it’s important to remember what that viewing did and didn’t do. Till’s killers went on trial after the funeral, and both were found not guilty after only an hour of deliberations.

What seeing Till’s disfigured face did, however, was stiffen the spines of the oppressed and motivate them to fight even harder for relief. Sometimes that’s all you need.

No one has the moral authority to force the families of those slain in Uvalde to make those images public, but if that was their choice, it could be helpful. Anything, at this point, to break through the numbness.

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