When the Good Guys Aren't
The consequences of institutional failure
Quick housekeeping note: On Friday I had a vaguely uneasy feeling immediately after I clicked the “Publish” button, but I wasn’t sure why; like when you leave the house and aren’t entirely sure you locked the door. And then I noticed it — in the headline I’d used the word inequity instead of iniquity as I’d intended. So that annoyed me for the rest of the day. There are perils to always publishing the first draft.
You Won’t Like Where This Goes
I hate for this newsletter to turn into an Andy Rooney-esque “Here’s what annoyed me on Twitter today,” but it’s actually a good place to find ideas worth engaging. I think a lot of people get stuck inside echo chambers of people who agree with them, and there are few places where fewer people agree with me than on Twitter.
A curious talking point that has emerged after the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, has been a surprising number of people smugly chortling at the idea that the [admittedly infuriating] incompetent response from police “really blows a hole in the ‘good guy with a gun’ argument.”
Just as a matter of level-setting, the “good guy with a gun” argument is a talking point from gun rights advocates that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” A little trite, sure, but also uncontroversial as far as I can tell. Granted, a lot of gun rights advocates use that to mean that more people generally should own and carry guns so as to increase the number of “good guys with guns,” but it’s also become a stand-in for law enforcement.
So we had all these “good guys with guns” inside the school, the argument goes, and they did nothing. And so therefore…well, I’m not really sure what. I don’t know what the end of that sentence is. Since the “good guys with guns” failed to do their jobs, we should therefore ban guns, I guess? But here’s my problem with that argument — if more than a dozen police officers enter a school during an active shooter situation, and then proceed to stand outside the door with their thumbs up their asses for almost an hour while the gunman continued murdering children, they’re not “good guys with guns.” They had guns, sure, but by no plausible measure were they “good guys.” Also, just as a point of fact, the shooter eventually was killed by a so-called “good guy with a gun” who had to go outside the chain of command and act on his own volition because he was apparently disgusted by the inaction up to that point.
The police response to the shooting was so tragically inept, and the criticism so justly enraged, that local police have apparently stopped cooperating in the investigation:
But as I said, I’m not sure what the argument is from those who seem to be getting perverse satisfaction about the supposed demise of the “good guy with a gun” talking point. “Since the police utterly failed here, no one should have guns because that’s the only way to keep us safe?” Is that it? I’m genuinely asking. Because I don’t think we appreciate the public policy implications of the collapse in trust of law enforcement. You may have noticed there’s been a bit of a reckoning on the subject over the last couple of years, and this is merely the latest (though possibly most consequential) example of law enforcement betraying the public trust. But it seems contradictory to me to argue that because law enforcement cannot be trusted, we should therefore remove guns from the citizenry. If anything, a loss of trust in law enforcement seems like it would exacerbate our issues, because people purchase guns when they feel unsafe. I’m not sure anyone has thought that all the way through — it’s much more important to score cheap rhetorical points, I suppose.
The Boogey Man is Us
As often happens in the aftermath of these shootings, the National Rifle Association is being vilified to the point of almost mythical evil. And I just can’t take it seriously. Now, full disclosure, I am a former member of the NRA. There was a time, not even that long ago, when the NRA was a fairly competent, bipartisan, single-issue organization.
But then they devolved into basically an arm of the Republican party and started engaging in bullshit culture war fights that I didn’t think was a good use of my money. Plus, I didn’t really feel like it was a good use of my money to help buy Wayne LaPierre a fourth vacation home, so I canceled my membership.
That said, there’s this mythos on the Left that the NRA is funding all of these Republican politicians so that they oppose gun control measures over the objections of their constituents; and I’m sorry, guys — it’s just nonsense. You can check out their political contributions here, but these are the highlights:
In the 2020 election cycle, the NRA wasn’t even in the Top 1,000 of political contributors. Their average contribution to a Republican congressional candidate was less than $2,000. (Ironically, they gave more, on average, to Democrats. But I presume that’s because there were fewer Democrats than Republicans receiving donations.) Their average donation to a Republican Senate candidate was less than $7,000. Their top individual donation was to Donald Trump, to the tune of $25,000; followed by Mitch McConnell at $16,000. To put that into perspective, Mitch McConnell raised some $3,000,000 for his campaign; which means the NRA made up some 0.5% of McConnell’s total donations. Even more ridiculously, Donald Trump raised nearly two billion dollars for his 2020 campaign; so the NRA made up a paltry 0.001% of Donald Trump’s total donations.
The NRA is not politically influential because of their money. They’re political influential because millions of people believe they have a constitutional right to own guns, and those millions of people vote, particularly in Republican primaries. It really is that simple. The NRA could dissolve tomorrow — and given the state of their finances and inept leadership, they might! — and it would not appreciably change American politics around guns. As with most of our political issues, there’s not some shadowy conspiracy there. The voters simply want what they want. And a bunch of voters want guns.
Constructive Contributions
Because I’m a masochist, and because I don’t want to be one of those people who simply sits around saying “no” to stuff, I’ve been reading a lot about mass shootings over the last week to try and come up with some common denominators to see what, if any, public policies would have prevented any of them. Given my google search history in the last few days, I’m probably on some sort of list — though it doesn’t matter if I’m on some sort of list because apparently no one does anything with that information! But we’ll get to that. The main takeaway, I think, is that there is no one policy that would have covered all mass shootings. They’re often an amalgamation of policy failures and simple human error with tragic results.
One idea that has been floating recently has been raising the age to buy semiautomatic rifles like the AR-15 to 21. I don’t have have any real constitutional objection to such a thing. There’s a similar requirement for handguns and the republic has endured. And while a 21-year-old age requirement may have prevented the Uvalde and Buffalo shooters from procuring their weapons, it would not have prevented incidents like Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora, Sandy Hook, Tucson, or Sutherland Springs, where the shooters were either over 21, stole their weapons, or otherwise procured them from someone else.
There’s a similar issue regarding background checks. It’s a perfectly reasonable policy on its own, but a background check system is only has good as the data provided to it. There was nothing in the background check system that would have prevented the Uvalde shooter, the Aurora shooter, the Tucson shooter, etc., from passing a background check. And in the cases of Virginia Tech and Sutherland Springs shooters, they actually did have adjudications that should have prevented them from passing a background check; but the relevant information was simply not uploaded into the background check database due to bureaucratic error. So some of these incidents could have been prevented simply by more thorough enforcement of existing law.
One pattern that seemed to keep popping up, however, was inaction around mental health. As I said, the Virginia Tech and Sutherland Springs shooters were both deemed unfit to possess firearms; but the Sandy Hook, Parkland, Columbine, Aurora, and Tucson shooters all had various contact with either law enforcement, mental health professionals, or both, that was never pursued in a way that would have adversely impacted their ability to pass a background check. The Aurora shooter in particular had been receiving mental health treatment for years after attempting suicide at the age of 11, and was, according to his therapist, obsessed with murder. To me that seems like relevant information to consider when selling someone a firearm. The Uvalde shooter also had a history of erratic behavior and torturing animals, which corelates strongly to future homicidal behavior. Seems like that should have landed him on a list of some sort, right?
Another fairly common denominator in these shootings is what you might call being “terminally online.” A lot of these guys fall down internet rabbit holes and get obsessed with mass shootings and find online communities that indulge and cultivate this obsession to the point that performing their own mass shooting seems like the logical conclusion. And that, I think, is one of the biggest contributors to this phenomenon. As I keep mentioning, starting about 25 years ago — but most noticeably in the last 15 — a subsection of young men in this country have become increasingly disturbed and obsessed with murdering large numbers of people, and they find others with similar obsessions who seem to encourage them to act on these obsessions. Of all the variables that contribute to the recent outbreak of mass shootings, that to me seems like the most obvious. Gun laws haven’t changed markedly, access to guns hasn’t expanded at a pace that would correspond to such an exponential increase in these types of events. What has changed most noticeably, for me, is the number of people for whom mass murder has become an obsession to indulge.
I’ll admit, I haven’t thought deeply about the logistics and constitutional implications of this sort of thing; but it seems to me that none of these shooters came as a surprise to those who knew them. In virtually every case, the response from the community was essentially “yeah, that sounds about right.” And sure, it’s a lot of pressure to put on bystanders. Not every weird kid who spends a lot of time on the internet is a mass shooter in waiting. [Relatedly, there’s been talk that the Uvalde shooter stuttered severely, for which he was bullied, and that he played violent video games, all of which contributed to his homicidal urges. And as someone who was bullied in school for stuttering and who played a lot of violent video games and nevertheless murdered zero people, I dare say there’s more to it than that.] But even if the subset of mass shooters doesn’t include every socially awkward loner who spends a lot of time on message boards, there aren’t many mass shooters who don’t fit that description. Now, I’m not one of those people who says that we need an increased religiosity in America, or that mass shootings are a result of absent fathers or devalued masculinity or whatever, but it’s I think it’s undeniable that there is a mental health crisis festering among young men that has fairly recently started manifesting itself as mass shootings, and that didn’t used to happen. We might spend some time thinking about why that is.
In the aftermath of 9/11, the public safety slogan became “If you see something, say something.” Even though I think that contradicts the general human preference to mind our own business, I think a similar attitude could be useful here.
I know that’s not a satisfying answer, especially to people for whom the only satisfying answer is “gun regulations,” but it seems to me that more community engagement and a focus on identifying and mitigating mental health crises in young men is a much more direct and logistically achievable strategy for reducing mass shootings than blanket gun regulations for which there are steep constitutional obstacles and insufficient political will.
Occasional Trivia
Answer from last time:
Category: Biblical Numbers
Clue: According to Genesis, there were this many people on Noah’s Ark.
Eight. (Noah, his wife, his three sons, and their wives.)
Today’s clue:
Category: Verbs
Clue: Gormandizing is doing this to excess.
Dispatches from the Homefront
My wife was telling me a story about one of her students behaving incredibly inappropriately, and I responded with a flabbergasted “dude.”
And our older daughter thought that was just the most hilarious thing.
“Duuuuude,” she repeated, in between cackles. “What does duuuude mean?”
“Um, dude can mean anything really. It can mean guys, or person, or even just ‘wow.’”
“Duuuuude. [hysterical laughter] Duuuuude.”
I’m glad to have expanded her vocabulary to 80s surfer lingo. Or 90s stoner lingo, I’m not sure.