Are Americans Indifferent to Mass Shootings?
True, the U.S. never does anything about them. But that's not callousness -- it's minority rule
The American post-gun-massacre routine rolls along this week. We are now at the phase where pictures of sweet little kids accompany articles about their funerals, and all the usual players in gun-control politics spend another day saying the expected things. Here we go again, we all say, with no expectation of change.
Given that this keeps happening (there have been 212 mass shootings in the United States since January 1), is it fair to say that Americans are indifferent to gun violence?
After all, in other nations mass murder prompted quick changes in gun laws, and those changes appear to work. American society can't make that happen. To judge by our collective inaction, we don't care about all these deaths.
Accepting that premise, you might start looking for explanations in human nature, as Mel Robbins did here a few years (and many slaughters) ago. Citing studies of people's reactions to the World War II bombing of London, she argues people must be directly touched by horror to feel affected. People who experienced "near miss" bombing were profoundly changed, she writes, but people elsewhere in the city, who experienced a "remote miss" felt invulnerable and uninvolved. When we hear of other people being killed in cold blood, she argues, we let it pass. We weren't there. These weren't our kids.
Perhaps there is some truth to this. I know, for one thing, that my reactions to any bloody crime here in New York City will vary depending on its location. If it took place on a street where I walk, or a subway line I might take, I'm more distressed.
But I think it's a serious mistake to ascribe a society's collective behavior to the individual psyches of its members. When we speak of nations having intentions and emotions (France supports nuclear power, Texas favors guns), we're using a metaphor. We're talking about millions of people as if they were cells in a single body, which has thoughts and emotions.
In reality of course a nation has no such thing. Its denizens are millions of disparate spirits, each with individual thoughts and feelings. Some may truly not care about violence, a very few want to commit gun violence, and others may care more or less passionately.
Democratic processes are supposed to distill this mass incoherence into actions that can reasonably said to be what "we" want.
This is not what happens in the United States, on the issue of gun violence. Polls suggest a majority of people favor more gun-control laws. But the American political system gives a minority of citizens a chokehold on legislation.
Because the Constitution gives two senators to every state, I and my fellow 19 million New Yorkers have the same influence in the Senate as do 582,000 citizens of Wyoming. As Ethan Fletcher explains here, in the Senate "Republicans have held a majority for 22 of the 42 years since 1980, but only in 2 of those years did their Senate majority represent a majority of Americans." This makes it all too easy for a minority of voters — a small-state, pro-gun minority — to block gun-control measures. (And the filibuster, now wielded constantly, effectively requires a 60-vote majority to pass a law. That makes this imbalance even crazier.)
This Senate imbalance permitted Republicans to simply block Barack Obama from appointing a Supreme Court Justice toward the end of his term. That's one reason the Court today is also a minority-rule institution — one that appears inclined to strike down state gun-control laws this year. Another reason is that most of its conservative justices (Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett) were appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote but took office nonetheless, because in the official election, each state gets as many votes as it has Senators and Representatives.
Is it fair, then, to say that the American public is indifferent to gun violence? I don't think so. It's not that "we" don't care. It's that the cost of turning care into action is extremely high. It's not enough to vote for candidates and boycott gun-friendly businesses. Cracking the problem of minority rule requires a revolution — an overturning of a 250-year-old political system. I doubt many of us care enough about anything to risk that. At least, not at the moment.