How do we Stop Mass Shootings?

A reflection in the heat of another tragic shooting

1. Purpose of this piece.

   1. You know, I don’t really see a lot of writing out there about mass shootings that express humility. I don’t see much of anything out there that expresses much humility. Everyone seems to know exactly what to do. That’s kind of why I want to write this, to lay out in plain language the complexity of the issue as well as the fact that there is no clear answer. If there was, we’d have solved this by now.

   2. This substack is coming back. I have a lot in the works, but I’m trying to be more thoughtful in my pieces. This one however, is done with very little research, just to get some thoughts out in hope you’ll comment and further educate me.

2. A caveat

   1. This is not a post about how to prevent gun deaths. Though mass shootings do involve guns and people do die, they are a small percentage of total gun deaths. So while I’ll bring up things like an assault weapons ban, it should be noted that that would do little decrease overall gun deaths in the United States.

      That being said, what this most recent shooting in Nashville has made clear to me is that it doesn’t matter what percentage of total death they are, there is value in preventing mass shootings because mass shootings often involve children.

3. What causes mass shootings? And what are solutions that governments (local, state, and federal) can implement for each?

   1. Mental Health

      1. Clearly most mass shootings are the tragic result of intersection of mental health problems and readily available guns. So one of the problems we have to solve is the mental health crisis. But what can governments do to help with the mental health crisis?

         1. It strikes me that mental health institutions could be part of the answer. When people are deemed too sick, the government takes them away from society. This could also help with our homelessness crisis. These were relatively common years ago, but went out of vogue, as I understand it, when practices like shock therapy and conversion therapy were publicized.

            1. I’m hard pressed to go much further than this, meaning any sort of mental health screening or proactivity goes very much in the direction of fascism and that scares me.

         2. I do certainly think that at a market level, there’s reason for insurers to want to cover mental health services. Mentally ill people often don’t take care of themselves in many ways that can come to bite them later in life (I include myself among this group).

            1. Is there room for a mandate here? Absolutely, but I obviously see that as very unlikely.

         3. Social media companies should be regulated, fined, destroyed, whatever it takes to get them to not be so bad for society. I’m partial to

            Jonathan Haidt
            ‘s theory that social media - specifically social media in your pocket - is what’s destroying the mental health of this nation.

            1. What does this mean in practice? I don’t know. Certainly children’s access to social media should be limited if not banned outright. Companies should be regulated in such a way that these apps aren’t purposefully addictive.

         4. And there has to be a space for hate speech and bad takes online, if only to prevent ostracization of those with bad views. Our cultural obsession with ideological purity is the stupidest thing to happen to society since the fear that the world was going to end because the Mayan calendar ran out.

   2. Community

      1. I do think one of the biggest reason for mass shootings and the mental health crisis is the lack of community structures in the lives of most average Americans.

         1. Social media certainly has a part to play here, but technology in general has just led to a decline in social gatherings and activities. Think of video games, whereas most boys used to spend time playing sports or tinkering with cars or chasing girls or causing trouble, boys spend an inordinate amount of time playing video games today. Don’t get me wrong, video games do a lot of good, but they have become more and more isolating. In an interesting paradox; as computing power has increased, the local multiplayer capacity of games and consoles has largely decreased. When people play video games with their friends today it means something very different than it did in the 90s and early 2000s. The same point can be made about many technologies though: air conditioning, streaming, work from home tech, google, etc. all keep us in our homes.

            1. A lot of this has to do with individual choice, so I’m not sure where the role of the government could even be here, but potentially parenting classes to teach parents the importance of socializing their kids could be beneficial. Also government campaigns that say: leave your house!

      2. The dwindling of the church.

         1. I mean the church broadly here to mean all believers of all faiths who congregate. As faith in organized religion and God generally has declined, nothing has taken its place. The beauty of church is in the gathering. Church isn’t church if you’re not regularly forced into a space with people who believe and practice what you believe differently than you, if you don’t have a community to take care of, if you don’t have morals and values guiding you to become a better person, and if you don’t have to listen to people who don’t have a clue and treat them with the utmost respect because you’re at church. It’s in those hard, awkward, frustrating moments that true love is built and community is formed. Unfortunately, there just doesn’t seem to be a secular alternative and it’s to the detriment of society.

      3. That doesn’t mean that governments, especially city governments and school boards shouldn’t try.

         1. In schools, the most vulnerable and ostracized children should be sought out and focused on and I don’t mean academically. Children who don’t have friends should be the focus of clubs, teachers or counselors or aides should find out what interests they have and make sure they have a good opportunity to build a community around those interests.

         2. City and state governments should build community message boards, hold gatherings for all kinds of people, give tax breaks and/or grants to churches and other community organizations such as bowling leagues and intramural sports, county and city fairs should adapt to the modern era so people who aren’t 80 can participate. And governments should hire very good pr people to make sure people know about these community building events and clubs.

   3. Guns

      1. Guns are obviously a huge part of the problem, specifically rifles. I say rifle broadly because the difference between an assault rifle and a rifle isn’t obvious to me. This is another area where government ideally should have a big role, but we live in a time without compromise.

         1. Abolish the second amendment.

            1. This will get a lot of pushback and for good reason. A citizenry that cannot protect itself is liable to being subjugated. But there’s certainly a middle ground here. Can we not guarantee the ability of citizens to protect themselves, not only from other people, but also from tyrants, without it being an absolute right? Is there a world in which the second amendment says something like “You have the right to bear arms if you can prove you’re not homicidal”?

         2. Liability laws

            1. Gun manufacturers obviously cannot be held liable for what people do with their guns. That’s like holding Clorox accountable if someone slips me some bleach in my mountain dew. But they should be held accountable if they are glorifying violence and more importantly, I think there is room to hold the people who allow killers to access their guns and/or sell killers guns accountable. Meaning: it’s basically impossible to close the private sales “loophole” in gun sales. If I have a gun and you want to buy it from me, I’m going to sell it to you and I’d be hard pressed to do it through a store or perform a background check, even if it was technically illegal to do so (think of ritalin or adderall on college campuses) . But, if I knew I’d be liable if you did anything illegal with the weapon I sold you, I’d certainly be much more judicious in who I sold it to and I’d be more likely to do my due diligence. Gun stores would, in theory, be even more judicious than Joe Public because they have a lot more to lose in a liability case.

               1. A law like this would have to be very strict though. If someone were to do their due diligence on someone and then that person were to commit an atrocity, we couldn’t be constantly raising the bar on due diligence to be just beyond what the seller did. The rules would have to be very easy to understand and systems would need to be put in place to make it easy for the average person to do.

         3. Background checks

            1. I’m not going to say anything about these because they’re very straightforward

         4. Red flag laws

            1. Often hailed as the solution to mass shootings, red flag laws have a mixed track record. Tennessee doesn’t have a red flag law, so the opportunity to enforce it wasn’t even there in the case of this shooting, but in many states, red flag laws just aren’t enforced leading to mixed results. I’m certainly pro-red flag laws, but enforcement seems to be an issue.

         5. The problem with gun laws

            1. Gun laws seem unlikely to me to solve the problem. There are hundreds of millions of guns in this country and making them illegal wouldn’t make them go away. I could, today, within probably 24 hours procure many illegal substances and items. The same would be true of guns even if they were outlawed. But, I don’t procure those things because they are illegal, so it’s certainly not an argument against gun laws, just to say they’re not going to be a panacea.

   4. Extremism

      1. The thing that’s hard about extremism is that I want to protect it up until the point where someone’s life is at stake. Freedom of speech is a beautiful thing. Nazi beliefs are vile, but the fact that Nazis are allowed to march in America is so beautiful to me. So I do think that most of the solutions to extremism lie in other areas and not in solving extremism itself. Building community, regulating social media, etc. In fact, I would argue that most violent extremism is the result of a lack of speech, not too much of it. There aren’t enough spaces where speech is protected, respected, and debated; and so people who feel unheard lash out in insane and horrific ways. Some of this is informed by listening to

         Megan Phelps-Roper
         talk about how she was deprogrammed by people engaging with her on twitter. And I would bet that members of the Westboro Baptist Church are not allowed on Twitter today.

4. What do you think?

   1. Please comment. Let me know what I’m missing, post articles, research, etc. I want this to be a discussion as much as a post by me. I want to know more about the issues and really help the thirty or so of us in my substack community know how to better think about this issue.