Spencer Bokat-Lindell* says America’s problem with guns boils down to one simple fact — there are just too many of them.
On an average day in the United States, more than 100 people are killed by guns.
Whenever this fact rises back to the surface of national consciousness, it tends to inspire a certain mystified resignation.
Politicians and commentators, acting in good faith and bad, probe the problem with the same stock of questions.
Was mental illness to blame, or white male supremacy or Islamic extremism or video games?
Eventually, after a day or two of asking, the questions stop.
The word “senseless” inevitably gets dusted off, and then stored away until the next time, for a next time there will always be.
However, making sense of America’s gun violence problem turns out to be a fairly straightforward proposition.
According to a 2018 Small Arms Survey the US has 393 million guns — more than one gun per American and about 46 per cent of all civilian-owned firearms in the world.
It’s the only variable that can explain America’s high rate of mass shootings. An ever-growing body of research consistently reaches this conclusion.
As writer German Lopez has explained: “Researchers have found time and time again that America’s high levels of gun ownership are a major reason the US is so much worse in terms of gun violence than its developed peers.”
So we know what causes America’s gun violence problem. Why can’t we seem to do anything about it?
Here are some of the most popular and persuasive explanations.
In the minds of many gun control proponents, American life has become — or perhaps always was — a zero-sum game in which one party’s freedom to exist in peace has lost out to another’s prerogative to kill.
In this view, mass death is simply the cost gun owners are willing to inflict on the country for the right to bear arms.
However, many Americans do not see gun violence in such black-and-white terms, because they do not see gun violence as having to do with guns at all.
According to a study published in The Social Science Quarterly in 2017, after a mass shooting occurs, people who don’t own guns tend to identify the general availability of guns as the culprit.
Gun owners, on the other hand, are more likely to blame other factors, such as popular culture or parenting.
The different stories Americans tell themselves about the roots of gun violence preclude shared understanding.
As long as they disagree about the cause of the problem, they will disagree about how to fix it.
If the United States were to hold a national referendum tomorrow, a number of gun control measures would probably pass.
Universal background checks and bans on high-capacity magazines and even on assault-style weapons all have the support of at least 50 per cent of the electorate.
So why don’t we have stricter gun control? According to The Washington Post’s Robert Gebelhoff, Americans simply don’t care about it enough.
“Rarely do Americans who support gun control make it their top priority — and this is especially true of people without strong party affiliation,” he writes.
“By contrast, Americans who oppose gun control are intensely focused; so much so that for some of them, it’s a core part of their political identity.
“In a primary-driven electoral system such as ours, the latter group wins out every time.”
There are other reasons policy doesn’t follow public opinion, and some of them are inherent in the very structure of American government.
The Senate, for example, by giving equal representation to every State, militates against majority rule.
Then there is the rise of the modern filibuster in the 20th century, which allows a minority to block majority-supported legislation.
That means most substantive legislation must get 60 votes in the Senate to pass — often an exceedingly difficult threshold to reach.
After the shooting in Gilroy, California in July 2019, in which four people were killed, the City of San Francisco declared the National Rifle Association (NRA) a terrorist organisation.
It claimed that “nobody has done more to fan the flames of gun violence than the NRA.”
Yet as my colleague, Nicholas Kristof has explained, the NRA used to be a more moderate organisation.
It favoured tighter gun laws in the 1920s and 1930s, and as recently as the 1960s supported — albeit more grudgingly — some limits on guns.
“In 1977 there was a coup within the NRA that put hard-liners in charge,” he writes.
However, others say the influence of the NRA is overstated, or at least misunderstood.
David French has written in the National Review that the NRA is powerful for precisely the reason most potent progressive organisations are powerful.
In his view, the NRA does not manipulate people into supporting gun rights; rather, it reflects and channels the desires of people who already do
Gun control proponents often argue that the Second Constitutional Amendment was meant to protect the right of State militias, not individuals, to bear arms.
This interpretation is disputed by gun rights proponents, but not exclusively.
Historian, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, who favours the Second Amendment’s repeal, has argued that it was expressly designed to enshrine not only the right, but also the obligation of individual colonial settlers to violently appropriate Native land and to control Black populations, both free and enslaved.
However, repealing the Second Amendment, besides being almost politically impossible, would do nothing to address the actual problem of gun violence.
Democrats have been proposing “common sense” gun control policies for the past 25 years.
Yet none of them — not universal background checks, not red flag laws, not even a ban on assault-style weapons — would confront the core issue: America simply has too many guns.
*Spencer Bokat-Lindell is a staff editor in the Opinion Section at the New York Times. Previously, he was an editor at The Paris Review and Axios.
This article first appeared on the New York Times website.
