Policy and security fixes are never going to be perfect. The best thing we can do is stop leaving people isolated.
Policy and security fixes are never going to be perfect. The best thing we can do is stop leaving people isolated.
I doubt I’m the only teacher who has scanned his classroom the day after a mass shooting and wondered, “Which of these students is our biggest risk?” We know the profile: loner, isolated, bullied, male. And yet, we seemingly cannot stop these horrific events.
And the uncomfortable truth of it all is exactly that: We might not be able to stop them — at least not in the near future. Most loners never shoot up a school, and those that do make up an impossibly small number. It’s worse than finding a needle in a haystack. It’s like trying to find a slightly grayer shell on a vast beach full of other gray shells.
Despite what the “do something” class on Twitter might suggest, there are few if any gun regulations that would stymie these attacks. Household gun-ownership rates were in decline for decades before the pandemic and gun regulations were scant until the 1960s, and yet mass shootings at schools are a comparatively recent phenomenon. The connection between gun ownership and gun violence is not as strong as progressives would like it to be. As Kevin Williamson observes, Americans do shoot each other at higher rates than other countries, but they also stab, beat, and burn each other to death at higher rates too. Guns don’t kill people; Americans do.
Also running against the “do something” narrative is the reality that even the problem of “mass shootings” isn’t as unique to the United States as blue-checkmark Twitter would have us believe. True, the United States has a unique phenomenon of lone-wolf mass shooters. However, according to researchers John Lott and Carlisle Moody, as far as the number of mass shootings in the world goes — be they lone-wolf shooters, terrorist attacks, mob violence, or otherwise — proportionally, the U.S. isn’t an outlier in this area. It isn’t a gun problem, they argue, but a cultural one:
Around the world, mass shootings occur pervasively, but many fewer as lone-wolf mass shootings. Understanding the dynamics of social conflict around the world exposes the irresponsibility of saying that the United States has more lone wolves because it has more guns.
They suggest that, in reality, the United States has more lone-wolf shootings because it has more loners in an already individualistic, isolated society. Other more closely knit societies still have violence, but it manifests in groups.
If the U.S. government could conceivably confiscate or buy back every gun in America, would that stop these attacks? I’m skeptical. For a decade in the 1970s, terrorist bombings were an almost daily occurrence. Copycat behavior mixed with political radicalism made them a norm. Car bombings during the Troubles in Ireland were so frequent we named a drink after them. The deadliest terrorist attacks in American history involved box cutters and fertilizer. Do bombings become the norm again? What about parade massacres via car? Once someone has committed himself to killing children, no paper policy or regulation will keep him from doing so.
The cause of these mass shootings is sociological: a small but potent class of isolated, angry young men. Any policy put forth as a “solution” must address this reality. Everything else — from gun regulations to school-safety measures — is merely mitigation.
Unfortunately, that leaves us with little recourse. If anything, trends suggest that this problem will only worsen. Kids go out less than they used to, they spend more time on phones, mental health is in decline among adolescents, church attendance is down, fewer kids are on sports teams, and so on. We can expect only more isolation as the years pass.
The only mitigation strategies that might prove helpful are red-flag laws and school security. Unfortunately, both carry with them unsavory trade-offs.
Regarding school safety, a TSA-type safety line creates a slightly less porous barrier in what ought to be an open and welcoming environment. And, again, morbid to consider, but school security isn’t perfect. Place a lone gunman near a door during school dismissal, and when students flood out of the single point of entry, we have another tragedy.
As for red-flag laws, allowing localities to limit civil rights because someone seems vaguely sketchy is a dangerous precedent to set. If such laws are passed, they must be written very specifically and with protections for the accused. Not to mention the burden that this places on teachers or even fellow classmates to report a student, perhaps incorrectly, to authorities.
Returning to my students, perhaps one of them is at risk of a violent, murderous outburst. He needs a male role model, involvement in school activities, a friend. These are the solutions. Without those, he poses a risk regardless of our regulatory structure. Red-flag laws miss perpetrators. School security fails. Many crimes are committed with illegally purchased guns.
And here I find my real frustration with the focus on gun regulation as the sole solution put forth. It suggests we adjust deck chairs on a sinking Titanic. So long as our society continues to cloister off, young men will turn only more violent, and that is a terrifying thought.