Gun Violence Again
While I do not want to insult those who are expressing their outrage or sorrow or shock by praying for those other families, I suggest we might also try to imagine exactly how we would feel if it were our child that was senselessly murdered.  Then, with the clarity that comes with such a perspective, it seems we would want to both pray for the victims and try to start making sense of this complicated, stubbornly stalled, gun violence debate.

In Gun Violence: The Real Cost, the authors estimate the annual cost of gun violence in America is more than $100 billion.  In the past, researchers have focused only on medical costs and lost productivity, but these author include myriad additional, concrete, costs in their calculations.  According to the publisher,

“All of us, no matter where we reside or how we live, share the costs of gun violence. Whether waiting in line to pass through airport security or paying taxes for the protection of public officials; whether buying a transparent book bag for our children to meet their school's post-Columbine regulations or subsidizing an urban trauma center, the steps we take are many and the expenditures enormous.

Cook and Ludwig reveal that investments in prevention, avoidance, and harm reduction, both public and private, constitute a far greater share of the gun-violence burden than previously recognized. They also employ extensive survey data to measure the subjective costs of living in a society where there is risk of being shot or losing a loved one or neighbor to gunfire.

At the same time, they demonstrate that the problem of gun violence is not intractable. Their review of the available evidence suggests that there are both additional gun regulations and targeted law enforcement measures that will help.

This urgently needed book documents for the first time how gun violence diminishes the quality of life for everyone in America. In doing so, it will move the debate over gun violence past symbolic politics to a direct engagement with the costs and benefits of policies that hold promise for reducing gun violence and may even pay for themselves.”

One online review of this book, however, raises the counterpoint that sustains the pro-gun lobby. “In explaining how ‘gun violence reduces the quality of life for everyone in America’ the authors miss the mark on how gun ownership reduces the probability of crime and enhances the standard of living of everyone.”

Does gun ownership ‘reduce the probability of crime’ and enhance everyone’s standard of living?  In the shadow of today's news, common sense says no, and my non-expert read of literature tells me that the research strongly suggests no, but the debate continues.

In “Linking Gun Availability to Youth Violence,” Alfred Blumstein (one of our most respected criminologists) and Daniel Cork found that as homicides committed by young offenders increased from 1985-1995 “an important factor” was the “significant increase in availability of guns to young people.”

In a very good read, an paper in 2000 called ‘Guns and Gun Violence,’ the author reviews the factors that drove gun violence up in the 90s and down since, focusing on the 1980s increase in the production of inexpensive, high-capacity, high-caliber semi-automatic pistols (replacing previously common revolvers) that were “widely available for the first time in the late 1980s.”  The author also reviews the literature to remind us of the following:

1.    “Not surprisingly, the more guns there are, the more gun crime there is.”

2.    There is a ‘close relationship’ between gun availability and rates of gun violence.

3.    “Keeping a firearm at home more than doubles the risk that a member of the household will be killed in a firearm homicide.”

4.    “Robberies and family and intimate assaults are three times as likely to result in death with a firearm is involved.”

But listing what the best available data suggests has not (yet) tipped the balance in this debate.  Beyond gun violence, is the question of violence itself.  Let me suggest one other perspective to consider.  There is already an exploding cottage industry analyzing the ways that the shooter was so unlike you and I, so evil as to be incomprehensible.  This may be true.  But it may also be less accurate than we want to think about.  One blog noted that continuing on the trajectory we seem to be on in America, with ever more guns more easily available, may bring us to a 'terrifying' place, where we become "a country living in hiding, ordering life online rather than living it." 

And another blogger, summarizing the media conversation at this point, surveyed the labels being applied to the shooter in an effort to explain this tragedy.  These include: "brainiac, mentally disabled, personality disorder, needy, withdrawn, awkward, nerdy, struggling to be social, on the honor roll, and subject to outbursts."

It is possible that there is something about American culture, or post-modern societies, something about ourselves and our communities, we ought to be examining here?  Is the availability of guns and gun violence driving us toward 'living in hiding' and 'ordering life online rather than living it,' or might this also be an indictement of a consumer society that places materialism on the highest alter, commercializing and diminishing everthing from Christmas (the real 'war on Christmas') to community, saturating communication channels with alienation, violence, and self-absorption?  How many of us, at 20 years old, were/are/will be 'awkward, withdrawn, brainiacs struggling to be social' or how many of our most respected elites are the poster boys for 'subject to outbursts' and yet we are suprised when some from within this odd tribe we have created act out?

Like everyone else, from prayers to finger pointers, I am just trying to get my mind around yet another senseless, and seemingly preventable, tragedy.  I do not want to suggest any level of expertise on this topic, only concern and a desire to help us all figure this out together.