There's some good data in this piece about mass shootings. Turns out mass shootings haven't grown in number, but have been stable across several decades (though I suspect the crucial inflection point was the end of the assault rifle ban back in 2004, though that may be my partisan politics). They also seem to be not increasingly the purview of white men, nor on the other hand are they related to video games. Mental health issues do in fact seem to play a role in violence, but that's an argument for getting people help, not for stigmatizing those with mental health issues.
All of this challenges my preconceptions of gun violence today. In a useful way. I don't think this makes me think "well, there's not a problem here." Instead, it helps me understand more carefully the precise contours of the actual problem.
I suspect we are tempted into a chronic "moral panic" about gun violence in the US, and especially about mass shootings. By "moral panic" I mean the way we can get into a feeding-frenzy that fuels its own anxieties, and is fundamentally unmotivated by any empirical evidence. It is an at least temporarily self-sustaining reality, like a hurricane. (There are a number of useful resources online about "moral panics;" this one is just one of many, but it seems ok.)
This doesn't mean that we cannot work for an America which is more like Canada, or every country in Europe, or Japan, or Australia, when it comes to gun violence and mass shootings. For all of them have effectively zero such shootings per year. And the US government has steps that could likely reduce the chances of gun deaths very quickly. That would reduce not only the number of deaths, but the number of children who survive such events, but remain scarred, sometimes for life; and the number exposed to fear of such horrors, more generally.
But the issue is the degree to which they are material issues which will affect a large number of people, and the degree to which these dangers are "spectacular"--the degree to which the ungrounded fear of the thing actually amplifies the damage of the thing. Part of the issue here clearly seems to be not policy but psychology. For parents like me, whose kids are now barraged with active shooter drills, and see adverts for bulletproof backpacks and the like, there is a kind of temptation towards the one percent doctrine: any degree of danger to our children is too great. And so we react in understandable but not really useful ways, in ways that actually hinder our efforts to achieve our goals.
And then there's this nice piece from the Washington Post, castigating Amnesty International's "travel advisory" stunt, warning people against travel to the US. AI has never issued travel advisories for any place ever; it is not in the travel advisory business; and there are lots of places where gun violence levels are much higher than the US (let alone their advice for US travel is quite dubious, too). Some people are sure to be angry at me for posting this, but I agree with the author of this piece: Amnesty's act was the kind of cynical, attention-grabbing bs move that actually harms the causes the attention grabber purports to promote.
Read the piece through before getting enraged or imagining this person is anti-Amnesty or pro-NRA. Quite the contrary. As the author of the first piece says, "[o]nly through dispassionate consideration of good data will society understand how best to prevent these crimes." The issue is to respond with focused intelligence and deliberated behavior, not to descend to pandering to social media "likes." We all need to discipline ourselves to avoid such empty-calorie displays of public speech.
Of course, the "moral panic" lens can be used to extend beyond mass shooting events, to the current moral condition of the United States as a whole. On the Left and the Right people feel besieged and under assault. I think one set of those concerns are more vividly related to reality than the other. But I think that, even on my side, we need to be alert to the ways in which we're playing with matches in a highly oxygenated environment. "Moral panic" is an ever-present danger.