America’s Gun Plague

As regular readers know one of the things that drives me to distraction is the myth of "American Eaxceptionalism" which portrays America as a unique and lofty nation and distracts far too many citizens from the many ways in which the nation is in dire need of improvement and is exceptional in many negative ways compared to other affluent advanced nations: high child  poverty, a flaw and unduly expensive health care syste, declining upward social mobility compare to "Old Europe" and perhaps most horribly off the charts numbers of gun related deaths and mass shootings.  This needless bloodbath is a plague that could be easily curtailed by simple common sense gun control that removed the flood of guns from the streets and from the hands of those who should not possess hand guns much less, automatic weapons.  Yesterday 10 more Americans needlessly lost their lives in a mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, as reported by the Washington Post:

Ten people were killed during a mass shooting Saturday afternoon at a Buffalo grocery store in what law enforcement officials described as a racially motivated hate crime.

Law enforcement authorities said Payton Gendron, an 18-year-old White man, approached the store in a predominantly Black neighborhood and opened fire on shoppers and employees, shooting 13 people including a security guard.

The massacre ended when Gendron surrendered to police outside the store. Later Saturday, he was charged with first-degree murder and held without bail. He pleaded not guilty.

Stephen Belongia, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Buffalo field office, said law enforcement officials were investigating the shooting as a hate crime and a case of racially motivated violent extremism.

The grocery’s longtime security guard fired back, but the gunman’s body armor blocked the shot, and the guard was killed in the encounter, Gramaglia said. He called the security guard a “hero.” Four of those killed were store employees and six were customers, law enforcement officials said.

Investigators are reviewing a screed that they suspect was posted by the gunman describing his white-supremacist motivations and ideology.

The author calls himself a white supremacist, fascist and antisemite. The document is centered on a far-right conspiracy theory that baselessly posits that the White population in Western countries is being reduced — or “replaced” — by immigrants in a deliberate plot.

Consevative writer Davis Frum has a piece in The Atlantic that looks at America's gun plague in today's politically polarized America and the reality that only gun control can stop the carnage.  Here are excerpts:

Was it one of ours? Or one of theirs?

That’s the question that flashes through American minds after a mass shooting. Was the alleged killer a jihadi, like the shooter at the Pulse night club in Orlando in 2016? A left-wing extremist, like the shooter who attacked a congressional baseball practice in 2017? A vegan animal-rights zealot? Or, as apparently was the case yesterday in Buffalo, New York, a white supremacist who believed in “great replacement” theory?

In a politically polarized and heavily armed society, each new massacre rapidly becomes another occasion for mutual accusation.

After Buffalo, the accusations of lethal white supremacy feel especially apt and especially deserved. Some of the country’s loudest media voices have night after night expressed ideas very similar to those that allegedly animated the alleged killer, and those ideas are loathsome. Their words will be quoted back at them, joined to demands that they disavow white-supremacist ideology. Perhaps some of them will even do that. Will doing so make a difference?

The crucial variable in mass shootings is not ideas, but weapons. We cannot control ideas or speech and should not attempt to do so even if we could. But we could reduce access to the weaponry that converts ideology into atrocity. At least, other advanced countries find themselves able to do so. Almost every country on earth has citizens filled with vitriol, but no comparably advanced country has a gun-violence epidemic quite like America’s.

Yesterday’s alleged shooter appears to be a white supremacist. If the next killer is Muslim or vegan, many of those now most eager to assign blame to the Buffalo suspect’s copartisans will be anxious to do the opposite—and of course, those now most anxious to restrict blame to the alleged killer alone will next time be eager to spread the blame as widely as possible.

Racist ideology is an evil in itself. But the American exception that bathes this country in blood and grief again and again and again is not that we are uniquely susceptible to racism or jihadism or veganism. The American exception is the unique ease of access to weapons.

Condemn the words if you will, but understand what those words do and what those words do not do. To save lives, focus on what is taking lives. Americans die by the gun in such terrible numbers because Americans live by the gun with such reckless disregard.