We Can't Legislate Violence Away, Can We?

Last week our newly reasonable House of Representatives introduced long overdue legislation to require background checks on pretty much all firearm purchases. The timing so early in this Congress at once signifies that gun control is a priority for progressive voters, and corresponds with the 8th anniversary of a mass shooting that targeted, well, Congress. It is the latest step by our elected officials to stint what is now a hallowed American tradition of gun violence.

In spite of overwhelming public support for gun reform, this bill is laughably basic and still expected to face fierce opposition in the Senate. It’s likely dead in the Halls of Congress, like Gabrielle Giffords nearly was (and six people, including a child were) eight years ago. The bill is also unlikely to curb the American epidemic of violence, but then it isn’t really meant to.

Epidemic is a great word to describe our culture of gun violence because it is so harmful and pervasive, but also because it evokes an analogy of disease or infection, which is apt.

Say, for instance, you have a badly abscessed molar. You have let it go far too long because a Good Guy with essential oils, or quartz crystals, or something, convinced you that it would help. Your cheek is very swollen and puss oozes into your mouth and it’s much too painful to chew and your European friends and loved ones are starting to stare. You have a problem, and you’ve finally decided to listen to your mother and go see a dentist.

Your dentist sees the problem clearly and prescribes a suite of treatments: narcotics for the pain, steroids for the swelling, and antibiotics for the infection. You take the pain pills and anti-inflammatories, obviously, but those won’t treat the root cause. That is basic, commonsense gun control. Stemming violence requires more.

This is not an argument against gun control. When your tooth is pussing and bleeding you take the damn pain pills until the antibiotics kick in. But the root of gun violence is the root of violence, which can’t be addressed by treating symptoms.

35,000 people die from gunfire in the United States every year. That’s about four times as many Americans as have died in the War on Terror, and more than half as many as died in the entire Vietnam War. Two thirds of these deaths are suicides, gun murders tend to be concentrated in city centers, and about 500 women are shot to death each year by partners (which is certainly under reported). These numbers can be reduced, but not eliminated, with meaningful gun control.

Treating gun violence as a public health issue is a good first step.

For instance, where states impose more restrictive gun policy, firearm suicides drop dramatically and suicides in general decrease. Where gun restrictions were repealed, suicides increased.

Any NRA talking head can quickly rattle off the exploding rates of knife violence in the United Kingdom, where gun ownership is very low. It’s easy to blow them off as partisan hacks, but at some level they’re right. The Brookings Institute has found that violence in general stems from social and economic uncertainty. Gun control will not address the underlying issues that drive violence: manufactured resource scarcity, social inequality, and the poisonous politics of masculinity that drive domestic violence.

Gun control will, however, make us much less lethal while we work out the real problems.

Time will tell whether the recent Congressional slide to the left has the staying power to effect meaningful change to the social and economic policies that underscore widespread violence. Meaningful reform to health care, urban planning, food security and wealth equality is necessary to treat the systemic sickness that drives violence.

But while the antibiotics are at work, you still take the Lortab. Gun control is not the answer but it is a stint to save lives while we do the real work. It’s the least that we can do.