Mass Shootings and Insanity

Saturday, May 6, 2023, a mall in Allen, Texas:  eight dead, including children, and at least seven more injured.  In America we don’t need the headline above to know what happened there.  It is only the latest event in an epidemic, a plague of guns, a monsoon of bullets.

In just the past two weeks there have been mass shootings–defined as events in which at least four people are shot–in Cleveland, Texas (five killed), outside Tulsa, Oklahoma (six killed), and Atlanta, Georgia (one killed, four injured).  It is only spring, but already this year there have been at least 202 mass shootings, more than the number of days so far in 2023.  Last year, there were at least 647 of them.

Shootings are now the top cause of death of children and teens in the greatest nation on earth.

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Has there ever been an emptier phrase in English than “thoughts and prayers”?  The  press conference in Allen, Texas, last Saturday night was full of official invocations of “thoughts and prayers.”  Allen’s representative in the Texas legislature, Republican Keith Self, added ballast to the phrase by declaring that critics of those words “don’t believe in almighty God, who is absolutely in control of our lives.”  Such a view is not only fatalistic.  It is also diversionary.

The press conference was a stem to stern exercise in diversion.  To hear the local officials, one would have no idea that this was the umpteenth mass shooting this year in America.  Or that it was the second in a week in Texas alone.  Instead, their pronouncements presented much more as praise for the bravery of first responders, the resilience of the community, and the love of neighbors for each other.  The presser seemed a celebration of humanity itself.

This latest horror at the hands of a gunman was simply divorced from the epidemic of American killing fields.  The victims were but nameless abstractions.  So was the shooter, who was killed on site by–yes–a brave police officer who ran toward the gunshots.  Most noteworthy was the officials’ total silence on the type of weapon used, which must have been lying at the side of the slain shooter.

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No weapons of concern here.  At this point, Texas officials apparently do not wish to stir up more fervor for banning the sale of AR-15-style military assault rifles, the type later described as the weapon used in the Allen massacre.  It was also the type used in the killing of five people in Cleveland, Texas, only a week earlier.  It was the weapon used to kill 19 children and two teachers at the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, a year ago this month.

Knowing there were injured persons in the Uvalde classroom, local and state police waited almost 75 minutes outside the room, in good part because they were fearful of facing the gunman’s AR-15, even though some of the officers carried the same weapon.  Ultimately members of the federal government’s Border Control Tactical Unit arrived and stormed the room, killing the 18-year-old gunman.

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The nation’s long-neglected mental health needs have provided the material for an increasingly popular conservative diversion in the face of mass killings.  This would be an odd result were it not for the extraordinary cynicism of many Republican leaders.

Again, the Great State of Texas provides Exhibit A.  Following the unthinkable massacre at the Uvalde Elementary School last year, Governor Greg Abbott identified the problem requiring a solution.  He said, “We, as a state, we, as a society, need to do a better job with mental health … Anybody who shoots somebody else has a mental health challenge, period.”  After last week’s shooting in Allen, Governor Abbott dismissed calls for more effective gun control legislation:

“We are working to address that anger and violence by going to its root cause, which is addressing the mental health problems behind it.  People want a quick solution. The long-term solution here is to address the mental health issue.”

Well, yes and no.  Certainly the treatment of mental illness has been underfunded and underdeveloped for decades in the U.S.   And we can assume that mass shooters are generally not of sound mind.  But two things.  First, given the decades-long history of massive underfunding of mental health services in the U.S., and the great difficulty in identifying likely future killers amongst our population even with much better mental health screening, this path to reduced killings is a very, very long one.

Second, it would be at least marginally helpful if Greg Abbott were really interested in increased funding for mental health in Texas.  The state–with the second most mass shootings in the nation this year–is one of only 10 states in the nation to refuse–on Republican objections–to take advantage of expanded Medicaid funding under the 2010 federal Affordable Care Act, which would provide mental health care to an additional one million Texans.

Meanwhile a bill simply to raise the age for purchasing a semi-automatic rifle from 18 to 21 is likely to fail in the current Texas legislative session.  Changes in gun laws in the state run in the direction of 2021’s law that allows most people 21 and over to carry a handgun, either concealed or openly, without a license.

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In fact, certain types of chronic insanity do underlie the nation’s epidemic of mass shootings.  These involve not the mental health of mass-shooting individuals, but of the society in which they are bred.  Mass insanity brings mass killings.

One is the sort just described: recognizing an increasing level of tragedy and trauma, which too often centers on the slaughter of children, and failing to act against it in any meaningful way at all.  Another is the lawful flooding of the nation with guns of all descriptions in the face of this national horror.

This firehose of weapons was facilitated by the Supreme Court’s woeful 2008 decision in the District of Columbia case.  By a narrow 5-4 vote, that decision misread both the Constitution and the foreseeable social consequences in ruling that the Second Amendment allowed individuals to acquire weapons for the purpose of defending themselves, rather than for the purpose of defending the state in a militia.

By 2017 the nation’s civilians already had 120 firearms for every 100 persons, by orders of magnitude more than any other nation.  Not surprisingly, gun-related deaths in the U.S. rose 35 percent between 2014 and 2020, and the country leads all wealthy, modern societies in annual rates of gun killings.

Both of these developments fit a useful definition of mass insanity:  the sustained failure to recognize reality in order to protect against its most dire threats.  How much saner should we think these approaches to guns in America are than the 1978 mass murder-suicide of 909 persons in the People’s Temple cult founded by Jim Jones.

Finally, might we not categorize the normalization of hate and discrimination by leading Republicans as a type of mass psychosis?  Led by Donald Trump, the Republican Party has given both legitimacy and support to groups including white nationalists, neo-Nazis and anti-Semites, whose hateful ideologies have fueled recent mass shootings of Jews, African-Americans and Latinos.

The road to national sanity on guns and mass shootings is much longer than it should be.  The only relevant question is whether we walk together toward or away from sanity.

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