(Disclaimer: Canadian without a dog in this fight checking in here)
If you mean the recent spate of stories about someone randomly getting shot over something trivial (turning around in someone’s driveway, almost getting into the wrong vehicle, etc) in my perception these are new to the national news. I feel as though they are getting attention right now because a cluster of them happened within a week of each other and violence is always a popular topic on the news.
If you mean (and just to be clear, I don’t think you do) scenarios like Uvalde or the various similar incidents that have happened since, I shudder to think there was ever a time when these weren’t national news. I really hope things in America never get to the point where something like that happens and it doesn’t make the news simply because it is all too common. Having said that, when I turn on the news on any given day and another mass shooting is being reported mere days after the previous one, I have noticed a tone of outrage fatigue from the hosts. They don’t like having to do the same report on the same issue over and over again with only the location and victims changing. They’re frustrated with the lack of meaningful progress on the issue and they don’t bother trying to hide it anymore.
For what it’s worth I think the US will eventually reach a point where there is sufficient critical mass on the issue to effect some meaningful change. I think that will be preceded by something really terrible happening but with enough incidents impacting enough people, something will eventually give. I don’t think apathy will win.
You could say the same about almost every problem in society. If we fixed economic stresses and had good education and healthcare provision for all, then crime, drug and alcohol abuse, homelessness etc etc would probably go down substantially.
But, while we look for broad solutions, we don’t normally hamstring ourselves by taking obvious and proximate solutions off the table. Because progress on broadly repairing society has not been great (and a lot of Americans still prefer lower taxes to these kinds of social improvements).
Now, I know why you’re saying this: you feel that the gun debate has become split into two entrenched camps, and that any talk of gun control meets fierce opposition from the other side. This is true, however the camps are not the same size: the vast majority of Americans, including most gun owners, are in favor of gun control.
So the solution is not for the gun control side to keep quiet and think of alternatives. On the contrary: it is for us to make our preference known very clearly, and the effect it may have on our vote.
Just to give n example, here in the Chicago area the media has long published articles on the past week’s/weekend’s shootings. Generally gang stuff, drivebys, innocent bystanders - so not technically mass shootings.). It has gone on torso long and the numbers are generally so large, I don’t even notice the articles.
Yes… there has surely always been a base line of criminals criminaling, violent nuts being violent nuts, and random citizens just snapping and going berserk, that did not become Big National News (plus violence to which society and authorities looked the other way because hey, it’s “them” taking each other down). And that almost surely included some incidents at a school or at a church.
One thing often pointed out but quickly ser aside is that peak crime rate in the US was over 50 years ago. Violent crime and murder rates are still below where they were decades ago. What we see over the last generation though is more news about more dramatic single incidents.
Frequency of nationally reported multiple victim assaults ISTM increased around workplace shootings with the “going postal” trope in the 1980s — which got publicity because what happens at a Post Office facility escalates to Federal Offense, it’s not just Sherriff Andy dealing with it.
But proper mass shootings NOT in the sense that crime statisticians use it but in the colloquial sense, namely large numbers of innocents targeted while peacefully going about their business, and whole town terrorized, in a single incident by someone seeking to do exactly that, has always been national news. However, the evolving format of the news media cycle has changed the pace and scope of coverage and its perception. And that helps lead to a not entirely unjustified self-protective reaction that, hey, there’s other stuff going on, I can’t just drop everything and focus on the latest point atrocity.
I realize that. And such are common around here. But I personally find them a tad irritating. I try to post a somewhat intelligent comment, and autocorrect changes it. Anyone knows what I intended, and knows the error was autocorrect. A post such as yours - however lighthearted in intent - focuses on something that makes my comment appear ridiculous or ignorant, rather than in any way addressing the content. Which I consider VERY MILDLY dickish.
What you did is extremely common, and I should have disabled autocorrect some time ago, so that any misspellings were entirely mine. I probably oughtn’t have responded as I did, but I imagine at least some folk might not appreciate that posts such as yours were not appreciated as clever or humorous - a least by me.
Where in the USA other than Illinois’ FOID requirement do you have to have a “license” simply to possess guns? Unless you’re talking about convicted felons illegally possessing, whom I wouldn’t have pictured as big on home schooling.
When I lived in Las Vegas, all pistols had to be registered with the local PD. I did not own any long guns, so I don’t recall ever learning whether the same regs applied to them.
I’ve been wondering if what might finally create the sort of political will needed is an Emmitt Till strategy. A series of courageous parents who permit photos of the carnage (along with news media who understand the journalistic importance). Don’t permit these to be tragic but sanitized news items. Make them real. Have people see grade schoolers with their brains splattered on the walls.
I hope it’s crystal clear that I consider this as a strategy with zero morbid interest. Such photos and video would be heart-rending and should rightfully invoke outrage. But the Till photos, the video and photos of black Americans being firehosed or attacked by police dogs—these were tremendously impactful. They helped to change things, including the passage of significant legislation.
“But people would be uncomfortable seeing such images.” Good! If people have let the frequency of mass shootings numb them to the real impact, let’s rip the veil away.
I find it a bit ironic that your thumbnail is one I’ve used as an illustration for the idea that a society could be completely disarmed yet still suffer from extreme violence and crime.
As for your suggestion, I’d point out that the Pro-Life movement has been shoving photos of bloody abortions at us for decades, without convincing many who didn’t already think so of the self-evident wrongness of legal abortion.
In order to register them I had to show up with them at a police substation and meet in person with an officer who inspected them. I do not know what would have happened had any of them been of illegal design or with a serial number that flagged in their database.
So although I did not need to ask their permission to own them, if they weren’t kosher for some definition of “kosher” that they / the legislature decided without my input, I suspect the outcome is that I would not be owning them after that visit.
So in a sense that is akin to licensure if the critical distinction you are pursuing is that licenses may be denied, but registrations may not.
Also, pretty much absolutely everybody agrees that killing schoolchildren is murder. A majority of people do not agree that a pregnant woman choosing to terminate her pregnancy and thereby killing an embryo or early-term fetus is murder.
High media visibility may affect our perceptions of how bad a particular bad thing is, but it is far less likely to change our minds if we don’t already agree with claims that the thing in question is in fact bad.
This is why most people who see news photos of massacred schoolchildren are appalled by the catastrophe of those destroyed lives, while most people who see propaganda photos of aborted embryos are merely annoyed about anti-abortion zealots trying to gin up their base.
I find it a bit ironic that you think a work of dystopian fiction, which is what I assume you’re referring to with regard to Stratocaster’s Clockwork Orange avatar, is in any way a meaningful “illustration” of real-world public policy issues.
I don’t think anybody has suggested otherwise. The point about prohibiting particular kinds of force-multiplying weaponry is that violence perpetrated without such weaponry tends to be a lot less deadly by comparison.
Remember what actually happens in the novel A Clockwork Orange during the events of what the protagonist, speaking via the author’s considerably more naive 1971-era perception of criminal destructiveness, describes as a spree of “ultra-violence”? Over the course of a day or so, the protagonist and his gang beat up and/or rape several people, one of whom later dies. (Years afterwards it’s suggested that another of the rape victims subsequently died of unspecified injuries somehow associated with the rape.)
Imagine the kind of death toll that a spree of “ultra-violence” on the part of a similarly aggressive sociopathic gang would inflict today, using today’s standard American weaponry arsenal.
This disconnect seems to me very illustrative of the kind of “normalization” of high levels of gun violence in American society that the OP is talking about. A fictional criminal episode whose deadliness doesn’t even come close to the threshold level of a modern “mass shooting” is held up as a cautionary example of “extreme violence and crime” in a disarmed society.
If reading or viewing A Clockwork Orange makes you more nervous about “extreme violence and crime” than reading real-life news stories about paranoid irresponsible and/or murderous gun owners in today’s America, that suggests something significant about the normalization of gun violence in American minds.
To the OP’s question: possibly. This article from Politico doesn’t give a solution to the problem, but it does give an incredible explanation for the reason: historical geographical cultures. To be fair, the premise of the article disputes the right’s (current) argument that places like New York City are violent, dystopian warzones and instead shows that the South is relatively unsafe.
Someone living in the most rural counties of South Carolina is more than three times as likely to be killed by gunshot than someone living in the equally rural counties of New York’s Adirondacks or the impoverished rural counties facing Mexico across the lower reaches of the Rio Grande.
The reasons for these disparities go beyond modern policy differences and extend back to events that predate not only the American party system but the advent of shotguns, revolvers, ammunition cartridges, breach-loaded rifles and the American republic itself.
The reason the U.S. has strong regional differences is because our swath of the North American continent was settled by rival colonial projects that had very little in common, often despised one another and spread without regard for today’s state boundaries.
I found the article fascinating, and only wish I could quote more to get the full idea across.