Photo by Specna Arms
For several years I’ve been peddling the theory that gun massacres are making it impossible for us to do community together in America. Our growing sense of vulnerability in public places will make us withdraw from participation in schools, churches and other spots where we gather together.
Following this week’s horrific killings at a Christian school in Nashville, I just want to point out another (anec)data point on that front.
The mass shooting at a Christian elementary school in Nashville this week has generated a broad shrugging of the shoulders in Washington, from President Biden to Republicans in Congress, who seemed to agree on little other than that there was nothing left for them to do to counter the continuing toll of gun violence across the country.
“We’re not going to fix it,” Representative Tim Burchett, Republican of Tennessee, told reporters on the steps of the Capitol just hours after the shooting that killed three children and three adults in his home state. “Criminals are going to be criminals.”
Mr. Burchett said he saw no “real role” for Congress to play in reducing gun violence, and volunteered that his solution to the issue of protecting his family was to home-school his children.
I’m not here to criticize home-schooling, but — at least as presented here by Congressman Burchett — it can represent a way from withdrawing from society at large. A way of shunning society for safety. It’s understandable, and also awful.
America is already experiencing an “epidemic of loneliness.” Unfettered access to killing tools — guns — might make it worse.
Then again, there’s a chicken-or-egg question at work here. From ABC News:
There is a loneliness epidemic in the United States -- and experts told ABC News it may be triggering violence.
Experts said although there is not a lot of research on isolation, there appears to be a link between loneliness and violence, experts said.
"Clearly isolation and loneliness are at play in a lot of violence," Dr. Edwin Fisher, a psychologist and professor in the department of health behavior at Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina, told ABC News. "They may be important red flags for us to recognize and trying to help people who are prone to violence."
It’s easy to imagine a vicious cycle: Loneliness leading to violence leading to more loneliness leading to … you get the idea.
Again, this is just a theory for now. Gun massacres are terrible in and of themselves, for what they do in real time to the victims, their families and communities. But I suspect the ripple effects spread more widely than we know.
Elsewhere…
At the Kansas City Star, I wrote about Sen. Josh Hawley’s response to the Nashville mass shooting — which looked for all the world to me like cynical exploitation for political purposes:
“Finally, it’s fair to wonder where Hawley’s passion on mass shootings has been all this time. When 19 students and two teachers were killed at Uvalde, Texas, last year, the senator issued a comparatively bland, four-line statement with a perfunctory call for tougher sentences for violent crime. (On his website, the release is tagged “Second Amendment.”) And I can find no record of any Hawley statement on November’s shootings at a Colorado LGBT nightclub that killed five people. No daylong Twitter jeremiads. No angry press statements. No running to the cameras for attention.”
It would be nice not to have to think about the ways we’re killing each other.