Destabilized Saturday Edition #19
A glimmer of gun sanity hope, baseball's Kaepernick moment, end active shooter drills, if we can get cigarettes out of bars...
This week was hard for me. Many bad things have silver linings and plausible ways to see hope and possibility, but when 19 small children and their teachers are executed in cold blood, it’s gutting. I’ve hid tears from my kids more than once.
I do, though, have a faint inkling that this event could prove consequential in a way previous school shootings have not. It could be wishful thinking, but maybe it isn’t. Regardless, at the end of this crushing week I’m going to offer a tentatively optimistic perspective.
And I’ll leave this here:
A week after 26 small children were executed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012, NRA president Wayne LaPierre asserted at a press conference, “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” The concept wasn’t new; as PBS documents it has century-old roots in American culture. After Sandy Hook, the NRA needed it. In the wake of the deaths of those innocent kids, and the infinite agony of their parents and families, the NRA needed an argument that would reposition guns from a problem that gets people killed to a solution that offers safety and comfort in a dangerous world. Enter the good-guy-with-a-gun-narrative (GGWAGN).
The GGWAGN has been wildly successful, accomplishing exactly what the NRA needed. It’s how we got armed law enforcement officers at schools. It’s where the idea of arming classroom teachers came from. The GGWAGN isn’t a genuine belief or a good faith argument, but it works. As TPM points out, however, the narrative needs to be absolute.
[T]he hallmark of post-Newtown NRA gun-messaging is that there’s no tension between the anguish of families reeling from the gun murder of their loved ones and pro-gun advocacy. None. That absoluteness of that axiom is critical. It is precisely that you need more guns in the right hands to stop such tragedies from happening again.
[T]he extremity of these child massacres make affirmative arguments essential. The NRA realized that it just wasn’t workable to be saying things like “Even with two a couple dozen mutilated children, our rights are our rights.” Or, “Yeah, it’s bad but your reforms go too far.” It doesn’t cut it. People are at risk of buckling when they try to make those arguments. You need to place yourself on the side of protecting the kids, stopping these massacres from ever happening again – even if your logic is basically absurd.
U.S. gun culture is so psychotically deranged – epitomized by this individual waiting in line to order a Venti caramel macchiato in a t-shirt, shorts, and a machine gun – and has been for long enough that it’s easy to assume it always will be.
But the massacre of nineteen precious children and two treasured adults in Uvalde, Texas this week is so searing and soul-crushing, we shouldn’t be too sure. Some things to consider:
This is only (“only”) the second mass shooting of elementary school-aged kids in modern American history.
Sandy Hook happened in 2012, a simpler time before Trump, before the pandemic, before January 6th and the Big Lie, and before it felt like the country might crack open.
At that point, Sandy Hook was a one-off. Probabilistic thinking suggested it was likely to happen again, but we could convince ourselves it was a fluke horrific event rather than a nightmarish symptom of a broken system.
Now, that comforting rationalization is gone, no longer available to many of the people who relied on it to sleep through the night.
The child murders in Uvalde also exploded the absurd logic of the GGWAGN, as more than a dozen officers apparently stood around and did nothing while a heavily armed madman menaced, threatened, and executed children.1
In the 21st century, gun maximalists have had an intensity advantage over gun control advocates. They won less with overwhelming numbers than with singular focus, passion, and identity. But if people feel their kids aren’t safe, that may shift.
In a week or two will we meekly return to business as usual? Quite possibly, yes; it’s what has always happened before. But there was one sign late in the week that maybe, just maybe, something fundamental could shift.
Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, a right-wing gun nut in good standing, decided he wouldn’t attend this weekend’s NRA convention in Houston. Patrick could have cited the need to attend to the aftermath of the crisis, but he didn’t. Instead he said, “While a strong supporter of the Second Amendment and an NRA member, I would not want my appearance today to bring any additional pain or grief to the families and all those suffering in Uvalde.”
As TPM notes, there is at least a sliver of a concession there. If a celebration of guns and the Second Amendment could cause pain to the families of the victims of a gun crime, then guns must be a cause of deadly violence and not solely the solution to it. It is slippage in the absolutism of more guns = more safety. Not much, but not nothing, either. It tells me Patrick is worried about a shift in the politics.
The odds this meaningfully changes gun politics in the U.S. are small, but heavily regulating guns and reducing violence in the process is possible. Both the UK and Australia dramatically tightened their gun laws in the 1980s and 1990s after separate horrific mass shootings. (In the UK it was a heinous mass shooting at a Scottish primary school that killed 16 five- and six-year-olds, along with their teacher.) Witnessing repulsive acts of violence committed against innocents is universally searing, and tipping points do exist in politics.
One indicator to look out for is whether blue state leaders (or their primary challengers) start seeing political advantage in questioning the authority of the federal government to prevent state regulation of guns. It would be a form of nullification and foreshadow a constitutional crisis, something Democrats would typically foreswear, but if voters demand leaders who will prioritize their kids’ safety above everything else, politicians and aspiring politicians may try to deliver it.
I’d have mixed feelings about such a development. Part of me would be elated – letting individuals own unregulated automatic weapons is nihilistic madness, and the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment doctrine is fraudulent – but another part of me would be concerned a constitutional crisis could lead to similarly bad outcomes.
In the era of destabilization, even potentially positive political reform scenarios threaten to aggravate instability.
My Work
Guns, minority rule, and American instability
Since Chief Justice Burger gave that interview, the Court’s right-wing majority has transformed the gun lobby’s “fraudulent” claims about the Second Amendment into the law of the land4. As a result, states are severely restricted in how they can regulate private gun ownership, and all Americans are subject to the deadly stochastic violence inherent in the universal availability of high-powered firearms.
Interesting Reads
[T]wo factors came out again and again as highly predictive. …The first was this variable called anocracy… How autocratic or how democratic a country is. And it has this scale that goes from negative 10 to positive 10. Negative 10 is the most authoritarian, so think about North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain. Positive 10 are the most democratic. …And then it has this middle zone between positive 5 and negative 5, which was you had features of both. …And what scholars found was that this anocracy variable was really predictive of a risk for civil war. That full democracies almost never have civil wars. Full autocracies rarely have civil wars. All of the instability and violence is happening in this middle zone.
And then the second factor was whether populations in these partial democracies began to organize politically, not around ideology — so, not based on whether you’re a communist or not a communist, or you’re a liberal or a conservative — but where the parties themselves were based almost exclusively around identity: ethnic, religious or racial identity.
Tweets of the Week
Extreme Weather Watch
Creeping Authoritarianism Watch
I’m skipping Creeping Authoritarianism Watch this week, we’ll be back with regularly schedule programming next Saturday. Instead, I leave you with this important reminder:
“The road to fascism is lined with people telling you you’re overreacting.”
I still genuinely don’t grok what happened – did the officers hear the shots and not respond? Could they not hear the shots? If not, why not? It feels like we may not have the full story yet.