Guns, minority rule, and American instability
As fury over the mass killing of children collides with minority rule, pressure will build
There aren’t words dark, angry, or bleak enough to describe a mass slaughter of elementary school students, though tweets declaring simply, “this is hell,” get close.
Trying, somehow, to wrap my head around the massacre over the last day, I thought about its implications for me. Certainly I will do my part to change our society so this kind of at-scale violence is no longer possible. But at a deeper level, I realized both that my anger will never fully dissipate, and that it shouldn’t. Even if I had the emotional capacity to completely let it go, the vastness of the horror demands that we remember. Although remembering won’t, by itself, prevent the next mass killing, forgetting would all but ensure it.
In the months and years after 9/11, there was an important discussion about America’s security vulnerabilities and the ways al-Qaeda “sleeper cells” might exploit them.1 The discourse spanned inadequate security at our ports, through which a nuclear weapon could pass unseen, concern about hard-to-detect “dirty bombs,” and fears about biological and chemical weapons, which became acute after anthrax was delivered through the mail to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and others.
Because I lived in DC, the topic felt personally relevant and I spent time thinking about it. I would put myself in the shoes of a terrorist wanting to inflict injury on the U.S. while injecting (more) fear into American life and think about how I might do it. Eventually, I concluded the simplest, most efficient way for a terrorist group to instill widespread fear would be to conduct mass shootings in seemingly random public places. In the post-9/11 environment, even a handful of terrorist attacks with assault weapons would have disrupted the country for days. Automatic weapons and ammunition could be bought cheaply and legally, and the effort would only require a handful of people. No flying lessons, plane tickets, or lax security procedures required.
Mercifully, it never happened. The sleeper cells were a fear exaggerated by the understandably panicked American intelligence community and the politically opportunistic Bush White House. Sleeper cells didn’t engage in mass shootings because they didn’t exist.
But foreign terrorists aren’t the only source of unpredictable, terrifying violence. With nary an al-Qaeda operative in sight, there have been 274 mass shootings in the U.S. since 2009, about one every two-and-a-half weeks. In those attacks, 1,536 people have been killed and 983 wounded.
[Aside: Counting “mass shootings” starts with defining the term. The 274 figure comes from the advocacy group Everytown, which strictly defines a mass shooting as an incident in which “four or more people are killed with a firearm, excluding the perpetrator.” This definition excludes incidents like the recent attack in the New York City subway, in which 10 people were shot but none killed. The exact number of mass shootings cited in the media tends to be all over the place because there’s no widely agreed upon definition.]
Rather than al-Qaeda terrorizing us with guns, all levels of government have empowered our fellow citizens to do it. It’s no mystery where it comes from.
Why is regulation of guns so incredibly lax in the United States? Multiple reasons, and there’s a legitimate debate about the relative importance of each. One of the most significant reasons is U.S. political institutions are easily and regularly controlled by a minority of the country. Specifically a small-state minority, which in practice means a rural and exurban, white, right-wing, pro-gun minority.
The dynamic is clearest in the Senate, where Republicans have held a majority for 22 of the 42 years since 1980, but only in 2 of those years did their Senate majority represent a majority of Americans. The Senate filibuster raises the threshold for success so high that passing legislation that can’t be shoehorned into a reconciliation bill is nearly impossible. From Ron Brownstein:
The practical implications of these imbalances were dramatized by the last full-scale Senate debate over gun control. After the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut, the Senate in 2013 voted on a measure backed by President Barack Obama to impose background checks on all gun sales. …[T]he 54 senators who supported the bill (plus then–Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who opposed it only for procedural reasons) represented 194 million Americans. The remaining senators who opposed the bill represented 118 million people. But because of the Senate’s filibuster rule, which requires the backing of 60 senators to move legislation to a vote, the 118 million prevailed.
Indeed, the most recent meaningful federal gun regulation, the 1994 assault weapons ban, passed the Senate 56-43, while the post-Sandy Hook 2013 legislation failed 55-45. Why the different outcomes when the votes were almost identical? Because 1994 was before controversial bills were routinely filibustered! Nobody filibustered President Clinton’s crime bill that included the assault weapons ban, so the law passed with 56 votes. Today, controversial bills with 56 senators in support are filibustered and are therefore DOA.
The assault weapons ban included a ten-year sunset provision, and it lapsed in 2004. By then the Republican Party had begun to radicalize on guns, so the bill was not reauthorized and assault weapons became legal once again.
Another minoritarian institution, the Supreme Court, has arguably had an even more profound influence on the non-regulation of guns. In District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), a 5-4 Court ruled that the Second Amendment protects an individual's right to own guns, regardless of service in a militia, and that Washington D.C.’s law banning handguns and requiring rifles and shotguns be stored safely (trigger lock or disassembled) violated this right.2 This significantly weakened states’ ability to regulate the ownership and use of guns.
Two important things here:
Two of the five votes for Heller, Roberts and Alito, were appointed by a president (Bush) first elected by a minority of the voters.3
The decision was based on an utterly ahistorical, made-up reading of the Second Amendment, meaning it was an exercise of raw political power by a minoritarian institution.
For anyone inclined to think “made-up” is biased or exaggerated, in 1991 former Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nixon-appointee Warren Burger told PBS:
The gun lobby’s interpretation of the Second Amendment is one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American People by special interest groups that I have seen in my lifetime.
He later wrote, in an article for the Associated Press:
[T]he real purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure that state armies, the militia, would be maintained for the defense of the state.
The very language of the Second Amendment refutes any argument that it was intended to guarantee every citizen an unfettered right to any kind of weapon he or she desires.
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.
If we step back and squint, we can see the United States is running an elaborate experiment on whether a modern society can function with widespread ownership of and unfettered access to weapons of war. Though AR-15s have been sold to civilians since the mid-1960s, private ownership used to be in the thousands, now it’s many millions.
As a result of all those guns sold since 2008, no country has ever lived in an overall gun environment like the one we are living in today.5 Here’s how stark the gap is between us and everyone else on earth.
We can summarize the state of play this way: the experiment is going badly, but it hasn’t yet become a sustained crisis that consistently holds people’s attention, and our political institutions are almost perfectly skewed to prevent reform.
The eternal anger and devastation over the slaughter of small children, combined with our political system’s minority rule biases, are yet another source of instability in America. Political majorities may tolerate minority rule if the conditions of daily life are generally acceptable, but regular school shootings likely make that difficult.
Climate analysts call the growing, increasingly desperate need and desire for climate action, “torque.” The holding back by powerful polluting interests of an adequate public response prevents action, but it also adds to this pent-up torque. At some point it will spring free and an enormous burst of activity will explode into the world.
The same may be true for guns. Today, the forces that support maximalist gun access are powerful enough to restrain the swelling demand for change. But there’s no guarantee that particular relative strength relationship will last forever. In fact, given the inevitability of future mass shootings, it will be under ongoing pressure. If and when the gun maximalist forces can no longer hold back the pent-up demand for change, the bursting forth of energy may take any number of shapes, with orderly political reform being just one possibility.
How exactly might it play out? On one side, the sacrifice of breathing, loving, joyful children on the alter of gun worship is morally intolerable and rage-inducing. On the other side, in the right-wing identity pantheon guns are right there with God, family, and traditional social hierarchies. Plus, millions on the right view every gun regulation as a trojan horse for leftist tyranny. So while the outlines of the “gun issue” mirror many policy debates, the stakes are much, much higher. That makes the building torque that much more powerful and potentially explosive, and it means the backlash to the torque being unleashed could be similarly powerful and unpredictable.
Notes:
https://everytownresearch.org/maps/mass-shootings-in-america/
https://maps.everytownresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Everytown-mass-shootings-report-2009-2018_Methodology.pdf
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/candor-take-two/sharetoken/CpfEBNpc9sN9
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2022/05/senate-state-bias-filibuster-blocking-gun-control-legislation/638425/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/11/on-the-military-and-civilian-history-of-the-ar-15/622310/
https://www.texastribune.org/2022/05/24/texas-gun-laws-uvalde-mass-shootings/
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/01/business/coronavirus-gun-sales.html
There was a lot of fear-mongering mixed in with a lot of genuine fear and, as you probably remember, with the shock of 9/11 still fresh, it was often difficult to tell them apart.
As I wrote two weeks ago, the Court may be about to further weaken states’ ability to enact gun regulations that enhance public safety.
Bush won the electoral college in 2000, but lost the popular vote to Al Gore by half a million votes. Bush then won both the electoral college and the popular vote in 2004, in part on the strength of the reputation he made responding to 9/11. Bush appointed Roberts and Alito in his second term.
Originalism for thee, but not for me.
In fact, in recent decades, countries like the UK and Australia have chosen to seriously restrict gun ownership in the wake of horrific mass shootings.