Back to the Heart of Darkness in Texas and the U.S.
It is far too easy to get upset, angry, and apoplectic every time a politician, a so-called “elected leader” offers “thoughts and prayers” for the victims of the latest mass shooting and the bereaved and then, in nearly the next breath, declare that “the other side” is guilty of politicizing the issue when the subject of gun control is brought up. It is also exhausting.
I live in Houston where there is permit-less conceal carry. My situational awareness spikes whenever I’m out, although so far, not to the point of dread. However, for someone who enjoys movies and writing about them, I sometimes wonder if someone is going to go off in a theater. Or if I’m strolling down the street on a walk, is someone having a bad day going to decide one less white bearded guy is less necessary or when I’m grocery shopping, what are the chances that someone else is going to lose their shit or decide to take out a store out of grievances along a spectrum (maybe racism, political orientation, gender orientation, who knows?) No, I don’t get morbid about it, but it crosses my mind more than I’d like.
Waking up to news about the shooting in Allen was not a great way to begin the day. I am hesitant to continue writing about this about without suggesting solutions, but there is an immense amount of denial on the part of those people who valorize gun ownership, who believe a good guy with a gun is the best solution, and who routinely dismiss any serious solution to enacting genuine gun regulation. Indeed, the governor and legislature of this state have pretty much made it a de facto statement that meaningful gun legislation is off the table.
That won’t keep them from croaking about how this is a Democrats problem, the result of liberal policies, of being soft on crime, of how these are sick individuals but then, these same legislators and so-called “leaders” will claim that funding more healthcare is socialism and such solutions are dead on arrival. And croak they do.
Another reason I’m hesitant to bloviate as is my wont is because others, like Heather Cox Richardson, are so much more capable and eloquent than I in getting the point across that this issue is, in fact, political. It is. It simply is.
To Professor Richardson’s point, since the mid-1970s, the National Rifle Association has driven the conversation, funding increasingly right-wing politicians and assuming a place of power in the nation’s politics out of proportion to their numbers. Of course, where did the NRA relocate to when they were driven out of New York after filing a bad faith bankruptcy claim and stated it would be moving their headquarters to Dallas. Of course, this is fine with Texas. Ken Paxton, the states AG-under-indictment is all gung-ho about protecting the poor, beleaguered gun-lovin’ freedom fightin’ org.
“The NRA should be allowed to relocate to a state that respects its right to exist and the freedom of its members to defend their Second Amendment rights,” said Attorney General Paxton. “New York’s antagonism toward this 150-year-old civil rights organization must end. Of the NRA’s five million members, 400,000 are Texans—more than any other state—and we welcome its relocation.”
Enough said.
My thoughts about Allen just continued to spin and wheel from there to Uvalde to Sandy Hook, all the way back to Columbine and it occurs to me that the problem may be with our phallophilia. I live in a state that honors the go it alone, single-minded, and very often, deadly cowboy hero of the B-movies and the fever dreams of grown-ups who really do think Manifest Destiny meant every man (very often, only a man, and one that is Caucasian to the fullest extent of their law) for himself and then, likely “God and country” in there somewhere. It’s the same colonialist/expansionist ploy humanity always uses to take what doesn’t belong to them…or spread Christianity or democracy or some such. Many of these people would perfectly understand Col. Kurtz’s orders to “Exterminate the brutes” as a direct mission statement on the way to spreading the Word of the Lord and/or The American Way of Life.
I mention both of those alleged reasons for white expansion because, well, this is the justification many of our ancestors used to conquer the American wilderness and move/get rid of those pesky tribal peoples that kept cropping up everywhere. These mandates, if you will, still stand for very many of our countrymen, particularly the ones in control of what are referred to as Red States. They would have us believe that theirs is the only True America and that their states are the best by any measure, but I have to ask the question, by what measure?
Let’s take Texas. We have the largest number of gun deaths in the country, this is where the war on abortion really took off, there is a systematic attack on education in a state that ranks near the bottom of childhood well-being and education. Some would say that there might be a link between miserable public healthcare and access to guns. The correlation is compelling.
And what of the claim that gun deaths are more of a “Blue State thing” as so many of these tired, old, and not-so-old predominantly white guys (and gals) claim? Well, no.
Over the past couple of days, I’ve returned to my data wonk roots and spent time with data files from the CDC, the Pew Research Institute, and the Gun Violence Archive. I’ve got nothing but corroboration from every source that establishes that this claim is nonsense.
Here’s a quick snapshot of the top states with gun deaths in totals as of 2021 (source: CDC)
|
YEAR |
STATE |
RATE |
DEATHS |
|
2021 |
TX |
15.6 |
4613 |
|
2021 |
CA |
9 |
3576 |
|
2021 |
FL |
14.1 |
3142 |
|
2021 |
GA |
20.3 |
2200 |
|
2021 |
IL |
16.1 |
1995 |
|
2021 |
OH |
16.5 |
1911 |
|
2021 |
PA |
14.8 |
1905 |
|
2021 |
NC |
17.3 |
1839 |
|
2021 |
TN |
22.8 |
1569 |
|
2021 |
MI |
15.4 |
1544 |
Doesn’t look goof for a lot of Red Staters, does it? Oh, but look! There’s Georgia! There’s Pennsylvania! And Illinois! AND CALIFORNIA! What about them???!!!
What about them? Yes, the sheer number of deaths is grim but this shouldn’t be a game of whatboutism, it should be a call to look more deeply at the statistics and most of all, to look more deeply at ourselves as a society.
I would like to draw your attention to the “RATE” column. This number of deaths per 100,000 people. This changes the substance of what conservatives decry as a #ThemToo whistle.
Below, I’ve taken the highest RATES with their states and put them up top and, separated by some rows, those states with the lowest. (Source: CDC)
California has the 8th lowest mortality rate of 9 deaths per 100K (in 2021, MA has the lowest of 3.4 deaths per 100K); indeed, the states with the lowest gun deaths per 100,000 people are all Democrat states.
The only state that voted Biden: New Mexico. Texas may not have made the top ten (25th) but the results need to be taken seriously: this is very much more a Red State problem with greater access to guns buttressed by lax gun laws.
YEAR STATE RATE
2021 MS 33.9
2021 LA 29.1
2021 NM 27.8
2021 AL 26.4
2021 WY 26.1
2021 AK 25.2
2021 MT 25.1
2021 AR 23.3
2021 MO 23.2
2021 TN 22.8
2021 CA 9
2021 NH 8.3
2021 CT 6.7
2021 RI 5.6
2021 NY 5.4
2021 NJ 5.2
2021 HI 4.8
2021 MA 3.4
We look for and talk about solutions and this is where my mood grow dark.
We know what the answers are. At the very least, background checks, background checks, background checks. Paying attention to red flags would be a start; I don’t want my emotionally challenged sibling, son, daughter, wife, husband, friend buying a gun. If someone sells a gun to someone whose record is one of mental instability, then I don’t think selling them the means for dealing with that instability that might well result in harm to themselves or others is terribly responsible.
Raise the age for gun ownership. Why can a child who isn’t old enough to drink or vote (and in some states) not old enough to drive allowed to own a weapon? Having said that, I can understand why there would be pushback. Okay, don’t raise the age, but here, let’s see how the worshippers of blue finish metal like the idea of banning assault weapons completely from the private sector. That includes the AR-15, any self-respecting shooter’s cheap, efficient, weapon of mass murder.
All of this would be well and good, but my mood remains dark, not because of the near-nil probability of any rational gun legislation being passed in this state or others like it, but because there is the additional issue of what to do with enormous stockpiles of weapons already in circulation? The only feasible possibility would be a voluntary government buy-back and that seems beyond imagining.
No, something else has to change and that’s what I find most daunting. This would require the long haul of voting out extremists and actually voting in people who care about the health of their communities and by extension, the greater polity. Not these so-called “leaders” with the mental and emotional capacities of toddlers. If meaningful change is to take place, it has to begin with us.
Even that, though, is easier said than done because, again, in all these states that really do need change, access to voting has grown further and further restricted, supported by similarly politicized (oh! That naughty word again!) courts across the country.
These issues intersect based on a party platform rooted in prioritizing lip service to individual liberty, the right to do what I want, regardless of how much it inconveniences (if not outright terrorizes) other people. The people who represent this party might even believe passionately that they are right, that their love for country is heartfelt and so on. However, that speaks to the immense failure of civic responsibility in this country being based on caring for others first, making sure that those in need have their needs met. Mine already are; it is my responsibility to pay taxes to see that infrastructure remains safe and secure, that kids get a decent education, that people in dire straits have a safety net that they can rely on. Getting shot should not be a concern.
The solution comes down to voting, yet again, and if voting in a democracy is now so fraught in some states as to be near impossible owing to redistributing/gerrymandering and manipulated so that young people and people of color do not have easy access to the polls, how can that change? Well, that’s going on right now, too.
I don’t see much, if any, change in the next five to ten years. These suits will continue to come up repeatedly but it will take concerted effort to keep the pressure on elected officials and even the courts (a topic for a whole other post.)
It is ill-advised to assume that merely because the various governors, senators, and congressional reps can be voted out of office that this is a done deal. The message needs to be made crystal clear; the will of the people is not being attended to by the Abbotts and the De Santises across the country. The fact that they are more than willing to deny responsibility for the thousands of people murdered en masse tells me that they are unfit for office. They know the playbook well: divide the poorer classes, pit ethnicity against ethnicity, invoke religious language (that these people can parade their venality as some form of Christianity is mind-numbing), and in general, gin up as much fear and division as possible and they can be little emperors for life.
I opened that it’s too easy to be angry about all of this. Over the past three or so days since I’ve been wading through statistics, essays, and articles, I’ve also been working on not making this too personal. I mean by that simply this: letting anger consume oneself is a sure way to cease to the humanity in others, however little humanity I might see in them at the moment. Yes, the victims of each gun assault and death deserve their anger; but for me, it’s not helpful to despise the governor or the lieutenant or the AG or the various other representatives. They may do despicable things like pass legislation that harms more people than legislation that helps, but this only serves to underscore their immense ignorance, stupidity, and frankly, greed.
It’s genuinely difficult for me to hate another person, but it doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be held to account. Whether that happens is dependent on other factors that an individual can only assist in supporting. It takes a concerted effort by many, many people to effect change. Hopefully, that’s taking place even as I write this.
Sources and notes:
For raw data sets, I highly recommend the following:
https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/
https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/reports/mass-shooting
Firearm mortality by state (CDC):
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/firearm_mortality/firearm.htm
What the Data Says About Gun Deaths in the U.S. (Pew Research Center)
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/26/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-u-s/
Red State Murder Problem:
https://www.thirdway.org/report/the-red-state-murder-problem
Education and Crime:
https://esfandilawfirm.com/correlation-between-education-and-crime/
Justice Department cases related to Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/06/us/politics/texas-voting-rights-redistricting.html
https://www.justice.gov/crt/cases-raising-claims-under-section-2-voting-rights-act-0
Responses to Allen, TX shooting:
As usual, Heather Cox Richardson provided historical context for the socipolitical twists and turns that have brought us to our present situation:
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/may-6-2023
Red State Murder Problem:
https://www.thirdway.org/report/the-red-state-murder-problem
Republicans have repeatedly turned to crime in America as a platform talking point, framing it as an issue specific to large, Democratically-run cities.
While overall homicides increased domestically in 2020, an analysis by Third Way, a public policy think tank, found that murder rates are higher in "Trump-voting red states" than "Biden-voting blue states." (See “Red State Murder Problem”)
Comments
Post a Comment