Let's Talk About Guns, Shall We?
There is no real consensus about what constitutes a mass shooting, but by most measures there have been almost 200 in 2023 and we’re not even close to half-way through the year. Last week there were 22 mass shootings. According to CNN there was a day in April when we had seven mass shootings in one day. Almost 15,000 people have died from gun violence this year.
Last week there were also two mass shootings in Serbia, one on Wednesday and one on Thursday, the first in a decade. Their president, however, has already announced stricter gun control laws. When a mass shooting in New Zealand claimed the lives of more than 50 people, it took three days for the cabinet to overhaul the nation’s gun control laws, including a ban on military style assault weapons. In the U.S, unfortunately, it seems like we’re stuck.
Gun control is complicated in the United States, not just by our politics, but by our culture. The freedom to own guns is baked into our Constitution, though how expansive that freedom is is up for debate. Our politicians pose with their own guns for Christmas cards, or when a suspected Chinese spy balloon is in our airspace. And while we’d like for this to be a purely right wing problem, we on the left have our own Senator Manchin who once released a campaign ad where he shot his own party’s Cap and Trade bill. That bill didn’t even have anything to do with guns, and they still featured prominently in the ad. Right wing bigot and deliberately provoking commentator Charlie Kirk says our gun deaths are worth the freedom of the Second Amendment, and it seems like he’s not alone.
While mass shootings often dominate the conversation, intimate partner violence, police shootings, and suicide are a huge part of our gun violence problem. And recently, we’ve seen a spate of gun violence where someone is shot after going up to the wrong car or the wrong house.
It’s not just the guns. A man was murdered on the subway in NYC last week after he was put in a chokehold by another passenger for fifteen minutes for the crime of being hungry and tired and unhoused and understandably loud and upset about it. As I was writing this I got a news alert about a car plowing into a shelter housing migrants and killing seven people. For years, the right wing of our politics has devoted itself to convincing anyone it can that our nation is under attack, that migrants are coming to replace hard working Americans, that Black and brown people are bringing terrorism and disease over our borders, that queer people are here to groom your children, that Democrats are actually a secret cabal of pedophiles, that blue cities are crime ridden horror shows with danger around every corner. On Fox News recently they claimed that we should have a plan to kill everyone we meet.
We are not under attack from people or families that don’t look like ours. We are not under attack from people from other countries. We are not under attack from teenagers who ring the wrong doorbell or get into the wrong car. I live in a blue city and I’m not scared. I ride the subway all the time, and I’ve never once been in danger from an unhoused person yelling. The Right want us to be afraid of each other. They want us to hide in our corners, to be angry and scared and alone, so that we don’t realize how much we have in common, how much we have to fight for together, how much we have to gain by learning from each other, from different opportunities and perspectives. How much better the world can be when we raise each other up.
We are not under attack from each other. We are under attack from fascist-curious, right wing bigotry that frames freedom as the freedom to enact violence on others, that wants us to blame those who are suffering rather than those who harm. We are under attack from a culture which allows the death penalty for making someone else nervous, when so often what makes us nervous is based more in our own biases than in any actual danger. We are under attack from a politics that refuses to budge, that prioritizes made up Senate rules over passing legislation, that rewards attention rather than action. We are under attack at the movies and music festivals, at school and at home, at places of worship and parks and the mall, from (mostly) white men with really big guns that shoot a lot of bullets really fast.
We don’t have to keep giving up our freedom for theirs. We do not have to submit to the constant surveillance of police, of metal detectors, of third graders learning to apply tourniquets. We do not have to let them cloak themselves in violence and toxicity to feel safe, while we experience no such safety. We do not have to let them make us afraid of each other.
Gun violence prevention is complicated in so many ways. When we criminalize something, our criminal legal system distributes those penalties inequitably. We already lead the world in the number of people incarcerated, disproportionately Black and brown people who are over policed and over criminalized. Filling up our jails even more is not the answer. We cannot forget the complexity that inevitably comes with trying to make ourselves safer. But guns, and particularly assault weapons, are killing us. Gun violence is killing us and our government is full of politicians who care more about the guns than they do about the violence we face, politicians who would rather we kill each other than help each other. We need to do something, and we won’t do it while they remain in power.
Here’s how you can help:
Follow Moms Demand Action and Everytown for Gun Safety. Not only do they have a lot of good info, they also do a lot of work at the state and local level which can be instrumental while federal politics is at a standstill
Donate to the Vote Save America No Off Years fund which distributes your donation among groups doing critical on the ground organizing to transform politics across the country. We won’t be able to change gun laws until we have elected officials that actually represent us.
Call your members of Congress and ask them to support gun violence prevention legislation. Yes, even if they already do. Yes, even if you know they never will. The way change happens is very slowly and then all at once, and making sure legislators know our positions on key issues is vital to making that happen. I have a guide for you here.