In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder yesterday, on the campus of Utah Valley University (UVU), pundits will again call for “national conversations” on toning down political rhetoric, rethinking gun rights, and addressing the increasing mental imbalance of Gen Z and younger generations. Some of these calls for dialogue may be in earnest. But few will go deep enough to touch the raw violence embedded in the American political imagination, which has come to believe differences of opinion are a threat to personal survival. And so, after a few news cycles, nothing, as always, will change. As Ian MacKaye of seminal punk band Fugazi once put it, “there’s no movement in a bad mind”.

Kirk, while highly combative and snark-driven online, was reportedly kind and generous in private — a devoted husband, a loyal friend, and an attentive father. A bad man he was not. But a bad mind is something else entirely. Kirk’s death, like his rise to fame, is the product of a culture war so entrenched, over issues so narrow but also so intransigent, that it now threatens to consume the republic. And in that frame, the place of Kirk’s death matters: not just as a backdrop, but as a symbol of how horridly intolerant and stupid we’ve all become. For Kirk was shot in Orem, Utah, at an event hosted on the campus of UVU — a site highly reflective of the culture war, and one I know intimately, having been born and raised in nearby Holladay.

Utah is far more than red rocks, Mormon temples, and the Osmonds. It’s also a mirror of the national divide, a perfect microcosm of America’s fractured soul. Despite what most people think, Salt Lake City and its surrounding county are solidly blue, aggressively secular, and its residents often go well out of their way to prove their progressive bonafides, not only to outsiders but to themselves. Today, five of the city’s seven council members identify as LGBTQ. The legislature that governs them, however, is dominated by arch-conservative rural and suburban counties — devoutly Mormon, heavily armed, and firmly in the grip of a Right-wing mentality that has less to do with the actual teachings of Joseph Smith and more the influence of Fox News and superficial online influencers like Kirk.

Orem and the UVU campus sit on the fault line between these two worlds. The relationship between Salt Lake’s progressive political class and Utah’s conservative rural bloc is not just adversarial. At times, it can feel borderline psychotic. The two groups do indeed want to hurt one another. Even when basic cooperation would obviously benefit both sides, hostility generally triumphs. Last year, for instance, Utah lost the Sundance Film Festival, a major cultural and economic engine. This didn’t happen because it was unprofitable, or poorly run, but because the state legislature refused to offer even modest tax concessions which they would do in almost any other similar circumstance. But punishing urban “libs” was more important than protecting local film workers, tourism jobs, or small business revenue. This isn’t dysfunction, it’s deliberate sabotage, waged in the name of cultural purity. And that’s what makes Utah such a stark lens for understanding Kirk’s shooting.

I’ve witnessed these tensions firsthand. Twenty years ago, I served as the communications director and speechwriter for former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson — one of the most combative local politicians in recent memory. He was, in his way, the Left’s version of Trump, totally abrasive, pugnacious, and completely uninterested in diplomacy of any kind. But he won reelection and was, again, very recently chosen as a top-two candidate for Salt Lake City mayor despite now being in his 70s.

Anderson’s popularity endured because he knew exactly what his base wanted in their heart of hearts — someone willing to take on the Mormon Church and the Republican legislature with unrelenting, theatrical aggression. In Utah, there was never a shortage of culture war material. Anderson fed the beast constantly blasting the LDSs, telling The Guardian they were “Taliban-like”. It may seem like an odd move for a Salt Lake mayor but, believe me, it was a deliberate choice, and the city’s electorate loved it.

The more the mayor condemned Utah conservatives, the more popular he became. We talked about it openly several times. I attempted to steer his rhetoric to a more compromising tone, but was vehemently rebuffed on every occasion. UVU sits right on the fault line — the literal and political divide — between deep-blue Salt Lake County and the hard-red Utah County to the south. I think it’s no coincidence, in other words, that Kirk was killed at this particular intersection. Already, some on the Right have speculated, without evidence, that the shooter must be a trans activist. That narrative will almost certainly gain traction once it becomes more widely known just how deeply LGBTQ advocacy groups dominate Salt Lake City and county politics. In fact, moments before the shooting, someone in the crowd reportedly asked Kirk, “How many of the mass shooters were trans?”

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While that possibility can’t yet be ruled out — especially when the Wall Street Journal reports that the shooter’s bullets may have been engraved with expressions of trans ideology — yet more scapegoating won’t solve the deeper issues that led to Kirk’s killing. The causes are both local and national, but at every level the problem is uniquely American. For if Utah’s deep polarization speaks to a national malaise, giving people ample causes to kill for, these partisan divides are vast and widening right across the Western world. The difference, as the dreadful clips of Kirk’s shooting so vividly shows, is that would-be murderers in the United States can also lean on the vagaries of the Second Amendment.

I’m hardly the first to say this, but guns are everywhere here, something that burrows to the heart of why US citizens tolerate, and even normalize, levels of gun violence that would be unthinkable in any other wealthy nation. More to the point, they’re accessible even to the deeply mentally ill and those with violent criminal records. Decarlos Brown, whose own mother tried to have him committed, infamously stabbed Iryna Zarutska on that Charlotte train last month. But given the laxity of the laws, he could just as easily have shot her. As a show of ideological purity, indeed, many red states have spent the last two decades dismantling even the most basic restrictions on gun ownership. Charlie Kirk was a vocal supporter of that movement. Utah is emblematic of the trend, and the consequences were visible well before Kirk’s murder.

In June, at the “No Kings” rally in Salt Lake City, a man was seen near the edge of the crowd assembling an AR-15 rifle. In true Middle-American fashion, several designated “peacekeepers”, many of them armed themselves, opened fire, believing they were stopping a mass shooting in real time. The man was shot and injured. But so too was an innocent bystander, killed in the crossfire of this chaotic, DIY version of public safety.

Well before anyone pulled a trigger, several rallygoers had already called 911 to report the man and his weapon. Dispatchers told them there was nothing they could do. Their hands were tied — because, in Utah, it’s entirely legal to brandish a loaded assault rifle in public, even at a political rally. In 2021, the state also eliminated its permit requirement for concealed carry. Residents can now carry firearms openly or hidden without a license, training, or any oversight whatsoever.

Anyone 21 and over who can lawfully possess a firearm, which, in Utah, is basically anyone without a criminal record, is completely free to carry a loaded, hidden firearm in public. That’s why the man assembling an assault rifle at the Salt Lake rally couldn’t be arrested until he actually opened fire. The psychological toll of living in such a society — where you can see someone preparing for a massacre and still be told “nothing can be done” — cannot be overstated. Again, I know these fears myself. Years ago, while teaching at the University of Utah, I had undergraduates show up to my office hours with pistols visibly strapped to their chests. Like the rally goers, I was legally unable to do anything — not even refuse to meet with the armed students. The university had attempted to ban firearms on campus, but the legislature sued and won.

A few years later, while teaching at the University of Texas at Austin, one of my undergraduates submitted an essay describing, in graphic detail, a fantasy in which he murdered his professor and then the rest of the class. Even if I had reported the paper, it wouldn’t have led to any firearms being confiscated. Not under Texas law, and definitely not under Utah’s. In 2018, Utah legislators briefly considered a bill that would have allowed courts to issue protective orders removing firearms from individuals deemed “severely mentally ill” or “violent, unstable”. But the bill was quietly stalled in committee and permitted to die. It has never been meaningfully revisited.

Despite the fantasies of the NRA and other pro-gun groups perversely proclaiming “an armed society is a polite society”, for the aware individual living amid this culture of gun fanaticism, the experience often feels quite different. For, if firearms are allowed everywhere, the reality is that you — and your family — might not be safe anywhere, which only feeds the need many feel to further arm themselves, literally and emotionally, in preparation for battle. Charlie Kirk might have been completely earnest in his desire to have good faith debates in public. But in America’s culture of violence and embrace of mostly unnecessary economic insecurity, very few young people are interested in debate of any kind today.

There’s an argument to be made, then, that the collective anxiety sparked by America’s culture of guns encourages political polarization, and vice versa. The woke Left might be off the rails on issues of race and gender. Progressives might frequently overreach in their attempts to play national therapist. But the American pro-gun movement is just as unhinged — if not more so. The derangement of America’s pro-gun obsession has taken on an almost cultic character. It’s ideological, absolutist, and soaked in a kind of religious fatalism. Indeed, when you combine this fanaticism with the fact that many of its most devout adherents also call themselves “Christians”, it becomes hard not to draw comparisons to Islamism. Either way, the idea that America’s mass shooting epidemic is somehow not a direct consequence of our carte-blanche right to bear arms, and the gun lobby’s relentless campaign to eliminate even modest restrictions, is straightforwardly absurd.

This year alone, there have already been 309 mass shootings in the US. That’s an average of nearly 1.3 per day. Again, firearms in themselves are not surely the only factor here. As the grim example of Decarlos Brown implies, too many dangerous people are allowed to roam the streets, pampered by a naively utopian justice system. But if the closure of dozens of psychotic hospitals over recent decades is clearly a problem, as is the fact that even habitual offenders are not locked up, it’s hard not to return, again and again, to the question of guns and who is allowed to own them.

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Among US adults, after all, 1.5-2% of the population experience hallucinations, delusions, or other severe psychotic symptoms. Out of a population of roughly 330-40 million people, that equals around five or six million people — nearly all of whom can arm themselves and take shots at innocent children or public figures they dislike, should the voices in their head instruct them to do so. Examined in its totality, it’s actually surprising there aren’t far more mass shootings and assassinations in the United States, though even the number that do happen are shocking enough.

Just turn on the news. Less than an hour after Charlie Kirk was shot, another school shooting unfolded in Evergreen, Colorado. One teenager was killed and two others seriously wounded. The day before that, six people were shot in San Francisco. Two days earlier, in Cleveland, another six were injured, including a 16-year-old boy shot in the teeth. It hasn’t even been a full two weeks since the massacre at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, where dozens of people, most of them elementary school children, were shot down in church. Two children were confirmed dead, but the final death toll could easily have been in the dozens, all in a country that continues to produce over 70% of the developed world’s mass shootings, year after year, without pause.

Two years ago, at a public event held not long after the Nashville school shooting — in which three children and three adults were killed by a non-binary assailant — Kirk was asked whether the mounting body count had shaken his faith in the Second Amendment. He gave an answer that was appalling in its content, but admirable for its consistency. “Having an armed citizenry comes with a price, and that is part of liberty,” he said. “You’re not going to get gun deaths to zero. You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won’t have a single gun death. I think it’s worth it. Some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.”

One must admit, Kirk lived his values right up to the moment an assassin’s bullet pierced his neck. But in 10 years, or 20, will his widow and young children see things the same way? That, in the end, is the real cost of America’s death bargain. It’s easy to call tragedy the cost of “freedom” when the corpses aren’t your own. But, as Ian MacKaye knew, there’s no movement in a bad mind. And today, as Kirk becomes a martyr for the online Right, America feels increasingly overrun by bad minds, and still wholly unwilling to admit the obvious.

Democratic presidents Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were all hunters who were open about owning a gun. Before he was elected president, Harry Truman proudly posed for a photograph holding two pistols he had bought that once belonged to Jesse James. And though FDR was the first president to try to pass national legislation restricting the ownership of weapons, Eleanor Roosevelt was said to often be packing a pistol in her purse.

Still, just as few people are as opposed to war as soldiers who have fought in them, owning and using a gun hasn’t stood in the way of a Democratic politician passionately opposing the wanton possession of firearms. No one hated what he referred to as the “extreme” policies of the NRA more than Carter, who at one time claimed to own “a handgun, four shotguns, and two rifles”. And it’s not as if the other side corresponded to the caricatures of political positions that abound today. Nixon was caught on tape saying, “I don’t know why any individual should have a right to have a revolver in his house.” Reagan, a firm defender of the NRA, alleged to sometimes carry a handgun in his briefcase, was a powerful advocate for the Brady Bill, which requires extensive background checks for prospective gun purchasers. He also supported a ban on owning assault weapons, a policy proposal which is anathema to just about every Republican now.

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It’s a platitude to say that guns occupy a prominent place in the American psyche. But they are the most explicit dysfunction of American life. As our freedoms expand, so do our fears and insecurities; as freedom gets big in one dimension, people tend to feel small in another. As anyone knows who has sat basking in the sun on an American beach, only to have someone else plant themselves down a few feet away with a large incursive dog and a speaker blaring loud music, one person’s freedom is often another person’s misery. I have a suspicion that as the American sense of entitlement has trampled the sense of American responsibility, and as larger freedoms have resulted in feelings of vulnerability and inadequacy, sedans have been overtaken by SUVs, fast food portions have grown freakishly large, empty displays of personal virtue have grown bigger and bigger — and handguns have come to be seen as hopelessly inferior to semiautomatic rifles.

Harris’s openness about owning a handgun — it’s a Glock, she told 60 Minutes — is probably the most dramatically symbolic step she is taking towards the way people live rather than how they ought to live. If I had my druthers, the next president would pass a national law requiring every gun owner to keep their guns locked up at gun clubs, as they do in Norway, Anders Breivik’s slaughter being a monstrous anomaly in that country. But that is no more likely to happen than Utopia itself. What is within legislative reach is the shaming and ostracising of Republican lawmakers who oppose a ban on killing machines such as semiautomatic rifles. The country needs to return to the days of gun-loving liberal politicians leading the charge against the insanity of private citizens owning weapons of war. To the days when a liberal president could lay claim to common values, thus making it possible for a sense of shared community to push back the boundaries of radical individualism, inch by inch. Walz, a proud gun-owner and hunter, is squarely in this tradition. But he’s not running for president, and his presence on the ticket is too transparently expedient and ornamental for it to represent a positive step forward in this respect. Plus, marksman that he claims to be, he spends much of his time shooting himself in the foot.

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It was, most likely, Obama, for all his political shrewdness often too comfortable lolling in rarefied liberal sentiments, who made the Democrats the party of anti-gun fantasy. That created an opportunity for Republicans to turn the Second Amendment into a matter of constitutional Armageddon. Obama’s remark, uttered in 2008, that people in red states “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them…” hangs over the Democratic party to this day. Hillary Clinton, his political rival at the time, pounced on that as an instance of unforgivable “elitism”, only to exhibit an identical elitism when she referred to the same segment of Americans as a “basket of deplorables” four years later. By 2016, when Obama blithely declared on CNN that he had never owned a gun, thus strikingly distancing himself from liberal gun-owning presidents who fought for gun control laws, a new generation of young liberal voters had complacently, and childishly, assimilated the idea that gun ownership tout court was a moral anathema.

In this sense, Harris owning up to possessing a gun bodes well for a Democratic party that has become more and more cut off from the way most Americans — decent, commonsensical Americans, not the small contingent of hard-Right fanatics — live their lives. Horrified by police murders of innocent blacks, they want the police to protect them from violence; whether it’s committed by blacks or whites, they don’t care. They are confused by the initiative to introduce young children to the option to radically alter their genders. And even though alarmed by the effects of climate change, they cannot understand why they have been hectored and shamed into buying electric cars they cannot afford.

The acknowledgment, by Harris, that you can own a handgun and, by extension, a hunting rifle, and at the same time want to make semiautomatic rifles illegal, should be about as controversial as someone claiming to be an atheist and suddenly praying to God in a time of trouble. That’s not to say that Harris’s avowal doesn’t also serve several other purposes.

The conventional interpretation of Harris’s “politics of joy” is that she and her handlers mean to contrast that with Trump’s vindictive dark vision of America. But the slogan also tries, on a subtler level, to appeal to people who might be drawn to Trump as the alternative to a repressive liberalism. The woke political revolution of the past eight or so years, now sinking in as an everyday social and cultural style is hardly less dark, in its comparatively understated way, than Trump’s American carnage. In Trump’s vision, ordinary Americans are being chased in the streets by immigrants and criminals. In the woke vision, ordinary Americans are chasing down non-ordinary Americans, group by group. The politics of joy is meant to cry Halt! to both destructive cartoons of American life. (Having invented “woke”, liberals have now made the term embarrassingly unfashionable to use; I demur. You’re stuck with it.)

And what better way to enforce an injunction against the two competing darknesses than the good, old-fashioned American figure of the new sheriff in town, this time sporting, not the six-shooters of Jesse James, but a Glock, the preferred weapon of regular and elite military organisations throughout the world? You’re a criminal or the wrong sort of undocumented immigrant? Hands up. You want to indoctrinate children to feel like racists? Say hello to my little friend. Language in America has become, on the one hand, so extreme, and on the other, thanks to the internet, so much like grunts or graffiti, that words have started to lose their function as vessels of meaning. A gun, on the other hand, has a clear, irreducible meaning.

Finally, and maybe most important of all, the person bearing arms, in this case Kamala Harris, is a short female, part black and part of South Asian descent. In the kingdom of Ends, in the kingdom of God, in the classless society, in the well-ordered society, in Shangri-La, none of that would matter. In America, in 2024, it matters. She also comes across as shallow, thin-skinned, super-entitled, phony and mediocre. That matters. None of this is nice or decent or easy to say. But it is the truth. A torrent of coercive pieties made the impuissant Biden choose Harris as his vice president; Biden’s hubris and lack of character made her their party’s presidential hope. If you had to choose the person least appropriate as Democratic nominee, when the deranged Trump, and the corrupt, craven enablers in his party, simply have to be expunged from the American scene, it would be Kamala Harris.

And so. Here is Harris and her Glock and her embrace of the American normal and the gun as olive branch. It is the gun of the maverick sheriff, of the lone cop inventing their own conformity, of the private eye fighting their way through an existential fog. In American culture, the terrible reality of a gun gets transfigured into the means to a happy ending. As such it might well allow the breathtakingly improbable figure of Kamala Harris to attempt two national salvations: to clean up the insular, self-serving infantilism of woke politics, and to present concrete proof of affinity and respect to alienated people — and who can blame them for their alienation, to a degree? — excited by Trump into a condition tilting on the brink of national suicide.

Columbine was not unprecedented. I knew that. Armed people had shot up American schools before, and Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the Columbine killers, may have been inspired by some of these killings. But their truer inspirations were not shooters at all. They were larger events of mass mayhem and death. In an online journal Harris sketched his ambition to create something “like the LA riots, the Oklahoma bombing, WWII, Vietnam”, and various apocalyptic video games “all mixed together”. Accordingly, he and Klebold conducted a careful study of their school’s cafeteria, to learn when it would be most densely packed with students (11:17am, they determined). They built several large propane bombs, timed them to explode at this peak moment, and, on the morning of their attack, carried them into the cafeteria, using the lunch-hour busyness as cover for their unusual lugging and dropping of heavy duffle bags in a lunch room.

So Harris and Klebold murdered 12 students and a teacher in their attack, and this was the deadliest school shooting in American history, at the time. But their plan was to kill many more — “at least four hundred”, Harris said. Given the size of the bombs he made, and given the number of kids in the lunchroom at 11:17am of April 20, 1999, he may have hit or even exceeded his number, if his poorly made bombs had actually gone off. The Columbine massacre is notorious as a school shooting, then, but it was also, and perhaps more consequentially, a failed bombing.

Beside its failed-bombing aspect, another core fact of Columbine that had faded in my memory is that its mastermind and driving spirit was a figure of evil so total and so extreme that, were he a character in a cartoon, you’d think him too cartoonish. Unlike many other school-shooters and mass-shooters both before and after Columbine, Eric Harris was neither abused nor delusional. He was smart and had a decent number of friends and was somewhat attractive to girls. He was fairly well-raised by a doting mother and an ex-military father — who was kind of a jerk, apparently, but hardly a tyrant to his two sons. Although early reports identified Harris as a bullied member of a group of outcasts called the “Trench Coat Mafia”, he wasn’t in TCM, and he wasn’t bullied. Instead, he just wanted to do bad things, and, as he got older, the badness he wanted to do expanded in scale until it was basically total. He wanted to kill humanity itself — and for no external reason. It was just what he’d come to want. His journals often show him to be angry, but he wasn’t despairing, and his anger, generally arrogant and affronted, was also exuberant. He was high-spirited in his desire to kill everyone, and self-aware. As he put it in one journal entry, “I’m full of hate and I love it.”

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Psychiatrists who’ve profiled him since his death have declared him a psychopath. This is probably accurate, but it’s also inadequate and unsatisfying. Like other psychopaths, Eric Harris totally lacked empathy and remorse, and he took pleasure in — and was very good at — deceiving and manipulating others. But, unlike most psychopaths, Eric Harris had an active, urgent lust to kill all the people in the world. And he had a restless practical bent. He was eager to work. He recruited and groomed his brainy, fitfully suicidal friend Dylan Klebold and, over several years, he made and described and carried out concrete plans for exploding, if not all of the world’s people, at least several hundred of its teenagers. Had his ambition to stage a large-scale massacre somehow passed before he could die attempting it, had he finished school and continued on to a psychopath’s semblance of a regular life, it’s easy to see him becoming a serial killer. His writings include several passages like this: “I want to tear a throat out with my own teeth… I want to grab some weak little freshman and just tear them apart like a wolf, show them who is god.”

That he wrote this stuff down, not only private journals but on a blog, and that he was just such a bristling site of evil energy, raises the predictable question: “How did people not know?” How could the nihilism and murder-lust of a prolific internet braggart, a kid who was making plans and making bombs and arranging for slightly older friends to buy him guns… how could all this have not raised eyebrows and hackles and red flags? In fact it did raise those things. This is the other incredible shock of the case that I’d forgotten.

More than a year before the massacre, Harris fell out with his friend Brooks Brown and began to torment and threaten him, and so Brown’s parents reported Harris to the county sheriff’s department. They’d seen the hair-raising pages from Harris’s website and sent them to the sheriff as well. Investigators there learned that, on top of the Brown harassment and the bloody fantasies and plans he described in his web journal, there was solid evidence that this Harris miscreant was building pipe bombs. They drew up an affidavit requesting that a search warrant be executed on his parents’ house.

But the affidavit somehow never left the sheriff’s department. A judge never saw it. A search warrant was never issued or executed. Again, this happened more than a year before the massacre Harris and Klebold eventually committed. Then, in the days after the massacre, the sheriff’s department learned they already had an old and highly suggestive file on one of the killers, now dead, and that they’d failed to request the search warrant for which they had the affidavit. That is, they could and should have prevented the massacre, and they failed. At this point, with federal agents poking around everywhere, the sheriff and the local prosecutor did what many low-level politicians would do in such a situation. They hid the file and lied about it.

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Such notes of mischance and ineptitude have become a leitmotif of school-shooting narratives. When they emerge, as they always seem to, they inspire the mix of agony and resolve carried in the phrase if only. If only the police had better procedures. If only they’d followed the good procedures they actually have. If only the parents had just paid attention. There’s always something that might have been done differently. Next time we will do the thing that, inconceivably, we failed to do this time.

After Columbine, law enforcement agencies throughout the US resolved to implement one huge lesson from the police response: stop treating school-shootings as hostage situations, in which police set up a perimeter and wait to negotiate with the shooters. Assume there is no negotiating, only murder, and storm the building! Engage the shooter! This was thought to have become the standard for active-shooter incidents in American law enforcement. But when, 19 years after Columbine, a disturbed kid began shooting up a school in Parkland, Florida, the school’s armed “resource officer” named Scot Peterson put himself in a safe position and waited for more cops to arrive.

This cop, a deputy in the local sheriff’s department, would be vilified for his cowardice and then prosecuted for neglecting his duty; but when his fellow deputies arrived, they also set up a perimeter and waited as the shooter claimed his 17 victims, instead of engaging him. When police from a neighboring jurisdiction arrived, they did finally storm the building and engage the shooter. The difference between two groups of officers, as the Atlantic’s Jamie Thompson outlines in a remarkable article, was their training. The second group had received sound, clear training on quickly engaging active shooters. The first group, the sheriff’s department to which the vilified school cop belonged, had received vague, ambiguous training that seemed to tell officers to wait for a bigger team to arrive.

Three years after the Parkland shooting, the elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, featured an even more paralytic response from local police, who waited outside the school for 70 minutes as the gunman finished killing his 19 young victims — after which came another agonised phase in which we looked to the heavens and said: If only. These events, mass killings of schoolchildren, are so unbearable that our psychological response when they happen is to undo them in our minds, to transport ourselves to the alternative timeline on which they didn’t happen. Then we can tell ourselves what actually happened was unnatural, owing to that one deviant thing — the uncanny failure to submit an affidavit, the singular cowardice of a sheriff’s deputy, the tragic loophole in the system for preventing schizophrenics from having guns, the criminal negligence of those oddball parents, who should have snooped on their psychopathic son way more than they did, who should have known their son was a psychopath in the first place, because we would have known. Any normal person would have known.

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And our legal and policy responses to these tragedies express, more or less directly, this need to undo them, fancifully and retroactively — sometimes through policies that are concretely illiberal and sadly unrealistic, sometimes through legal actions that are obvious acts of displacement and scapegoating, such as prosecuting Deputy Scot Peterson for doing what he was trained to do, because we can’t undo the outrages he was merely, haplessly present for.

Recently, in Michigan, a mother and father were convicted of negligent homicide for failing to prevent their teenage son from bringing a gun to his high school and murdering four of his fellow students. This conviction does not mean “[p]arents are… expected to be psychic”, the trial judge said. Rather, apparently, they should just know in advance if their child is going to bring one of their guns to school and murder four people. After all, mere days before his crime, these parents outrageously took their child to a gun range, when a “reasonable” parent, in the view of the court, would have known he might be on the verge of murdering people. One legal commentator captured this theory of responsibility in revealing terms. The parents’ conviction, he said, “is a shot across the bow to all parents, to all people who have firearms in their house, to keep them locked up, if they could be in the hands of the wrong people”. Parents don’t have to refrain having guns and teenage children in the same house, in this formulation, or even keep their guns locked up as a rule. They just have to lock up their guns “if they could be in the hands of the wrong people”.

This is a very American hedge. The problem isn’t guns being everywhere, or kids having guns. Across America kids have guns, even congressmen’s kids. The problem is the wrong people having guns. How do all those parents know they aren’t raising the wrong people? How do those congressmen know? The only real confirmation your kid is one of the wrong people is when he goes to his school with some of your guns and murders a bunch of other kids. Because access to lethal firepower is more-or-less universal in America, the contingencies of life — the fallible insight and foresight of parents, their inconstancy in keeping their millions of guns locked up, the leaky procedures of exurban bureaucracies, the variable quality of 18,000 separate police agencies, the hidden-ness and unpredictability of people’s thoughts and desires — sometimes reveal themselves in the sickening manner of mass shootings. America can’t do anything about the guns, and so it tries to stamp out the contingency. And if we can’t create a plausible fantasy of stamping it out, we mould it into an effigy — parent-shaped or deputy-shaped — and bring criminal charges against it.

The availability of so many high-capacity firearms, and the self-fuelling sequence by which the evil and unbalanced inspire each other to stage new spectacles of violence, has placed us in a bizarre condition — a mix of archaic thralldom before unruly fate and a very modern, and latently totalitarian, urge to master the smallest and blurriest variables of human action with state power. To the problem of school shootings and other gun massacres we direct an attitude of tribal magic, and also an ambition for total administration and surveillance informed by the latest teachings and terminology of mental science. As I noted above, it’s hard not to view figures like Deputy Scot Peterson and the Michigan parents as sacrificial tokens, ritual offerings to the implacable god of crazed gunmen. And it’s hard to miss the strangeness of Republican politicians, and other small-government conservatives and libertarians, arguing for comprehensive national monitoring of everyone’s mental health, so that some opaque procedure of psychological bureaucracy can determine who’s not sane enough to exercise what they also say is a fundamental right.

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In other words, the distinctively American understanding in which unrestrained ownership of and commerce in firearms is a non-negotiable component of political liberty in its very essence has been revealed as a strange bargain, fraught with self-contradiction. For us, the prerogative of owning and bearing arms is a foundation of citizenship in a free republic, something guarded with manly vigilance by our proudly armed yeomanry as they bear the standard against political tyranny, and also we might need the government to monitor our brains to keep us from going crazy and shooting up a school.

It may derive from convenient hindsight, gained from Columbine and its progeny, along with my time living in several American cities where gun-death is its own social system, but I think this bargain is a fundamentally bad one. The theory of citizenship that underlies American gun rights is bad political theory. In the American ideology of guns, uninfringed gun rights belong to a maximalist notion of political liberty. But our wide and unrestrained distribution of guns directly and indirectly limits civic and political freedom far more than even robust gun restrictions would. In encounters with our local agents of sovereign authority, police officers, we citizens must perform an elaborate kabuki of submissiveness and harmlessness, because the police are, understandably, a little freaked out, pretty much all the time, at the possibility that the person they’re dealing with is carrying one or more of America’s half-billion guns. That we accept this obligation to grovel before the sovereign’s men as totally natural and not at all humiliating is a symptom of the ideological numbing induced by our gun absolutism, our psychic need to cope with its self-contradictions. It may happen one day that the police, not knowing what you’re up to and nervous about getting shot, will scream at you, “Get on your knees!” and at that moment you’ll know you can’t refuse or even protest, even a little, as a citizen of a free republic. You’ll just have to get on your knees.

If you understand the possession of firearms as a kind of executive power, the ability of one will to coerce another, then you’re forced into an uneasy realisation as an American. For us, executive power is in fact all around us, all the time, requiring prudence and deference in our everyday interactions, constraints on what we do and when, and — if the wrong dudes roll up on you — absolute submission, as of a subject to his king. When the wrong dudes rolled up on a friend recently, directly across the street from my house, and one of them let an arm fall out his open window so that my friend could see the pistol attached to the hand, there was only one thing for my friend to do, pull his phone and wallet from his pockets and hand them over. From their stolen Volkswagen in that moment, these dudes wielded sovereign power, and he was their subject. This is a lesson about the political dimension of crime, the retail tyranny of forceful acts of taking, that the progressives who oversee our permissive regime of law enforcement, and who view criminals as victims of invisible structures rather than as agents using arbitrary executive force to coerce their fellow citizens, could stand to learn as well.

My friend is a mellow guy, but I’m not. He took being the victim of a sidewalk hold-up in stride, glad to have escaped unshot from his encounter with armed lowlifes. But I seethed on his behalf, and my anger was a citizen’s anger. The dudes in that Volkswagen, in using an armed threat to steal his property, had violated his rights and, in forcing his submission, insulted his dignity as a person and citizen. My fantasies about chasing down that car and, yes, using the fantasy gun I magically had, retrieving the stolen wallet and phone and, in some of the angrier iterations, shooting those motherfuckers in the head as I did it, were those of a citizen wanting redress against an unjust exercise of arbitrary power. Of course those were just fantasies. There was no redress. He just had to take it. When my turn comes, I’ll just have to hide my citizen’s anger and take it as well.

In another recent local incident, a man walked onto his porch late at night to confront two guys trying steal his car, to raise an objection as the legal owner of the car, and they each pulled out a gun and began shooting at him. He just opened his mouth to protest an act of arbitrary taking by armed agents of a hostile political will — “What are you doing?” he said — and they made him know, by firing 30 rounds in his direction, somehow missing him on the porch and barely missing his daughter in her bed, that his protests were not allowed in the autocratic regime they’d set up on his property. These are real insults to the liberty of citizens, real acts of tyranny, frightening and sometimes lethal and undeniably political, that happen every day in this country.

I’m not even anti-gun, in any total sense. Some of my siblings and some of my best friends own guns. I think hunters should be able to own guns. I don’t think law-abiding citizens should be prevented from owning a gun to protect their homes. But, as a precept of political theory, the idea that it’s some kind of anti-republican tyranny for the central government, the actual sovereign, to exercise any control over the weapons of executive power — how powerful they are, how they fire, how many of them circulate in society — strikes me as insane.

It shows symptoms of insanity as political practice as well. You note these symptoms in the things politicians say when, after the newest Columbine, they’re forced by their absolutist gun ideology to finger a culprit that isn’t guns. After several school shootings, pro-gun activists and politicians have said that classroom teachers should carry guns. After the Uvalde massacre, Texas senator Ted Cruz said the problem was that schools have too many doors. After the Sandy Hook massacre, where 20 first graders and six adults were murdered by a delusional man, Wayne LaPierre, head of the National Rifle Association and purported opponent of tyranny and champion of limited government, decried the lack of “a national database of the mentally ill”.

But my favourite example of this phenomenon, in which the psychic prohibition on acknowledging the obvious importance of guns in America’s massacre problem yields a clearly compensatory sort of babbling nonsense, is when then-president Donald Trump faced questions about a hideous church massacre in Texas in 2017. “I think mental health is your problem here,” he said. “We have a lot of mental health problems in our country, as do other countries. But this isn’t a guns situation… This is a mental health problem at the highest level.”

We can leave aside Trump’s tacit concession about guns here, what the mental health problem we share with “other countries” says about the massacre problem they don’t share with us. Instead, we can just focus on the fact that it’s Donald Trump at the mic, telling us we need to get serious about mental health in this country, that the root cause of a grave public policy problem is something to be tackled not by the police, or by Donald Trump’s best guys, but by psychotherapists. To me he doesn’t sound entirely well in this moment. He doesn’t — as we sometimes say of people who are struggling emotionally or psychologically — sound like himself.

Gun violence is booming in the US. In the past three days alone, there have been reports that residents of Washington DC are afraid to walk five blocks, because “I don’t want to get randomly shot”; that a New Mexico governor has issued an emergency ban on bearing arms in response to gun violence; and that 60 congressional Democrats have signed an open letter to President Biden demanding that he use “every tool at his disposal” to combat the wave of gun-related deaths.

Within this culture of fear, guns are rapidly ceasing to be the preserve of white men. Since 2020, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), there has been a 43% increase in Asian-American gun ownership, a 49% rise by Latinos, and a 58% increase among black people. And the diversification of gun ownership is intersectional: during the pandemic, Geneva Solomon, co-owner of Redstone Firearms in the Hollywood district of Los Angeles, said that she began noticing “an increasing number of black women, including single mothers and those living alone” coming to her shop to buy guns. “The desire to feel secure and empowered sparked a significant surge in interest,” she told me. Even before Covid, change was afoot, with the National African American Gun Association reporting that, since 2015, half of its new members are women.

Gun ownership increases when people feel threatened; it is well-documented that gun sales spike after mass shootings. Likewise, the increase in violence against people from non-white backgrounds during the pandemic has helped spark a national arms race. Attacks on people of Asian backgrounds in particular exploded, as political leaders began calling Covid the “kung-flu” and blaming China for unleashing it on the world. In liberal states such as California and New York, where large numbers of people from Chinese, Japanese and Korean origin have lived for generations, businesses came under attack and people were subjected to random assaults on the street.

The Latino population, who account for one fifth of new American gun owners, have some more complex, nebulous motivations for arming themselves. American Latinos, particularly those who speak Spanish at home, have traditionally been in favour of gun control. But that support has dropped precipitously. The desire to assimilate to their new lives as Americans has been cited as one factor, as has fear of hate crime. In Texas, where Latinos now outnumber white people, they are increasingly being targeted by white supremacist propaganda and are moving further to the Right — particularly along the Mexico border. There are signs that the same trend is taking place in New Mexico, where there are calls to impeach the Democrat governor trying to ban guns.

For African Americans, the question of gun ownership — something denied to them for long periods of American history — is thornier still. Black people remain the most targeted demographic for hate crimes in the country, while the number of black people killed by police has also increased in recent years. Civilian gun violence also takes a hugely disproportionate toll on black communities, particularly in disadvantaged areas. Between 2016 and 2020, more than 10 out of 100,000 black teens were murdered with guns; the equivalent figure for their white peers was 0.8, and for Latinos 1.9.

But if black people are arming themselves out of fear of violence, the inevitable result has been more violence. Josh Sugarmann, an anti-gun activist and founder of the Violence Policy Center, says that the real effects of a broadening gun ownership base is already having catastrophic consequences within the black community. “We’re starting to see the impact of putting more guns in homes,” he says, “especially as measured by suicide among black kids.” Last year, the gun suicide rate among black teens surpassed the rate of white teens for the first time on record. The most likely result of being armed, Sugarmann says, is that they will use their guns “against themselves, their friends or their family — and never to kill a criminal or stop a crime”.

While discrimination and violence are undoubtedly central to the changing demographics of American gun ownership, there is another factor at play. For the gun industry, expanding its ownership base has been an active project, and an existential one — bred of cold-blooded capitalism as much as radical ideology. Since the Nineties, the gun lobby has conducted an all-out assault to expand its market share, weaponising fear as part of a diversity push to expand its customer base.

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Watching the extinguishing of the tobacco industry, the powerful gun lobby realised that failure to move with the times would see guns, like cigarettes, becoming a fringe vice that was looked down on by the general public. To survive, the industry would have to persuade citizens that its product is a mainstream commodity. Limiting itself to only the “pale, male, and stale” demographic was not only bad for its image — it was bad for business.

Naturally, it turned to advertising. White men would no longer be the focus. Women, people of colour, and the gay and lesbian communities were targeted with slogans such as “Equality? Brought to you by Sam Colt”, “Gun control once kept freedmen defenseless against KKK”, and, “99.8% of rapists polled prefer you unarmed”.

The industry hit their target. One recent study found that videos geared towards protecting women were viewed two-and-a-half times more often than videos that only featured men. Whether these were directly appealing to women, or to men keen on protecting women, isn’t clear. But these ads were onto something. Women’s gun ownership has almost doubled since 2007, from 13% of the population, to 22% today.

In 2015, the NSSF, which has overtaken the NRA as the key industry voice, held a summit. The theme was: Diversity. Its marketing chief Chris Dolnack said that the industry was focused on making changes “to embrace a new consumer audience”.

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This increase wasn’t entirely down to the gun industry’s activities. Tragedies such as the Columbine High School massacre and 9/11 saw Americans of all stripes feel the need to be armed for self-protection. A woman firing off rounds in a bikini might look cute, but it’s fear and loathing that really sells — and wins votes. “Stand your ground” laws, where individuals have the right to use deadly force if necessary to protect against an intruder, have now been enacted in 38 states. People listened. Whereas in 2000, the majority of gun owners cited hunting as their primary reason for possessing a firearm, six years later, two-thirds said it was self-defence. By 2021, the proportion of people who said they purchased a gun for self-defence had risen to 88%.

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What effect this shift in gun-owning demographics will have at the polls next year remains to be seen. It won’t necessarily benefit the Democrats. Gun owners, a historically Republican base, can still be in favour of harsher weapons restrictions and background checks, the traditional domain of Democrats: rights for me and not for thee has never been an unpopular position. And attempts to take on the well-funded and highly aggressive gun lobby have fallen short time and time again.

Addressing the broader social issues that have led many to gun ownership could, in theory, persuade some new gun owners to put down their weapons. But, if the past decades are a guide, there’s only so much politics can achieve here. There’s no getting round the second amendment: it’s baked into American history.

Despite having one of the world’s highest per-capita rates of gun ownership, Serbia had never witnessed a mass shooting until last month, when a 13-year-old boy killed nine fellow students and a security guard at his elementary school in Belgrade. It was the deadliest school shooting in Europe in 15 years – and it was followed by another spree, just one day later and a few miles away, when a 21-year-old man armed with a semi-automatic rifle opened fire as he drove through three villages south of Belgrade, killing eight.

Although a number of American gun-control activists have praised the seemingly swift response by President Aleksander Vučić, the shootings have prompted the largest protests seen in Serbia since the fall of Slobodan Milošević in 2000. While Vučić hastily announced stricter measures, his authoritarian government’s deployment of 1,200 police officers to schools — as well as its threat to bring back the death penalty — were seen by many locals as both insufficient and heavy-handed. A Serbian minister’s claim the school shooting was caused by the spread of “Western values” further infuriated protestors, who accused him of instrumentalising the tragedy in line with a pro-Putin agenda.

In this way, the present crisis illustrates the failures of the authoritarian Vučić government — and, by extension, also of Western intervention in the region. But it also shows the grim success of a particularly American brand of individualistic, sexist rage.

Certainly, the immediate response by both the government and opposition has been a world away from the endless debate in America, which had seen nearly 200 mass shootings in 2023 by the time of the Belgrade massacre. But as Biljana Djordjevic, an opposition MP in a green coalition, tells me, the crisis occasioned by her country’s dual massacres is “bigger than these two tragedies” alone, and represents a potential “moment for this country to change”. Mass demonstrations at the shootings have prompted demands for resignations at the top of government and reforms of the government-controlled media ecosystem. The largest protests since Vučić came to power bespeak a deeper anger with his highly centralised rule, corrupt and inadequate service provision, and lack of democratic norms.

In Belgrade, few doubt that the powerful interests focused around Vučić are trying to prevent any such change from taking place. Last weekend, the president brought his supporters onto the city’s rain-swept streets. Memes on Serbian social media mocked the buses shuttling Right-wing nationalists into the capital, and the provision of free drinks and snacks as an inducement to attendees. (Vučić-branded cereal bars were freely available, with packets of Smoki, the delicious and insanely popular corn puffs, handed out only on request.)

While addressing a rain-drenched crowd, Vučić resigned the leadership of his dominant Serbian Progressive Party (SNS). He made it clear he will remain president while launching a new, centralised political force with which he intends to cleanse Serbia of what he called “severe diseases”. Prominent among those “diseases” will be the “vultures” and “hyenas” the president has condemned as attempting to politicise the shootings.

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Demonstrators parroted government lines – that this was a “gathering”, not a protest; that the event had nothing to do with the recent shootings; and nor was it a rearguard action following the ongoing anti-government protests, which brought tens of thousands of people to the same streets. “This is not related to the shooting,” insisted Ilya, 32, one of a group of muscular, shaven-headed men lined up in front of the stage where Vučić was set to speak. “We just want to show we support our president. If he calls us, we will come.” 

In practice, the “gathering” was a show of force, bringing together pro-government hooligans, war veterans, state employees, Serb nationalists from Serb regions of neighbouring countries, and pensioners in pursuit of free nibbles. The event coincided with a flare-up of violence in Kosovo, provoked this time by ethnically Albanian authorities in the breakaway region, thus providing Vučić with a convenient foil for his calls for national unity. Scores of Serb protesters and Nato soldiers were subsequently injured in clashes. 

It is clear that many Serbians are angered by what they view as the government’s self-serving response to the shootings. A uniquely diverse range of opposition parties — centre-Right, liberal and Leftist — plus various political movements have backed the ongoing anti-government demonstrations. “I’m in favour of a complete ban on weapons,” said Biljana Stojkovic, co-chair of Leftist party Zajedno (Together), “but the presence of policemen in schools can only increase fear and abnormality.” Djordevic notes that the Belgrade shooter came from wealth and the second gunman’s father was an army General, meaning that both could still have access to guns, regardless of official controls.

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In a clear contrast with the pro-government “gathering”, the angry protesters huddling under umbrellas were immediately and volubly political, linking the shootings to what they call a “culture of violence” and impunity emanating from the government. “Why are we here? After 10 years of dictatorial rule, repression, closed media and brainwashing, why do you have to ask?” Slobodan, 52, tells me. Like other demonstrators, he is quick to demand Vučić’s removal, liberalisation and a concomitant pivot towards Europe, away from what Slobodan calls “Eastern despotism”. (Serbia has been on the waiting list to join the EU since 2009, a major stumbling block to its membership being its refusal to recognise Kosovo’s declaration of independence.) 

Indeed, Western policy plays a crucial rhetorical and geopolitical role in shaping Serbia’s ongoing domestic debate. In Serbia, criticisms of state policy are typically articulated through appeals for a pivot towards the West, which are in turn rebutted and echoed in reverse by the government’s supporters. “The issue is the immediate reaction, the claim the system has not failed,” says Djordjevic, arguing that the minister who blamed “Western values” mere hours after the massacre intended to distract attention from government failings. She highlights the second shooting, conducted by the general’s son sporting neo-Nazi insignia, as instead demonstrating the role of nationalist, Right-wing ideology in facilitating the ‘culture of violence’ blamed for the killings. “Blaming ‘Western values’ is a way to promote Putin’s values in Serbia, as a contrast to democracy,” Stojkovic adds. 

Ever since the collapse of Tito’s “third way” socialism path between the communist Soviet Union and the capitalist United States, the Serbian Left has struggled to articulate alternatives to Russian-sponsored revanchism without looking to Europe for inspiration and support, with predictably limited results. Actual European accession, and subsequent investment, remains essentially off the table. As such, the liberal opposition’s courting of Europe has resulted in few positive steps toward the democratisation protesters believe could prevent more shooting tragedies. “We just have to wait for the EU to help us to move forward. Right now we are stuck in a vacuum,” says Stojkovic.

Meanwhile, there are other US “values” that may underpin the Belgrade massacre. As a prescient analysis published just two weeks before the school shooting suggests, ultra-misogynistic ideas promoted by “manosphere” influencers such as Andrew Tate — who chose the Balkan nation of Romania as a hideout prior to his arrest on rape and human trafficking charges — have found an enthusiastic audience among young Serbian men. NGO-led efforts to promote gender equality have struggled to make significant inroads, with feminism and LGBT rights characterised as “Western”, therefore liberalising, therefore destructive influences.

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It’s striking that eight of the nine fellow pupils killed by the school shooter were girls. Though Djordevic cautions it is too early to ascribe definitive motivations to the shooter, the hallmarks of a US-style school shooting motivated by a particular confection of entitlement, resentment and “incel” ideology are readily apparent. Whether explicitly or implicitly, the poisonous notion that young men have a “right to sex” with whichever girl they please constantly recurs as a motivation behind recent US school shootings. (On a US-based “incel” forum, the shooting was rapidly praised by both US and Serbian posters.)

As in America, the idea that young people’s hardships are the fault of a political culture that denies them opportunities for conquest has proven considerably more compelling than the liberal rights order with which the misogynistic ideologues are in constant, self-perpetuating battle. Neither Tate nor Vučić offers any real solution to the genuine challenges faced by the new generations over which they hold sway. But in their own way, each is able to harness and profit from their followers’ misplaced anger. And in both cases, the Left has long struggled to come up with a compelling, organised alternative to their opponents’ strident battle-cries. 

Whether Serbia’s nascent protest movement will indeed prove able to “institutionalise the change people feel in their hearts”, as Djordevic’s claims, remains to be seen. What is certain is that Serbia, like the United States, is in need of political proposals and cultural role-models reaching beyond current polarities. And in both nations, the criticism of a liberal order which has failed to follow through on promises of a better world for the new generation should not preclude the critique of those who prey on young men’s worst impulses.

The only facts we have are these: on 5 September, 24-year-old Chris Kaba was being pursued by police after an automatic number-plate recognition (ANPR) camera linked the car he was driving to an earlier firearms offence. After being stopped on Streatham Hill in South London, Kaba was killed by a single shot fired through the driver’s side of the car’s windscreen by a Met police officer.

That officer, who remains unnamed, has been suspended from frontline duties — a routine procedure under the circumstances. But the police’s view of the incident, according to sources, is that their unnamed employee acted in defence of himself, his colleagues and the general public. It’s a line that’s hard to argue with, if one makes a clear case that the individual feared for life or limb.

Faced with a lethal threat, police officers have, under English law, the same right to self-defence as the rest of us. The application of a layman’s “reasonable force”, though, might be augmented by a professional order to “shoot to stop” any suspect engaged in armed violence or life-threatening behaviour. And in practice, shooting to stop often amounts to shooting to kill: police marksmen are trained to aim for the torso — the easiest part of the body to hit — and a single well-placed round, let alone five or six, frequently proves fatal.

The public’s understanding of marksmanship, ballistics, perceptual distortion, perpetrator behaviour and human anatomy is largely based on far-fetched cop shows and disbelief-defying Hollywood beat ‘em ups. The naïve belief that a violent suspect can be easily immobilised by a good “winging” is ubiquitous — and ridiculous. Most people couldn’t hit their own front door with a football from six feet, yet we expect armed police officers to shoot a knife-wielding terrorist in the hand, or aim for the arm of a driver who’s weaponised a vehicle. We suppose that a violent suspect would just shout “Ouch!”, stop what they’re doing, and go quietly into custody. Well, good luck with that.

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As former Met marksman Tony Long told me, when I interviewed him for the Channel Four documentary, Secrets of a Police Marksman: “If they pose an immediate threat to you, they cease to be a human being. They are a target. They have to be shot and you shoot them.” The reality is, an armed confrontation with a police officer isn’t meant to a fair fight. The shock and awe tactics employed by the service, particularly in vehicular hard stops, are designed to intimidate, destabilise and immobilise a suspect by using superior force. As one armed officer told me: “If you don’t want to get killed on the streets of London by someone like me, don’t go out there with a knife or gun thinking you’re fucking Charlie big potato.”

Now in his sixties and retired, Long is a highly commended Met veteran of 33 years, 25 of which were spent in the force’s ever-evolving specialist firearms unit. He knows all too well what it means to shoot to stop a “target”, having hit five suspects in his career, killing three. (“I’ve got a real problem with bullies,” he says.) The first was Yardie police informant Errol Walker, in Northolt, North West London, during the Christmas holidays of 1985. I remember the incident well: it followed the siege of a flat on a council estate, and in those days of scant TV offerings, the unfolding drama made for gripping viewing. His handlers tried, several times, to coax Walker out of the darkened flat with the offer of takeaway pizza.

Walker’s crime was stabbing his wife’s stepsister to death, before throwing her over the balcony and taking the victim’s four-year-old daughter hostage. In the end, he was double-tapped by Long, but  miraculously survived. Grabbing the child, who had been stabbed in the neck by Walker, Long ran out of the flat, carrying her to safety and leaving the incapacitated criminal to be dealt with by colleagues.

No one can fault Long’s actions on that day — nor on another, two years later, when he took down three heavily-armed robbers at a meat-packing factory in Plumstead, South East London, killing two and injuring a third. Such were his gun-toting heroics that the News of the World, having discovered his real name, dubbed him “Dirty Tony”, a moniker he bridles at. The paper also reported the nickname foisted on him by a police commander, Sue Akers: “the Met’s own serial killer”. Her loose lips wound up costing the Met £5,000 in damages, after Long sued his former employers.

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But it was Long’s final shooting that echoes the Chris Kaba incident, in that it was more ethically and practically ambiguous, and called into question the definitions of hero cop, psycho-villain, and, yes, racial profiling.

In April 2005, the officer found himself opening fire on 24-year-old Azelle Rodney, who was sitting in the back of a VW Golf with his fellow gang members, Wesley Lovell and Frank Graham, in the front. All three were black. Police intel, which included the use of a surveillance drone, had indicated that the men were armed with machine guns and en route to rob a gang of Colombian drug dealers somewhere in the outer reaches of North London. Long fired eight rounds from his Heckler and Koch G36 carbine at him, six of which hit Rodney, in the face, head, neck and chest. Rodney died of his wounds.

To cut a long story short: the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) initially concluded that there was insufficient evidence to convict anyone in connection with Rodney’s death. There followed a long, drawn-out inquest, then a judge-led public inquiry, and finally an Old Bailey murder trial in 2015, which saw Long acquitted and his name finally cleared.

All the signs suggest there will be a similarly drawn-out exercise in truth-seeking in the wake of Kaba’s death. Heat, confusion and protest have followed the incident: Sky News bizarrely reported that a large central London protest, featuring Stormzy, was a memorial march for the Queen. The Independent Office for Police Conduct has now opened a homicide inquiry, a move that has prompted the Met’s approximately 2,500 armed officers to threaten handing in their weapons in support of their beleaguered colleague. It’s not the first time such threats have been made, nor will it be the last.

A cynical solution to the perceived problem of specialist firearms units “holding the public to ransom” — a solution that would also, conveniently, help the police regain the streets from violent criminals — would be to simply arm all police officers. The UK (excluding Northern Ireland) is one of just 18 countries, out of 193, that does not routinely arm police. Doing so would surely level the playing field between officers and armed criminals, especially female officers, who routinely face suspects with an advantage in both size and weaponry. Why should the 34,000 Met police officers tasked with keeping a city of nine million people safe be expected to do so, for the most part, with little more than a stick and a pair of handcuffs?

“The subject of arming the police has been going on for years and is normally raised after an officer is shot dead,” Long says, “or more recently after terrorist attacks such as Borough Market where unarmed officers received life changing injuries because they weren’t correctly equipped.” Last week also delivered up another justification: on Friday, in Leicester Square, a female police officer was left with potentially life-changing injuries after she and a male colleague were stabbed by a “frenzied” suspect.

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“Sadly, we’re now at a point where there is more justification in routine arming than ever, but at the very point where the police have never been in a worse position to implement it,” says Long. “The current government and the last two Mayors of London have got rid of 70% of police stations required to securely store sidearms, and all but one of the ones containing a firing range.” The other issue is that “no serving police officer has been recruited on the understanding that they will be required to carry a firearm, so they could not be forced to do so”. Understandably, “incidents such as the recent Streatham shooting reinforce the attitude among many officers that they would never carry a firearm for fear of the way they’d be treated if they ever had to fire it”.

Long says that for a sea change to occur, every Met recruit who joins the service must be prepared to be armed — if not immediately, then at some point in the future. If they refuse, their employment should be terminated.

As Long’s career illustrates, an officer who shoots someone may be characterised as either a hero or a villain. The fatal shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell tube station in 2005 — a tragedy of mistaken identity that occurred in the hunt for the 21/7 terrorist, Hussain Osman — tested the resolve of many armed officers, and the thickness of London’s collective skin. But, such was the capital’s siege mentality following the 7/7 bombings, Londoners expected the police to do what they had to do to take out the bad guys. As former Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Lord Blair, would later tell me: de Menezes “died in the fog of war” — a sentiment that, alas, many Londoners were prepared to accept in the short-term.

Equally, some battle-hardened Londoners would have written off Mark Duggan’s death at the hands of a specialist firearms unit in August 2011 as just another “scumbag” getting what he deserved — regardless of the details of the shooting. Others protested, and ultimately his death ignited days of rioting. Once again, the Met’s relationship with London’s black community was strained, as it had been after the accidental shooting of Cherry Groce, which triggered the second Brixton riots in 1985.

Ultimately, every police shooting leaves both the public and the police damned if we do, damned if we don’t. We want the police to protect and serve and take out the human trash that other state agencies are failing to catch, but we don’t want to give them the resources to do their jobs. Rampant racial profiling, the industrial scale stop-and-search of black youths, and the service’s failure to get a grip on London’s violent gang crime often makes me question the Met’s motives, as well as its strategies. But as the old saying, mistakenly attributed to Orwell, goes: “People sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.” To put it another way: being an armed cop is a dirty job, but someone has to do it.

And yet for decades, conservative Americans have held up her series, the Little House books, which includes Little House on the Prairie, as a Bible of libertarianism: true examples of American self-reliance and independent spirit. The nine children’s books about a hard-working pioneer family warned about the encroaching power of the state, and heralded the rise of the modern Republican party. They are fiction, of course, but based on Wilder’s real childhood.

Published in the throes of the Great Depression, the Little House books were powerful allegories opposing President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programmes, which provided unprecedented financial support to struggling Americans. They also illustrated a major shift in Republican ideology that took place in the Thirties, as the party sought to widen its appeal. It shed its reputation as the party of elite business owners, and instead began to emphasise the power of the individual.

In one of the scenes in The Long Winter, a storekeeper is overcharging starving residents of De Smet, South Dakota, who want to buy the last grain in town. A riot seems imminent until the hero of the books, Charles “Pa” Ingalls, speaks up. “This is a free country, and every man’s got a right to do as he pleases with his own property,” he tells the storekeeper. “Don’t forget that every one of us is free and independent, Loftus. This winter won’t last forever, and maybe you want to go on doing business after it’s over.”

This impromptu speech is anachronistic: arguing about unregulated markets was a debate rooted in the Thirties, when this book was written, rather than the 1880s, when it was set. It hints at the secret lying at the heart of the Little House books: it was Wilder’s daughter and secret co-author, Rose Wilder Lane, who imbued the books with their political message.

Lane was one of the intellectual architects of the libertarian political movement in America: she was an influential free-market activist, writer, and acquaintance of the philosopher Ayn Rand. Her projection of her radical political views onto her mother’s pioneering childhood means that the series should be read as a double history: folk stories about the 1870s and 1880s woven through the vantage point of the Great Depression and the Second World War.

Pulsing through the books, meanwhile, are principles rooted in the Declaration of Independence. Thanks often to Lane’s revisions, characters occasionally quote that document, noting that they want to be “free and independent”. In Little Town on the Prairie, Pa takes Laura and her sister to the Fourth of July celebration in town. In Lane’s revision, Laura is transfixed by the reading of the Declaration of Independence and the singing of My Country Tis of Thee:

“The crowd was scattering away then, but Laura stood stock still. Suddenly she had a completely new thought. The Declaration and the Song came together in her mind, and she thought: God is America’s king. She thought: Americans won’t obey any king on earth. Americans are free. That means they have to obey their own consciences.”

This is why the books are so beloved by conservatives today: these libertarian views formed the basis of the modern Republican Party.

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Yet the books purposefully understate the difficulty of the American pioneer experience. It was in fact a brutally hard life of crop failures, isolation, and disease. Although the Little House books preserved in accurate and lyrical detail many of the skills that small farmers practiced in the 19th century, Lane recast many scenes as optimistic takes on tragedy that did not reflect how the family actually responded. In On the Banks of Plum Creek, Pa announced during a horrible plague of the Rocky Mountain locust that ate crops for two years: “We won’t let a pesky crop of grasshoppers stop us.” The locusts did, in fact, lead to their financial ruin. Two years later, according to Little Town on the Prairie, the family resorted to eating the blackbirds that had destroyed their first corn crop in Dakota Territory. The family sings Sing a Song of Sixpence at the table. And why not show some upbeat pluck in a children’s book?

But Wilder cautioned her daughter that the family was not an optimistic group. The quality they relied on was stoicism, putting up with the bad that came. That’s very different from hope. “I wish I could explain to you about the stoicism of the people,” she wrote to Lane in 1938, when they were halfway through writing the series. “You know a person cannot live at a high pitch of emotion. The feelings become dulled by a natural, unconscious effort at self-preservation.” Wilder insisted that the Ingalls family had never reacted to anything emotionally.

The divergence between Wilder’s real-life story and the Little House narrative was also apparent from what they left out: crime and tragedy. Gone from the books were stories Laura had written in early drafts: the death of a baby brother, a mournful episode running a tavern that ended with the family fleeing late at night to avoid paying its debts. The hardships that did stay in the books shored up tenaciousness as a value, such as sister Mary Ingalls going blind as a teenager. Laura then had to step in to help her and support the family by teaching at several schools.

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By Bari Weiss

The books also downplayed the various ways the government helped the family, spinning a myth of self-reliance. Like many pioneer settlers, they were given a free homestead through the federal Homestead Act, which granted tracts the government had taken from American Indians. Then there was sister Mary’s state-paid college for the blind in Iowa. The stories only talk of Laura having to teach to pay for Mary’s college expenses — perhaps her clothes.

The stories continue to exert a kind of power on the American psyche. The books have sold more than 60 million copies and were taught in classrooms for many decades; the series remains part of homeschooling curricula. “Laura Ingalls Wilder is the quintessential American pioneer,” says Wilder expert William Anderson in the PBS American Masters documentary Laura Ingalls Wilder: Prairie to Page.

And Lane’s legacy can still be felt in the Republican party. Lane only wrote political articles after publishing the Little House books and her libertarian treatise The Discovery of Freedom. But she campaigned for limited government in the last years of her life. In the Sixties, she took under her ideological wing a young man in Connecticut; he was Roger Lea MacBride, who became a champion of libertarian thought and ran for president for the new Libertarian Party in 1976. Later, MacBride took the libertarian ideas with him as he migrated back to the Republican party’s Liberty Caucus.

Lane also donated funds to help businessman Robert LeFevre launch an institution for adults in Colorado called the Freedom School, which named a building after Lane. Two of the early students who studied free markets and limited government there were Charles and David Koch, who went on to become members of the Libertarian Party in the Seventies and Eighties. Later, they returned to the conservative branches of the Republican Party and became hugely influential by donating money to Republicans promising to support free-market concerns, including such notions as refuting the science of climate change.

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The myth of the pioneers, embodied by Laura Ingalls Wilder, inspired many conservative American values today. They were seen as the kind of independent, self-reliant Americans that the Second Amendment was designed to protect. But even they would have struggled with some aspects of modern Republican policy — gun control in particular.

Certainly, the Ingalls family owned and used guns. In one scene in Little House in the Big Woods, Pa Ingalls trudges with his rifle through the snow of northern Wisconsin, checking animal traps. Rounding a large pine tree, he meets a black bear, standing on its hind legs clutching a dead pig. Pa aims his gun, kills the bear, and immediately runs home for the horses and sled to take the meat home. There, it resides in frozen form in a shed. Pa hacks off pieces with an axe at mealtimes.

Even the mythical Pa Ingalls would not have thought today’s Americans needed guns in most situations, especially the range of weapons available today. He preached to his daughters the necessity of restraint. “You wouldn’t shoot a little baby deer, would you, Pa?” says Laura. “‘No, never!’ he answered. ‘Nor its Ma, nor its Pa. No more hunting, now, till all the little wild animals have grown up. We’ll just have to do without fresh meat till fall.’”

When baby animals were roaming the forest, it was time to put the rifle away.

Elliot Rodger, the 2014 Isla Vista shooter whose “manifesto” was a laundry list of complaints about his loneliness and sexual rejection, felt particularly resentful toward his female classmates, whom he saw as “mean, cruel, and heartless creatures that took pleasure from my suffering”. Unable to attract a girlfriend, he settled on revenge. “If I cannot rise above them,” he wrote, “I will destroy them.” When Rodger finally buys a handgun, he is happy for the first time since childhood. “I brought it back to my room and felt a new sense of power. I was now armed. Who’s the alpha male now, bitches?”

We don’t know yet what motivated Salvador Ramos, the teenage gunman who killed 21 people in Uvalde, Texas, last week, but we do know that like most shooters, he was a misfit and social outcast. Early reporting suggests that he spent recent months harassing teen girls on social media, “repeating girls’ names until they paid attention to him”, and expressing to them his desire to get his “name out there” like the Canadian murderer Luka Rocco Magnotta. The Buffalo shooter, Payton Gendron, was also an oddball with a history of making threats, although his immediate motives seem to have been more ideological than social or sexual. Even so, in the course of his white supremacist diatribe, he blamed “weak” “European men” for the degeneracy of the West and concluded that “strong men are needed to fix it”.

Whatever the nominal motivations behind them, rampage shootings are nearly always a product of wounded masculinity. “They are the most masculine of crimes,” says Ralph Larkin, a criminologist at John Jay College who has studied mass shootings for decades. “Can you think of more than four or five female mass shooters? There aren’t any.” Shooters, Larkin says, are “marginal males who feel they have been wronged by society, and so they pick up a gun. There is always a sense of violated entitlement, and I don’t care whether it’s school shootings or racist shootings.”

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Modern mass shootings, according to Larkin, began in 1966, when Charles Whitman, a former Marine with an undiagnosed brain tumour, murdered his wife and mother before climbing to the top of a tower in downtown Austin, Texas, and shooting 14 people to death. Larkin speculates that the sudden rise in these shootings was a reaction to the sexual liberation of the Sixties and the corresponding rise in the status of women — a point on which some of the more historically minded murderers would no doubt agree. “We’re talking about toxic masculinity here.”

Toxic masculinity, of course, is a somewhat slippery concept. Colloquially, it refers to the elements of traditional masculinity — competition, stoicism, aggressiveness, physical strength, a willingness to resort to violence — that fit awkwardly or not at all into modern liberal culture. A 2019 explainer in the New York Times defined it as “a set of behaviours and beliefs” that men are socialised into from a young age, including “suppressing emotions or masking distress”, “maintaining an appearance of hardness”, and “violence as an indicator of power”. More than a few articles have flagged toxic masculinity, combined with Americans’ easy access to guns, as one of the causes of mass shootings.

These elements of masculinity can no doubt be “toxic” in the wrong circumstances — the problem is with the assumption that they are purely a product of cultural scripts, rather than reflections of something inherent in men. Francis McAndrew, a psychologist who has studied mass shootings, told me that while socialisation plays a role in encouraging some forms of male violence, it does not create it out of thin air. This is particularly true for young men, who are ultra-sensitive to status competition, which historically would have determined their ability to attract women and form alliances with other men. Young men, McAndrew says, have been selected to regard adolescent social hierarchies as a matter of life and death.

“Today, you can go to college or move to a new city,” McAndrew says. “But when we were evolving, whatever happened during adolescence was a life sentence. And if you established yourself as a bad dude that nobody messed with, that could work to your advantage. Our minds are still stuck in that past of needing to be paid attention to. And the guys who don’t get that experience all kinds of dark emotions. They feel left out, they feel like losers, they feel desperate, and they need to make a statement.”

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For these alienated young men, guns and violence can be intoxicating. According to the “challenge hypothesis”, male testosterone and aggressive behaviour surge in response to “situational cues that represent either a threat to a male’s status or a signal that competition with other males is imminent”. Handling a gun acts as one such cue, especially for men who are not used to them. “If you pick a powerful weapon and you perceive that combat is imminent, you get a spike in your testosterone levels,” McAndrew says. Given that marginal males tend to have low testosterone, which can lead to feelings of anxiety and depression, this spike can be euphoric, as shooters like Harris and Rodger attest. “The solution,” McAndrew says, half-joking, “is that everyone should be allowed to own high-powered weapons except for men under the age of 40.”

Mass killings are also, themselves, a way to achieve status and notoriety. McAndrew notes that for ideological spree killings, like the Buffalo shooting or jihadist attacks, the ideology “organises and channels” the killers’ rage, providing them with a community, an audience, and a sense that they are contributing to some important cause — in other words, status and a measure of celebrity for people who feel they are invisible. And status and celebrity, even of the worst kind, have their benefits. According to a 2018 story from the Florida Sun-Sentinel, Nikolas Cruz, the far-Right loner who murdered 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, was inundated with fan mail from female admirers after being arrested for his killing spree.

This should not come as too great of a shock. According to the sociologist Nathalie Paton, rampage shootings represent a perverse expression of some of our culture’s dominant values, including self-expression, autonomy, and authenticity. “Nowadays the social norm is to ask each and every person to pursue individuation, to become autonomous,” she says. “But it’s a paradox — when you ask everyone to be original not everyone can be, so they have to go to extremes like violence. It becomes a form of empowerment, a way to pull away from social norms that are imposed.” As she wrote in an article from 2017: “The very project of a mass shooting not only allows the reversal of social roles, but ultimately it becomes the guarantee of subjective liberation.”

The shooters, Paton argues, highlight another contradiction in the dominant ideology. Everyone is supposed to be an individual, and all individuals are respected equally. Yet beneath this injunction and guarantee are all the typical modes of conformity and hierarchy we would expect of a human society. The beautiful, the talented, the athletic, the funny, and the interesting rise above the ugly, the clumsy, the anxious, the introverted, the boring, and the resentful.

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These relative statuses, for the losers, are all the more painful for being nothing other than a reflection of who and what they actually are. “Individuality” is wonderful when your true self is a tall and handsome swimmer with an unexpected love of classical cello, or a beautiful girl who likes to go backpacking with her friends. But who, really, is someone like Salvador Ramos, an odd-looking boy who disturbs nearly everyone he talks to, whose hobbies include shooting people with BB guns and throwing dead cats at strangers’ houses? Does anyone, really, want someone like that to be himself? I doubt it.

In his novel Whatever, in which he first advances his idea that sexual liberalism is a system of social hierarchy no less cruel than economic liberalism — now a cornerstone of “incel” ideology — Michel Houellebecq introduces us to the character of Raphael Tisserand, a man so stupendously ugly that despite his good salary and desperate efforts, he is still a virgin at 28. One evening, after Tisserand has spent hours at a club trying to charm a young women only to see her depart with a handsome black man, Houellebecq’s narrator offers Tisserand a knife and urges him to use it on the couple. “When you feel these women trembling at the end of your knife, and begging for their young lives, then you will truly be the master,” he says. But, after following the pair to the beach, Tisserand is unable to follow through on the murder and decides to drive back to Paris. He dies in a car crash that night.

Our society seems to have its own generation of Tisserands. The problem, in America, is that ours have guns.

I wonder if the elementary school students in Uvalde, Texas, had similar drills. I wonder if the teachers there, like my sister, worried about what they would do if they had to barricade the door. I wonder if the fourth graders in Texas had time to pick up their staplers and notebooks and lunch boxes to defend themselves from an 18-year-old armed to the teeth before he slaughtered them in their classroom.

The elementary school shooting in Texas is the 212th mass shooting this year. It is the 27th school shooting. It is also the deadliest mass shooting in the US so far in 2022, which says something because it happened just ten days after ten people were killed in a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. So far, at least 19 children and two adults are dead in Uvalde. Others are injured.

I read these headlines and I think about how people grow accustomed to horrific things. How, not so long ago, people watched other people get hanged, drawn and quartered in the public square. They watched beheadings. They participated in honour killings. I think about things that, in other times, in other places, perhaps seemed perfectly normal to the people who witnessed them — and that still remain normal in parts of the world today.

We look at such practices from our civilised perch and wonder how human beings ever did this to one another. How did they witness such barbarism and still have the appetite for dinner? How do we?

How have we normalised the fact that innocent people in America can step onto a subway car or go to a grocery store or a synagogue or a church or a concert or a baseball game or a party or a car show or to work and maybe they will just be gunned down? How have we become accustomed to — let’s call it what it is — child sacrifice?

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There is a deep sickness in this country. It goes beyond our addiction to guns. It’s an anti-social, anti-human disease that has gripped our society and our politics. A big part of that disease is how numb we have become to violence. The country has been experiencing the largest crime surge in decades. Armed robberies are up. Shoplifting is up. Road deaths are up. Car break-ins are so common in some cities that people leave notes on their windows to the thieves that nothing is inside.

But the most devastating rise has been in murders. Since the FBI started tracking the data, 2020 marked the highest single-year increase in homicides. In 2021, it went up again. As of 2020, the leading cause of death among children in America is guns. Not cars. Not drugs. Guns. It was also the year that we had the highest rate of gun sales in American history.

The profiles of America’s mass shooters don’t fit into a straightforward political box. The 18-year-old who massacred elderly black New Yorkers at the grocery store in Buffalo earlier this month was driven by white supremacy and evil conspiracies such as the Great Replacement. The shooter the next day, who targeted a Taiwanese Church in Laguna Woods, California, was Chinese. The recent shooting in Dallas, at a Korean spa, was carried out by a young black man. The mass murderer in Uvalde, another 18-year-old, is Hispanic.

And the victims of the new crime wave fit no single profile. They include a young Eagle Scout in Philadelphia. A 24-year-old UCLA graduate student stabbed to death while working at a furniture store. An Afghan refugee who had worked as an interpreter for the US army who was shot to death while resting in his car between Uber shifts. It’s the 70-year-old nurse murdered at the bus stop on the way to work. The 19-year-old Burger King cashier robbed at gunpoint — and then killed after handing over the money. It’s the eight-year-old boy shot outside of Chicago. A pregnant woman who was shot to death just after arriving home from her baby shower.

Sixteen cities, including Philadelphia, Austin, Jackson, Columbus, Baton Rouge, New Haven and Portland, saw record high homicide rates in 2021. In the nation’s capital, more people under the age of 50 were gunned down than died from Covid.

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You don’t need to be told what you already know: that mentally ill people getting their hands on guns to commit mass murder this easily is deranged and wrong. Accepting this as normal has nothing to do with respecting the Second Amendment. You don’t need another writer pointing out that this doesn’t really happen in other places and maybe the fact that America has more guns than any other nation on Earth has something to do with it. There’s nothing well-regulated about Salvador Ramos, though it appears he bought those assault rifles legally on his 18th birthday. There’s simply no world in which our founders would look at inner-city gun violence and these sick teenagers in suburban schools and say this was their intention.

Gun rights activists will argue that other countries have guns and that murderers don’t need guns to kill and that some of the cities and states with the strictest gun laws in the country have the highest rates of violent crime and that people kill people guns don’t kill people and that anyway good guys with guns kill bad guys with guns. (Uvalde police officers and a school resource officer reportedly fired at the shooter. They couldn’t stop him.)

Here’s where I think they are right, if inadvertently: the social rot that’s come over America, the nihilism and hatred of each other, is part of the cause here. The dissolution of our social ties — and with them the accountability and responsibility that an actual community demands — has allowed insanity to fester unnoticed. Lockdowns accelerated the isolation, the purposelessness, the lack of meaning that was already overcoming us.

If we insist on viewing this shooting as part of some isolated issue or species of violence, then we miss the point. The point is the country is being consumed by what Philip Roth called “the indigenous American berserk”. It stretches back many decades, or longer, and for ages it was possible to ignore or compartmentalise. Now the brokenness is everywhere we look — and it is impossible to unsee it.

A version of this article first appeared on Bari’s Substack.

Decades ago I changed my position on the issue of “gun control”. Even though I still believe liberals are correct about the unfortunate predicament created by our founders, I now hold that we must tolerate privately held guns and all that comes with them. That may sound like a paradox, but once you understand the tensions internal to the mind of an armed American liberal, you will understand something fundamental about the American experiment.

Portland, where I live, is an absurdly progressive city on the compulsively liberal Pacific coast. But that isn’t the whole story. Washington, Oregon, and California, the three left-coast states, vote as a Democratic block. But that’s not because we lack for conservatives. We have lots of them. They are just consistently outnumbered and outvoted.

I should probably explain here that, although I believe that liberals are right about the unacceptable cost of our second amendment rights, conservatives are closer to correct, as I see it, about the governing of our cities — a fact that becomes glaringly obvious if you visit Los Angeles, Seattle or San Francisco and compare it to any major city in conservative Texas. American liberals don’t seem to understand that their values cannot simply be implemented locally. That’s partly why I’m armed like a conservative despite my liberal values. But I digress.

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That day at the gun shop, most of the people I stood in line with were conservatives who felt like they could use a bit more firepower. And I couldn’t fault them. So did I, apparently. I imagine they sized me up and read me as a liberal. I’m pretty sure I look like one. But I felt welcome, or at least as welcome as one can in an environment where there is a run on guns and ammo.

And there was indeed a run, as there always is when the population is on edge. When Americans worry, they buy guns. Some of that is irrational, as the guns they bought in previous panics are likely to last a good long time. Some of it is people arming themselves for the first time. And some of it is intuitive — the result of a somewhat vague reassessment of the level of need.

The gun shop was visibly strange in those early pandemic days. It looked like it had been stripped. The wall behind the counter that would normally display perhaps 100 different models of handgun had maybe 20 — guns no one really wanted but would eventually be reluctantly purchased by some Johnny-come-lately. But it was the state of the ammo that was most striking. In the major calibers there wasn’t any, a pattern that everyone in the shop knew was repeated all over town, and indeed across the entire country. Ammunition manufacturers couldn’t keep up. When a crate of ammo was occasionally delivered to the shop, it was target ammo, not ideal for self-defence, and it was rationed to one box per family, per week. Welcome to America.

In the gun shop, no one was troubled by novices, or even liberals. Explanations were patient. It’s a surprisingly courteous, agreeable, and highly technical culture: no one knows more than gun enthusiasts about the hazards that come with firearms, and such people take a very dim view of those who treat guns casually.

I suspect the notable courtesy was at least partly the natural result of the level of armament. The staff were surely all armed. So too, I would guess, were the clientele — it is legal in Oregon to have a concealed handgun given the proper, easily obtained permit. In such an environment heightened tensions are quickly noted, and de-escalation is an ever-present priority. It is, in some sense, the opposite of Twitter, where no one is armed and people are routinely terrible to each other.

There was one woman behind the counter, who had the unenviable task of running background checks for every firearm purchased. In most cases that meant she had to disappoint customers and tell them it would be days or weeks before they will be able to collect their weapons. She had been ringing up and disappointing people, non-stop for weeks. As I neared the front of the line I heard her say to the room: “I don’t get it. Do they think they’re going to shoot a virus?”

“It’s not the virus they’re worried about,” I offered. “It’s their neighbours if the food runs out.”

There was a general murmur of agreement, and I was glad to have brought something useful to the party. But looking back, I don’t think my explanation was complete. In fact, I’m sure it wasn’t.

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Most of those stocking up on guns and ammo belong to a culture, and like every other culture, it has its beliefs, suppositions and fears. That culture believes that tyranny may descend on us, even here in the freedom-loving United States of America, and that privately held guns are the key to fending it off. I’m not a member of this culture, but I believe they may well be right about this.

In a country where politicians are increasingly prone to withdraw or stand-down the police to curry favour with confused constituents, it is easy to see how things can quickly escalate as they did in Kenosha, Wisconsin the night Kyle Rittenhouse shot three men in self-defence at a riot. To be clear, I do not believe Rittenhouse, then 17-years-old, should have been there with his AR-15. But I also don’t believe the streets of American cities should ever be ceded to violent ideological bullies — a now familiar pattern that set the stage for Rittenhouse’s actions.

To understand why private guns may be decisive in a fight against tyranny, let’s take a moment to revisit what is assuredly the most inscrutable section of the United States Constitution, the Second Amendment: “A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

It’s almost like a deliberate non-sequitur. In fact, after decades of pondering the question, I’m now fairly convinced that that is exactly what the founders gave us: an intentionally vague pronouncement designed to force the question into the future, to ensure it would be repeatedly reevaluated to keep up with changing weaponry and circumstances. Near as I can tell, it’s a place holder for a principle they could not tailor in advance.

They clearly didn’t want to give the legislature or the courts complete latitude. They tied our hands; our representatives are not allowed to disarm the public, even if a majority desires it. And the founders gave us a strong hint about why — something about the need to protect a “free state” from, you know… stuff. But they didn’t tell us how much firepower citizens should be allowed to have. And thank goodness they didn’t, because muzzle-loaded weapons are no better a model of modern weapons than a movable-type printing press is for an algorithmically personalised infinite scroll.

The second amendment contains two conundrums, one novel and one original. The modern trouble is relatively straightforward: What does it mean not to “infringe” on the right to bear arms? In the 18^th century that was far simpler because, although guns have always been a force multiplier for an individual, the factor by which an individual’s force was multiplied was so much lower. Back then, within reason, a person could be trusted to buy the guns they wanted to own.

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On first glance, the original puzzle also seems uncomplicated: The state is going to need a fighting force if it is to remain free. But the longer one stares, the stranger this pronouncement seems. What militia, regulations and state were they even referring to? Is it a reference to the Army? No, the Army already existed and could have been referenced if that was their intent, having arisen first as the Continental Army that fought and won the revolution after it was formed in 1775, later to be re-founded as the United States Army in 1784 — seven years prior to the 1791 ratification of the Bill of Rights with its “well-regulated militia” riddle embedded in its second amendment. So if it wasn’t the Army protecting the “free state” they meant to invoke, then it must really have been the people — but against whom? And what is “a well-regulated militia” and where is it going to come from and in what way is it to be regulated other than “well”?

As a young man I regarded the second amendment as the founders’ biggest blunder. As we head into 2022, my position has flipped — I now believe history may well come to regard it as the most far-sighted thing the founders did, not in spite of its vagueness, but because of it. It’s like a mysterious passage from a sacred text that forces living people to interpret it in a modern context. The founders believed the people needed to be able to defend their free state — with deadly force — whether that refers to a geographical state, or a state of being, or both.

It’s not that I don’t see the terrible carnage which comes from ubiquitous guns. I do see it, and I detest it just like every other decent American. I know that a single deranged or careless person can rob us of anyone, at any time. No American is exempt. Not our families, nor our leaders. It is a terrifying realisation. With modern weapons an individual can kill dozens. It has happened many times, and it will happen again.

I find none of this remotely acceptable as a human, or an American. Remember, I said at the beginning that I believe that the liberals are basically right about the staggering cost of ubiquitous guns. Further, I don’t believe the net effect of ubiquitous guns during an average year, or decade, or century is a reduction in harm. It’s a complex picture, but many Western nations have managed crime as well or better than the US without the population being armed. On long timescales, however, I suspect this trend reverses. A nation’s descent into tyranny can kill millions, and it can drag continents, or the world as a whole, into war.

The terrifying carnage that derives from the right to bear arms must, in the end, be compared to the cost of not having that right, not only for the individual, but for the republic and its neighbours at a minimum. If you imagine that tyranny cannot happen in America due to some safeguard built into our system, or by virtue of some immunity residing in the population itself, then perhaps there is nothing left to discuss.

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For my part, I don’t believe it. In fact, I believe I know better, both as a scholar and as someone who was falsely accused of racism and hunted in my own neighbourhood — with the police withdrawn in a foolish attempt to appease the mob. And I suspect that if we put the question to a vote, the fraction of the citizenry who believes tyranny could happen here is rising rapidly, even if we don’t necessarily agree on its most likely source. Of course, the fact that tyranny may happen anywhere is not sufficient counterweight to the unacceptable cost of ubiquitous modern firearms. To imagine that cost is outweighed, one must also believe that an armed population is in a position to fend off tyrants.

This, I admit, is by no means clear. Many will correctly point out that no matter how many semi-automatic weapons are in private hands, it will never be a match for the firepower of the guns — including fully automatic guns — in the publicly funded arsenals that, the argument goes, are in danger of finding themselves at the disposal of tyrants. When you add to that the incredible range of weapons and weapon-systems for which the public has no answer, it’s a slam dunk: in a head-to-head conflict between a treasonous, tyrant-led US military on the one hand, and freedom-loving Americans on the other, the military would trounce any number of militias, no matter how “well-regulated”.

But that isn’t really a persuasive argument, for two reasons. First, who decided this would be a fair fight? How many times will the US military have to find itself stalemated by inferior forces before we incorporate the lesson of asymmetric warfare into our national consciousness?

When our family lived in Olympia, Washington, we frequently saw foxes in our backyard. We learned not to worry about our cats because the foxes seemed to simply ignore them. Here in Portland, we have coyotes instead of foxes and neighbourhood cats are constantly disappearing. Does this imply that a wild fox can’t beat a housecat while a coyote can? As a mammalogist I’m sure that’s not it. A fox would almost always win a fight to the death with a domestic cat. But a house cat is capable of doing enough damage on the way out to dissuade anything but a desperate fox from trying it. An armed populace might not be able to defeat a tyrant’s army, but they could well punish it into retreat.

The second reason an armed population might succeed against the military-gone-rogue is that it is exceedingly unlikely the entire military would accept immoral orders. Either they would divide over the question, and the armed populace would end up fighting alongside the hopefully large portion of the military who remained loyal to the Constitution and their fellow citizens. Or those who would naturally resist immoral orders would have been purged from the uniformed ranks under some pretext that discovers and discharges those with independent minds, returning these non-compliant souls home to their well-armed families and neighbourhoods. Either way, private gun ownership might well prove decisive in a periodic contest between “patriots and tyrants”.

I expect this argument will prove unpopular. Are we really that near the brink of tyranny in America? I don’t know. I think it’s plausible enough that it would be irresponsible not to discuss what might happen.

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I also think it is worth taking a brief look at Australia to discern whether it has any lessons for us. Australia is, after all, a nation with many similarities to the US: it had its own permissive gun ownership laws and culture until the 1996 massacre in Port Arthur, Tasmania, in which 35 people were killed. The alterations in Australia’s gun laws and the gun buyback programme that followed are frequently held up as a possible model for American gun reform. And they make a strong case that massacres and other gun violence can indeed be greatly reduced by such a programme. But at what price?

I have to tell you, I’m finding it very difficult to make full sense of events in Australia at the moment. I see things that look a lot like tyranny reported from there. I have friends — people I know personally and trust — fleeing Australia due to what looks to them and sounds to me like tyranny. And I have interviewed Australians who describe absolutely tyrannical encounters they are having with governmental authorities.

But I also see respected people assuring me the picture we are getting is distorted. Whatever the truth, as the ideals of the liberal West spread like wildfire during the 20^th century, I fear we Americans were lulled into a false sense of complacency as freedom caught on in region after region and appeared to become permanent. I don’t know if we will ever fully discern our founder’s intent with respect to the second amendment. But I strongly suspect their understanding of freedom, freshly won, was much more realistic than ours.

This is what gun ownership comes down to, whether you’re a liberal or a conservative. If there is a way to protect liberty from spasms of tyranny that does not condemn us to the spectacular cost of regular gun violence, I’d love to know it. But if the dynamism of the West, the productivity, the ingenuity, and the quest for fairness can only be protected from tyrants at the point of a gun, then so be it.

He went to Kenosha, Wisconsin, last August to protect property during a Black Lives Matter protest after widespread arson and vandalism the night before. He ended up shooting three men that night, killing two, in what he claimed were acts of self-defence. All of the shootings were captured on video, some from multiple angles. He tried to retreat from everyone he shot that night, resorting to deadly force only when he was cornered, physically attacked, or threatened with a gun. At no point did he continue shooting after ending the immediate threat.

Although prosecutors attempted to argue that, merely by being present with a gun, Rittenhouse, now 18, had “provoked” the protesters, they were unable to provide any convincing evidence that Rittenhouse had done anything to threaten anyone or initiate conflict in any way. The defence, by contrast, was able to show that Rittenhouse, far from picking fights, attempted throughout the night to avoid or defuse conflicts with protesters.

The trial confirmed that the real villain of the night was the first man Rittenhouse shot, 36-year-old Joseph Rosenbaum. This was the most important shooting, because it set in motion the events that led a crowd to assault a fleeing Rittenhouse, allegedly in the belief that he was an “active shooter”, and which led to Rittenhouse shooting and killing Anthony Huber, who was attacking him with a skateboard, and wounding Gaige Grosskreutz, who advanced on Rittenhouse with a drawn pistol.

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Rosenbaum, a convicted child-rapist and domestic abuser, had no connection to the protesters. He was a disturbed man who had been released from a psychiatric ward earlier in the day and who, according to video evidence and multiple eyewitness testimony, had been belligerent and threatening all night.

According to both Rittenhouse and one of his companions, the Army veteran Ryan Balch, Rosenbaum told members of their group: “If I catch any of you guys alone tonight, I’m going to fucking kill you.” Later in the evening, he found Rittenhouse alone and began chasing him across a parking lot. After first attempting to run away, Rittenhouse wheeled around and shot the advancing Rosenbaum. The closest eyewitness to the shooting testified that as Rosenbaum approached the defendant, he yelled “fuck you!” and lunged for the barrel of Rittenhouse’s gun. The other main clarification at trial came from Grosskreutz, who admitted that Rittenhouse only shot him after he pointed his own gun at the teenager.

Many of the initial media reports that painted Rittenhouse in a sinister light turned out to be false — for instance, Grosskreutz’s claim, which he repeated in multiple interviews, that he had been shot with his hands up in a position of surrender. Rittenhouse did, as was reported early on, “cross state lines” to get to the protest, but only from Antioch, Illinois, a border town that is a suburb of Kenosha, which is where Rittenhouse worked and where many of his family live. He did not transport the gun across the border, and although it is legally murky whether he was allowed to be carrying it — he was 17 at the time — the judge threw out the charge because of ambiguities in the law.

Yes, he was a supporter of Trump and Blue Lives Matter, but there is no evidence that he was a “white supremacist,” as alleged by Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, or a “domestic terrorist,” as alleged by Pressley and Ilhan Omar. He was not a member of any militia group, despite the misguided representations of his initial defence team. He was not out “hunting” anyone.

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The most damning evidence against him, which was not admitted at trial, was a video from a few weeks prior in which he joked about shooting looters. But again, there was no credible evidence that he initiated or escalated conflict with anyone that night. He lied about being an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT), when in fact he had only received CPR training, but this was hardly relevant to the shootings. Perhaps he shouldn’t have been there, but the same was true of nearly everyone there that night. They were all defying a curfew. Many of the protesters were also from out of town. Some, like Grosskreutz, were also carrying illegal guns.

From the beginning, the case against Rittenhouse relied on obfuscating the actual events of the night in favour of mythmaking: easily debunked misinformation, moral and emotional appeals to the justice of the protester’s cause, the racial identity and political sympathies of Rittenhouse, the far-Right politics of some of his most vocal supporters, rhetorical flights against “white male tears” or “fascism”, and arguments about the United States’s gun laws or the biases of its criminal justice system. One index of the confusion surrounding the case is the number of Twitter users who appear to have only recently learned that Rittenhouse’s assailants were white.

Indeed, even on the Left, those reporting on the case or following it closely have tended to conclude that Rittenhouse was not the monster he was initially painted as. Long pieces in the New York Times Magazine and the New Yorker, while drawing attention to the extremism of some of the militia members who showed up to protests, to the general atmosphere of chaos, violence, and racial tension that summer, and to the role of Right-wing media in stoking outrage over rioting and property destruction, concluded that Rittenhouse himself was more or less a foolish kid with conventional politics who got in over his head. Last week, Ryan Grim of The Intercept tweeted: “People should be prepared for Rittenhouse to be acquitted on all the major charges”.

Emotional reactions, not to say irresponsible tantrums, are to be expected after a divisive trial such as this one. Commentators on both sides will say stupid things, and there will be no shortage of people on Twitter making triumphant racist memes about Rittenhouse or declaring that the verdict gives licence to MAGA wingnuts to hunt down liberals and shoot them for sport. Today, nearly every national issue in the United States is what the blogger Scott Alexander has called a “scissor” issue — one that is not merely divisive but in which the opposing sides seem to be operating in different planes of reality. The Rittenhouse verdict is no different, even if in this case, unlike in the Brett Kavanaugh or Covington Catholic controversies, we can know with reasonable certainty what actually happened.

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By Park MacDougald

What happens next will be a litmus test for the country. Despite the uncertainties inherent in jury trials, the two main trials to come out of last summer’s unrest, this one and the murder trial of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, reached the correct verdict, though this is cold comfort in a country where the two main factions are defined by their mutual mistrust and loathing. Already, Republicans have begun pouring salt into the wound, and it looks as if the verdict will cement Rittenhouse’s reputation as a conservative folk hero — an innocent man smeared by corrupt politicians, a partisan media, and biased Big Tech companies.

Democrats, meanwhile, are convinced against all evidence that a cold-blooded murderer has been set free due to the colour of his skin, with leading politicians declaring the verdict a “miscarriage of justice” and asking the Justice Department to pursue what could only be described as a political prosecution of the Wisconsin teen. These are signs that the scars opened over the past few years will not be quick to heal.

Yet some on the Left have already begun to signal that things got out of hand last summer. They are admitting, for instance, that “defund the police” was a stupid and politically toxic idea, that riots and arson lead predictably to violent chaos and should therefore be discouraged rather than cheered, and that some of the police shootings that initially sparked outrage — including the one that set off the riots in Kenosha — were based on initial reporting that, had it come from Fox News or the Right-wing Twittersphere, would have been clearly labelled as disinformation.

Many of these things were obvious at the time, and it can be frustrating now to observe those who only found the courage to say the obvious after Joe Biden won the presidency. But it is better than the alternative, which is to continue denying the reality in front of their faces. In this case, the reality is that Rittenhouse was found innocent of murder, and correctly so. Biden, to his credit, has already stated that “the jury system works and we have to abide by it”. One hopes that his allies will listen. To refuse to do so is only to court more tragedies.

Chauvin will go to prison for Floyd’s murder, having been found guilty of murder in a court of law, but the sweeping civil unrest that followed the 2020 killing — and which still continues in some spaces unabated — is its greater legacy. Riots and looting left multiple urban neighbourhoods in ruins; more productive forms of protest led to tangible policy change. Punitive bail policies that target the already disadvantaged have been revoked; new laws have been passed restricting the use of chokeholds and no-knock warrants; more states are requiring the use of police body cameras and mandating the swift release of footage when an encounter with the cops results in violence or death.

But at the same time, an unsettling rise in violent crime over the past year threatens to undermine the cause. Last weekend, multiple shootings occurred in various American cities — and media outlets leaped to declare a crisis. “Bloody weekend in America renews call to stop the shootings,” wrote The Times, which pointed out that the “mass shootings” had “brought total number killed by guns in the US this year to 7,601, with an additional 9,504 dying from suicides.”

“America has already endured 230 mass shootings and 13 mass murders in 2021,” said Axios on Monday. Today, the Gun Violence Archive — a non-profit organisation that tracks all shootings in the US — puts the total number of mass shootings so far this year at 232: the California Bay area saw its worst incident since the early 90s in San Jose on Wednesday. Indeed, since the Times story was published on Tuesday, the Archive has tallied up 257 more deaths caused by guns, bringing this year’s total to 7,858 — or, if you include suicides, 17,626.

Crime and policing have become so fraught, so politicised, that despite the need for urgent action, productive discussion on these topics is a rarity in America. And no issue better illustrates the unbridgeable divide than the debate over gun violence. At one extreme is the gun enthusiast, a card-carrying member of the NRA who owns dozens of weapons — as is his inalienable right, according to the second amendment — and mocks the sissy libs who want to take them away. At the other is the blue-state pacifist, who has never held a gun in his life but nevertheless would like to abolish them entirely, including taking them out of the hands of police. In between them is a landscape littered with bullet casings and dead bodies that both sides shamelessly use as props in an endless, seemingly unresolvable debate about who’s to blame: the guns, or the people using them.

“What’s clear, as the president has said, is that we are suffering from an epidemic of gun violence in this country,” said the White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre in response to events in San Jose, “both from mass shootings and in the lives that are being taken in daily gun violence that doesn’t make national headlines.” But if you look behind the headlines, the distinction she draws is blurred. CNN, whose headline read, “There were at least 12 mass shootings across the US this weekend,” included a pivotal disclaimer a few lines in: “CNN defines a mass shooting as an incident with four or more people killed or wounded by gunfire — excluding the shooter.” This definition also stems from the Gun Violence Archive, which interprets a mass shooting as any incident in which at least four victims (not including the shooter or shooters) are shot and either injured or killed.

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But in shaping its coverage around this definition, the media elides distinctions that are vital to understanding the different ways that gun violence manifests — and arguably misleads readers who don’t realise how much nuance is being lost. The GVA makes no distinction between an incident of terrorism like the Pulse nightclub tragedy; a disgruntled employee “going postal” at his workplace (as happened in San Jose); or a drug-related skirmish in which two rival gang members start shooting at each other and the wounded are innocent bystanders who simply caught in the crossfire. They’re all lumped together under the “mass shooting” umbrella.

But for most people, whose awareness of gun violence centres on high-profile, high-fatality incidents in places like schools or churches, the words “mass shooting” evoke something quite specific: the image of a lone gunman — always male, usually white — firing into a crowd of innocent, unarmed people without warning. A mass shooting is Stephen Paddock raining down bullets from a Las Vegas hotel suite, as a crowd of concertgoers screams and scatters below. It’s Adam Lanza murdering innocent children and teachers at Sandy Hook elementary school with a bag full of semiautomatic weapons. It’s Eliot Rodgers’ incel massacre.

This type of shooting, also known as a rampage or spree killing, is rare as compared with other forms of violence; in 2020, a year in which roughly 20,000 Americans were killed by guns, there were no rampage killings in the US at all. Yet we tend to highlight these incidents above others in discussions about gun violence — or, as CNN did here, use language that evokes them — not just because they’re particularly horrifying, but because they’re easy to politicise. Defining “mass shootings” in an overbroad way allows us to insist that the problem is guns, not crime, and that the solution lies in gun reform, not law enforcement.

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This is a narrative generally favoured by politicians on the Left, for whom gun control is a relatively easy issue on which to take a hardline stance without losing voters (whereas a tough-on-crime position can alienate those further Left.) It’s also the one preferred by the Biden administration, which actively steered the conversation in this direction in a recent press conference. When asked about the weekend’s violence, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said:

“Certainly there’s a gun problem. Between mass shootings that get a lot of attention, that we lower the flags, there are hundreds, thousands who lose their lives and that’s one of the reasons the president will continue to advocate for the Senate passing universal background checks.”

Passing major gun control measures was one of Biden’s bigger campaign promises, and universal background checks are just one part of that; the President’s gun reform wish list also includes more legal liability for gun manufacturers, banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, and closing loopholes that allow people with records of domestic abuse and stalking to get their hands on weapons. He’s also proposed a gun buyback program and taken aim at kits that allow the creation of “ghost guns,” unlicensed firearms with no serial number, which are popular with criminals. Unfortunately, the background check measures have passed in the House but stalled in the Senate, where Democrats lack the numbers to push them through and can’t seem to convince any Republicans to cooperate across the aisle.

Psaki’s pivot away from rising violence and toward gun reform legislation is a politically savvy move — but it also pivots away from the truth. Even if you believe (as I do) that universal background checks are a great idea, focusing on this and other reforms that primarily affect the sale of licensed firearms is a way of avoiding the complicated nature of tragedies like the spate of shootings last weekend.

Many of these tragedies took place in communities plagued by continual violence, where murders happen so frequently that pop-up shrines to commemorate shooting victims are a common roadside presence, and where perpetrators frequently escape arrest because residents fear retaliation if they talk to the cops. Some were gang or drug-related, and several involved conflicts between multiple armed assailants who ended up hitting innocent bystanders when they were trying to shoot at each other. In Youngstown, Ohio, an altercation at a nightclub spilled into the street and exploded in gunfire that left two people dead. In North Charleston, South Carolina, fourteen people were shot, and one teenage girl killed, after a fight broke out at an “unauthorized concert”; the police are still looking for multiple shooters. In Minneapolis, another nightclub shooting allegedly began with a confrontation between gang members who both pulled guns and began firing.

And because this type of gun violence often involves illegally obtained firearms, gun reform legislation or more stringent background checks would have done nothing to take the weapons out of these killers’ hands.

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The “mass shooting” narrative, in which the biggest threat is the ubiquity of the guns themselves, also obscures the tangled web of class, cultural and community factors that create these horrific tragedies — as well as the human cost to ordinary people who live every day with the endemic threat of violence. And the Left’s obsessive focus on more unusual forms of gun violence, whether it’s police shootings or rampage killers, misses the ugly truth that people in communities plagued by crime are far more likely to be killed by a neighbour than they are by a cop.

The prominence of a given death seems to depend more on the identity of the villain than the victim. When police shot and injured Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin last year, there were protests, riots, and strikes by multiple professional sports teams, as the whole country rallied around the idea that black lives matter. And yet, the two dozen black children killed in incidents of community violence since the start of 2021 don’t seem to matter to anyone; there are no protests, no namesake legislation, no hashtagged outpouring of rage and grief. Perhaps one of the strangest omissions in this narrative, considering the source, is that both the victims and the shooters in last weekend’s brutality were virtually all people of colour.

Of course, while the Left pivots towards guns-not-violence, the Right will pounce on its own pet issues. The phrase “black-on-black crime” will make an appearance, invoking ugly racial stereotypes while ignoring the anguish of the communities and families who live with such constant grief, fear, and loss. Policies favoured by the Left, from defunding police departments to bail reform, will be blamed for leaving more criminals on the street while giving law enforcement fewer means to deal with them. They will note that it’s not just shootings that are up, but crime across the board: car-jackings, muggings, brutal assaults in broad daylight. They’ll blame progressive lawmakers for empowering criminals to offend with no fear of arrest, from Chesa Boudin in property crime-plagued San Francisco to Jacob Frey in violence-ridden Minneapolis. They’ll be a little too gleeful when one of the police-free autonomous zones in places like Portland or Seattle devolves into chaos that results in someone’s death.

Nobody will offer policy solutions; everyone will point fingers across the aisle. The Blue Lives Matter crowd says, what can police do? Their hands are tied. Their opponents counter that their hands aren’t  tied, they’re just sitting on them — on purpose.

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By BRET WEINSTEIN

The truth is buried somewhere here, but conversations like these will never reveal it. It’s all heat and no light, all the time. Yes, some politicians are trying to strike a balance on criminal justice reform: NYC mayoral candidate Andrew Yang recently suggested revisiting the city’s elimination of cash bail for non-felony offenders to address the issue of hate crimes, in which perpetrators have gone on to attack someone else as soon as they’re back on the street. He is an outlier, though — and even in deep blue New York City, the mayoral race has become dominated by the issue of gun violence. It’s not a coincidence that Yang’s fiercest opponent is Eric Adams, a more conservative former police officer who has promised to take a tough-on-crime approach to reducing shootings.

Meanwhile, America has settled into two separate, well-worn grooves, forever digging deeper instead of rising up and out in search of common ground. The Right will go on taking ghoulish delight in spiking crime rates, perhaps quietly hoping that it’ll get worse yet, so that come 2024 they can claim that Joe Biden’s America is indistinguishable from the dystopian nightmare of the sci-fi film The Purge — the kind of country where you’d have to be crazy not to have a few guns for self-protection.

And the Left will remain safely ensconced in their white upper-crust neighbourhoods, vowing to “save” their poorer, blacker neighbours from the racist rule of law, whether the neighbours want this or not (and they don’t: across the board, including in black communities, police abolition remains a largely unpopular proposal.) They’ll sneer back and forth about the Ferguson Effect, in which community distrust of police leads the cops to pull back from policing in vulnerable neighbourhoods, which in turn leads to a spike in crime rates (a real and dangerous phenomenon, or a myth that coddles cowardly racist cops, depending on your political sensibilities.) They’ll start another unwinnable war over the second amendment.

And in the meantime, whatever it is that’s causing Americans to kill each other at a nearly 20% greater rate than they were at this time in 2020 will continue to cost lives.

But unless the violence fits the narrative, most of us will never hear about it. Even as national media descended upon Minneapolis to await the verdict in Derek Chauvin’s murder trial, little mention was made of the countless lives lost or upended by violence in the city since last May. Since the death of George Floyd, at least 100 people have been murdered in Minneapolis. Nearly 200 have been shot. Among the dead are several children. The four-block grid now known as George Floyd Square remains closed off, guarded by security checkpoints to keep law enforcement out; possibly for this reason, it is something of a magnet for acts of violence, including drive-by shootings.

On March 6 of this year, when one man was shot and killed just steps from the same place where Chauvin killed Floyd, police reported meeting resistance when they tried to enter the scene. But when shots rang out yesterday, sending those who came to honour George Floyd’s memory diving for cover, it was a different story: according to witnesses, the police never showed up at all.

“This includes the gruesome and grisly video games that are now commonplace. It is too easy today for troubled youth to surround themselves with a culture that celebrates violence. We must stop or substantially reduce this, and it has to begin immediately.”

The outcry against this connection was swift, with many pointing out that young people in other countries – Japan, for instance – enjoy playing first person shoot-em-up video games without taking to the streets with semi-automatic weapons to kill in real life.

No, these people argue, the charge against video games is a deliberate distraction from the real enemy: the availability of military grade weapons at the local gun store. Trump is so in hock to the NRA that he wouldn’t dare confront the original sin at the heart of the American mind: that guns mean freedom – freedom from outside interference, freedom from colonial oppressors (the British), freedom from big government etc.

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By Mary Dejevsky

It was 20 years ago this year that a pair of students from Columbine High School murdered twelve of their fellow students and a teacher using automatic weapons and sawn-off shotguns. A connection was later made between these murders and the amount of time both students had spent playing Doom and Quake, and other first person shooting games.

Those who resist any causal connection here describe the reaction as “moral panic”, and in 2011 the video games industry in fact won a significant victory at the US Supreme Court, against those who would restrict the sale of violent video games. Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association concluded that: “studies … do not prove that violent video games cause minors to act aggressively … and most of the studies suffer from significant, admitted flaws in methodology”.

So where does this idea originate that video games cause young people to be violent? One surprising tributary that has been influential in establishing this connection can be traced back to a controversial report written long before video games had ever been invented: S. L. A. “Slam” Marshall’s much discussed Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command, published in 1947.

Slam Marshall was the army’s chief historian of the European theatre of operations during the Second World War: his astonishing thesis was that, in an average infantry company, no more than one in four soldiers actually fired their weapons while in contact with the enemy. Later historians have challenged his methodology. But notwithstanding this challenge, this was the root of the moral panic, and it originated within the military: most soldiers are reluctant to kill.

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On 10 June 1944, one battalion of the US 502nd Parachute Infantry started receiving enemy fire. Their commander, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Cole, described the behaviour of his men. “I found no way to make them continue fire,” he explained:

“Not one man in twenty-five voluntarily used his weapon. When I ordered men who were right around me to fire, they did so. But the moment I passed on, they quit. I walked up and down the line shouting “God damn it! Start shooting!” But it did little good. They fired only when I watched them.”

It was testimony like this that prompted a complete re-think within the US military about how to train soldiers to overcome their natural resistance to killing. Turning to the work of the popular behaviourist psychologists of the day – especially B F Skinner – the military set about transforming their training programmes, using behaviourist principles to desensitise their troops to the effects of killing other human beings. The key idea was simply that the empathetic connection between human beings needed to be broken by the constant practise and repetition of killing in a situation that, as closely as possible, simulated the feel of the combat environment.

The combination of repetition and desensitisation, underscored by a strong sense of group absolution, enabled the natural human instinct against killing to be overcome. Using these basic techniques, the firing rate of ordinary soldiers was transformed. By the time of the Korean War in 1950, the rate had more than doubled.

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How does this connect to video games? Perhaps the most influential exponent of the Slam Marshall line is former Army Ranger and West Point psychology professor Dave Grossman, whose book On Killing (1996) has become required reading at military academies around the world. According to Grossman, first person shooter video games replicate exactly the same techniques that the military have used to get soldiers to kill: repetition and desensitisation. Thus, for Grossman, video games can act as “murder simulators”.

“They act just like police and military simulators, providing conditioned responses, killing skills and desensitization, except they are inflicted on children without the discipline of military and police training.… If we intentionally tried to raise a generation cocked and primed to kill, we could not have done a better job.”

These conclusions issued in a whole host of influential studies, including Grossman’s co-authored Stop Teaching our Kids to Kill (1999) and Assassination Generation (2016).

The case against these books is pretty straightforward. Many millions of young people play Grand Theft Auto without turning into psychotic killers. And gamers have a strong case when they argue that the NRA point to the video games industry as a scapegoat to deflect attention from the real cause of the epidemic of mass murder that blights the US: the simple availability of military-grade weapons.

But both intention and opportunity need to be considered here – and video games relate to intention whereas the availability of weapons relate to opportunity. It is perfectly conceivable that both may shoulder their fair share of blame.

As I watch my sofa-rooted teenager, console in hand, blasting his way through the summer holidays, I know perfectly well that he will never act out in reality what he plays out on the screen. But I retain a residual commitment to the idea that we become what we practise to be. And the real world experience of the military, whose job it is turn naturally empathetic children into professional killers, gives me some pause to wonder what it would take to turn him into a fighter.

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By Giles Fraser

The problem with the various pet theories that people have about the causes of gun crime is that they have become both so reductive and so highly politicised that one explanation is too often set against another. The interplay of societal breakdown, a culture that celebrates violence, weak gun laws, white male resentment, the role of alcohol and mental health: one could go on – and most social scientists tend to say that there still isn’t enough data to really work out what is really going on.

In 1996, and under pressure from the NRA, Congress withdrew public funding for the study of gun violence; there is a national database of car crash deaths, for example, but still no such equivalent for gun violence. Given the epidemic proportions of mass shootings in the US, the idea that even its study is a political football is totally absurd.

And here we go again. This weekend, the UK news, from TV to the press to social media, was dominated by reports of the shootings at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas (21 dead), and outside a nightclub in Dayton, Ohio (death toll nine).

Saturation coverage of these US atrocities largely blotted out anything that was happening closer to home, whether in the new political landscape of Borisland or the town of Whaley Bridge, which is threatened by a collapsing dam.

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By Tom Chivers

Mass shootings on the other side of the Atlantic tend to command a level of attention quite out of proportion to the relevance of these atrocities for us (not much) – perhaps it’s because of the simultaneous loss of life, perhaps because they just seem so alien. This time, the El Paso shooting also seemed to fit into a broader narrative – that of President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and support for gun rights – which kept it in the headlines even longer.

As predictable as the initial European response is the misplaced hope that follows. Surely, now, Americans and those who govern them will understand that their gun laws (or the lack of them) must be addressed? An eloquent table of mass-shootings worldwide is produced to show precisely how out of order the US is: this year’s lists most European countries with zero such events, then the United States at the top, or the bottom, as you choose, with a huge 249. If other countries can eliminate, or almost eliminate, mass shootings, shouldn’t the US be able, even be morally obliged, to do the same?

It does not work like that. The public response in the United States to last year’s shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida created an impression that the tide might be turning, at least the tide of public opinion, with a new generation – of pupils and parents – leading the way. El Paso and Dayton may not completely discredit that argument, but they hardly suggest that radical change is around the corner. The gunman in El Paso was 21.

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Don’t get me wrong. The shocked – and I would contend, exaggerated – European and UK response to US mass shootings is nothing to be ashamed of. It reflects well on us. It shows that, in most European countries at least, the multiple shooting of one’s fellow human beings is something repugnant and deeply alien. When it has happened – and the slaughter of 77 mostly young people by Anders Breivik in Norway eight years ago in pursuit of his racist agenda demonstrates that we are not immune to such crimes – the authorities and the public have been united in their determination to prevent any repetition.

Still, it seems to me, after spending time as a correspondent in the United States – starting shortly before the 1999 school massacre at Columbine High – that the censoriousness from this side of the Atlantic and the belief that the US can, must and will change its permissive attitude to guns reflect a profound misunderstanding of the United States.

Nor does it help – much, at any rate – to blame Trump, for all his inflammatory language, because mass shootings are nothing new, and the motives are different. Yes, there is a strong strand of white supremacy in the United States that has found an outlet in racist violence. But there is also an anarchist and anti-authority strand – remember Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, of the 1980s and 1990s – while school and college campus shootings have been committed by those who feel they are social misfits or outsiders. Then there are those who “go postal” with their grievance.

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It remains to be seen whether Trump’s time in office has fostered a climate in which racists can act on their prejudices with impunity. But what unites the mass shootings is not the motive, but the ease with which firearms can be obtained across most of the United States, which enables one person to kill many others at the same time. A correlation has also been found between gun ownership and gun deaths. So, simply put, it is the guns.

Any thought that European sensitivities will temper this, however, is wrong. The right to carry a gun is enshrined in the Second Amendment of the US Constitution – and, though many on this side of the Atlantic might disagree, there is an admirable aspect to this. It makes the United States almost unique as a country that trusts its citizens to bear arms.

Of course, there will be those who abuse that right. But Trump’s argument, after the Florida school shootings, that fewer might have died had teachers been armed, would not be considered outlandish by many Americans. The phrase beloved of the US gun lobby, that “guns don’t kill people; people kill people”, is widely embraced. You can take the gun culture back to pioneers and frontiersmen if you like. But the right to carry the most lethally effective means to defend yourself – and to use it – simply does not invoke the hostility that it would do here.

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Nor is gun culture just about guns. It is about all sorts of other things that are valued by Americans, which include a different relationship between the individual and authority and the right – the freedom – to be an outlaw.

Yes, it makes for a more violent society. It makes gun crime, including the mass shootings, vastly more prevalent that it is in the UK and other European countries. But that is a choice that Americans have made. They may tweak their laws a little at the edges in response to the latest atrocity. They may require a medical certificate here, or a licence there, or curbs on the open sale of the most murderous automatic weapons. But they will not legislate, still less amend their Constitution, to deny people the right to bear arms.

To blame the US gun lobby for this, in the shape of the National Rifle Association, is to see things the wrong way around. The NRA is a force and has money because gun-ownership enjoys public support, and no amount of mass shootings or appeals from shocked Europeans is going to change this. Americans have accepted a trade-off, between permissive gun laws and the high incidence of death by shooting. It is a trade-off that regards El Paso and Dayton, and Columbine, Stoneham Douglas and the rest, as a high, but largely tolerable, price for what is seen as the ultimate in personal freedom. This view will persist well after Donald Trump has left the White House, and probably for a long time after that.

“Foreigners often view American attitudes to gun ownership with incredulity. They just don’t understand the passion with which the right to bear arms is defended. However, I think that they will understand when their own governments try to stop them from driving.

“Charlton Heston once declared that the government would only take his gun from his ‘cold dead hands’. In the next few decades, there will be those who clutch the steering wheel with equal determination…”

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As it turned out, we didn’t have to wait long for ‘a right to drive’ movement to get off the ground.

Alex Roy is a rally driver, writer and activist. I’ve no reason to think he read my article, but at the time he too was thinking about the implications of driverless technology, albeit with rather more concern. In fact, as M. R. O’Connor tells us in the New Yorker, Roy has emerged as the leader of the human resistance:

“Roy started the Human Driving Association in early 2018, after reading a manifesto written by Robin Chase, the entrepreneur and former C.E.O. of Zipcar. In the manifesto, ‘Shared Mobility Principles for Livable Cities,’ Chase outlines a now familiar vision for autonomous driving, in which dense urban areas are filled with autonomous vehicles that operate in fleets, so as to reduce congestion and emissions… In ninety frenzied minutes, [Roy] wrote his own manifesto, which he published as an article for The Drive, an online car magazine. It begins with a picture of a steering wheel and the words ‘From my cold, dead hands,’ and culminates by calling for a constitutional amendment creating a right to drive.”

The Human Driving Association already has 10,000 members, even though there’s no immediate threat to the ‘right to drive’. Just how big could the movement get if the companies investing in driverless technology succeed in putting fully automated vehicles (AVs) on the road?

Every year, more than a million people die in traffic accidents around the world. We’ve become habituated to the slaughter. But would we be as tolerant if computerised driving systems were responsible? I doubt we’d allow robots (because that’s what driverless cars are) to kill a million people every year, or a hundred thousand for that matter. Even a death toll of 10,000 could generate hundreds of ruinous law suits. If AVs are ten or a hundred times safer than human drivers, that won’t be enough; to go mainstream they will need to be thousands of times safer.

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However, if that standard is ever achieved then it will place the human right to drive under immense pressure. Every death or injury caused by human error would be seen as a completely avoidable tragedy.

Of course, the same is often said about gun deaths – which, in America, are mostly the result of accidents, suicide or criminal activity. Yet gun ownership remains deeply entrenched. Might we see the same libertarian impulse protect the right to drive?

The parallels are inexact. Firstly, there’s no constitutional amendment upholding such a right, let alone one as old as the Second Amendment (hence the campaign). Secondly, the compulsory application of AV technology would not necessarily ban car ownership. Though driverless cars may well be most conveniently accessed as a driverless taxi service, it’s conceivable that many people will choose to own one (or several) of their own, even if they aren’t allowed to drive it themselves.

Thirdly, I doubt that the prohibition on human driving will be single event. Rather, it’s more likely to be phased in gradually, with computer control of enabled vehicles being mandated in certain locations (like city centres and school vicinities) or in certain circumstances (above a given speed, or in hazardous driving conditions).

There won’t be a particular date on which human drivers are dragged kicking and screaming from the steering wheel. Rather, expect a process of ‘automation creep’ in which the driving seat gradually becomes a passenger seat. In fact, with the introduction of partially automated features like cruise control and automatic parking, the process is already underway.

O’Connor conveys Roy’s dystopian view of where this is all heading:

“In place of the driverless utopia that technologists often picture… consider another possibility: a congested urban hellscape in which autonomous vehicles are subsidized by companies that pump them full of advertising; in exchange for free rides, companies might require you to pass by particular stores or watch commercial messages displayed on the vehicles’ windows… In such a world, Roy said, ‘The joy of the ride is taken away.’”

That’s not an implausible scenario. However slow and subtle the shift, going driverless does mean individuals surrendering direct control over their mobility on a massive scale. We need to think through the implications of that for a free society.

In theory, the AV fleet operators would probably be as keen to cater to our whims as taxi firms already are. Nevertheless, AV tech (especially if it is networked) implies a road transport system where either the state or some powerful private interest would be in ultimate control.

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But for all the agency that the car has given to so many, we shouldn’t forget how much it’s taken away from others. The streetscape was once a thoroughfare for everyone, the car turned it into a killing ground – a place we teach our children to be afraid of. Ending that terror could itself be seen as an act of liberation.

Expect a long and bitter fight between incompatible freedoms.