After El Paso and Dayton, Three Ways to Think About Mass Shootings

“The worst is not,” Edgar says in “King Lear,” amid much—an old man’s madness, a father’s brutal blinding—that would seem about as bad as life can get, “So long as we can say ‘This is the worst.’ ” The true worst, his point is, will be so annihilating that we will not even have language left to reference it. But, if finding words for the worst is not within our power, finding them for what’s about as bad as bad can be is—and that is the case with the two gun massacres that took place over the weekend, in El Paso, Texas, with twenty-two dead, and Dayton, Ohio, with nine. Though neither is the worst that we have seen in recent years, together they had a particular brutality about them.

Those who have made gun sanity a consuming cause can only weep at these events. Figuring out what to say is hard enough; figuring out what to do is even harder, since no more actions seem likely to result from these incidents than did from other state-sanctioned mass shootings of recent years. (When the state, knowing what ought to be done, doesn’t do it, it sanctions what gets done instead.) To read of Jordan Anchondo, who died of bullet wounds because she threw her body over her two-month-old son to save him, and her husband, Andre, who died beside her while trying to protect them both, is to move past tears of pity to those of rage. This should never happen. But, amid the sheer madness and horror of the killings, it seems worth making some necessary distinctions. We can’t act wisely without seeing straight, and we can’t see straight if we don’t see clearly.

First point of clarity: the problem is guns, their availability, their lethality, their omnipresence in American life, and their protection by the ruling political party. There are racists in every country. There are video games in every country. There are mentally ill people in every country. There are not gun massacres in every country. And, when there is one, comprehensive new laws are passed, and there is seldom another. Why are there so many in America? Because there are too many guns in America, and, in particular, too many lethal guns easily purchased—guns modelled on military weapons whose only purpose is to kill as many people as rapidly as possible. Study after study, correlation after correlation provide the evidence on this point: control guns and you reduce gun violence. If we banned assault weapons and all their diabolic accessories, the number of gun massacres in America would be reduced—as was true during the decade between 1994 and 2004, when there was a federal ban on such weapons. We can have the same confidence in this correlation as we do in the efficacy of vaccines or antibiotics. Gun control works.