School Shootings and Making Things that Shouldn't Happen Harder
My views on gun control have evolved over the past few years. At the center of that evolution is a miscalculation of some risks in the abstract model I’ve built up about the way the world works.
First, I undervalued the risk of societal breakdown that the COVID lockdown changed for me. There were parts of the country under broad curfew with previously unimaginable limitations on liberties. Concurrently there were parts of the country with no limitations at all. And in that contrast there was more tension than I think many of us realized. The powder keg came pretty close to getting lit.
Secondly, I undervalued the likelihood of limited, non-nuclear warfare between modern nations and the uncertainty of those outcomes once something that we thought ended last century happened. Watching citizens in Ukraine arm themselves and effectively defend their homes against the power of Russian armored advance changed my mind about the futility of a committed group in the face of a modern military power. Maybe that’s a lesson I missed in Iraq and Afghanistan when we needed to leave a large portion of the most powerful military the world behind simply to leave and turn it over to a force we never defeated.
Lastly, I overvalued the stability of the U.S. Federal government. I was and still continue to be deeply surprised by how many otherwise reasonable people that I knew thought that our democracy was completely rigged and that the Capitol riots were justified.
Upgrades in those risks drove me to the conclusion that allowing a total monopoly on weapons to be held by the government or those willing to break the law to have them exacerbates the poor outcomes of those risks further. This shouldn’t be mistaken for romanticizing extreme views on the Second Amendment or the fetishization of guns. But instead an acknowledgement that where I once was unsure whether we’d be better off at the margin if we had no guns at all, I now think it’s reasonable to believe we’d be worse off. And that’s forced me to double down on a logical follow on perspective. If gun ownership is important, gun control laws are extremely important; more important than I thought they were. Because guns aren’t going anywhere. And they’re everywhere.
When I left the military a decade ago, there were 88 guns per 100 Americans. Since then, that figure has increased to 120 guns per 100 Americans. No matter what anyone is saying about the direction of gun rights in America, the prevalence of gun ownership is not at risk. Not only is no one coming for you guns, no one is even slowing down their proliferation. On the contrary, it’s rapidly expanding. As is the market for sophisticated tactical gear. Things like scopes, suppressors and body armor are offensive accessories that are now sold openly and advertised online. When I was working with those weapons daily 15 years ago, that wasn’t the case. I left my body armor in my truck and a cop driving by told me that I was going to get him killed if it got stolen and to lock it up. Today I see people running around Cross-Fit classes wearing it.
The point is, contrary to political bluster on both sides, it’s certain that the aggregate risk of gun violence and the enabling objects that make it more dangerous in America are escalating significantly. The data supports it, though the overwhelming majority of gun violence is crime or domestic violence related and not the sort of terrorism that results in school shootings.
The sheer amount of fire arms and the limited or geographically uneven regulations around by who, what, where and when these firearms are allowed to exist tips the cosmic risk needle towards saying that we’re in need of something that limits access to firearms to something less than it is now. Gun rights advocates have come pretty close to unconditional victory here. And while I stand by my statement that we’re better off with civilian gun ownership than without it entirely, we’re clearly in a place where prohibition isn’t a risk. And so the risk shifts to the sheer concentration of fire arms in America and simply how easy it is to purchase them for people who are more likely to use them for terrorism.
I use the term terrorism intentionally. School shootings are terrorism. They orbit around nihilistic, misogynist motivations that seek to show the world that one has power over the reality that they believe oppresses them. It’s not coincidental that the people that perpetrate them are close in age, economic demographic and share the same trauma and mental health risks as the young men that the terrorist networks I used to hunt recruited to wear suicide vests. The pattern is pretty clear. And so we should not only be comfortable with making it harder for younger men of a certain age with certain red flags to turn 18 and purchase assault weapons and unlimited ammo, we should be insistent. And in an environment of rapidly expanding gun ownership with highly successful terrorist attacks happening to children, thinking that represents unacceptable infringement on rights is an opinion held by a motivated political minority.
In thinking about the work I did in counterterrorism, I think about the times when we were successful and what made us successful at stopping violence. And I think about the times we weren’t and people got killed. We stopped attacks because in order to build a suicide bomb, recruit a bomber and transport that bomber to the location and then do the public relations work to claim credit, you needed many people to cooperate. And in that cooperation there was always a loose end somewhere that we could pull on to break down that cooperation. And in that breakdown you could find a gap to insert force to stop the violence. Right now in America, in many places, buying a tactical weapon and lots of ammunition and walking into a school and shooting children requires close to no cooperation at all. It requires no loose ends to be exposed pull on. It provides too few gaps for the forces of deterrents to insert themselves and do the just work of saving children. And so it is easy enough for people who aren’t particularly bright, capable or talented to do something which ought to be prohibitively hard to do.
Ross Douthat quotes criminologist Adam Lankford in a recent column.
“If you make buying a firearm more difficult for people who find it difficult to do anything socially, that makes a difference.”
There’s a lot in that statement that squares with my experience saving lives. The point is making a difference. If you make enough difference in the right direction then school shootings get too hard to do. If you innovate school facility safety technology so that it’s harder to do it, it makes a difference. And yes I believe this can be done without turning it into an airport or arming teachers. If you make it harder for someone who just turned 18 to establish offensive firearms dominance over law enforcement, it makes a difference. If you make a troubled young man have to cooperate with just a few more people before they walk through the door of a school classroom and murder children, than it makes a difference.
These are neither political nor controversial opinions.