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Mass Shootings Are A Public Health Issue [1]

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Date: 2023-05-07

Two staff from the local Department of Social Support are doing a status check on the old guy in the park. [Midjourney AI and mjr]

I’m going to share some of my ruminations about what the US can/should do about mass shootings, because I can. [I wrote this in June last year, after another mass shooting, I forget which.]

Of course, there won’t be agreement on this kind of stuff. It has become a political football (which, if you think about it, is an indicator of absolute horribleness) but, hmmm, am I revealing too much if I mention that I often ponder what I’d do if I had power? I’m interested and concerned with power because I often sit around wondering why it is that the people who have power don’t use it for good purposes. It’s part of my process of strategic analysis to look at the choices being made by ${whoever} and to wonder what I’d do if I were in their shoes. Usually, my results come back effortlessly as “something radically different” which is the point of the exercise: why do the powerful make the choices that they make? That is a serious question. And, my attempts to answer it are why I often refer to politicians as “sadists” or “sociopaths” – I can’t come up with an answer that’s not untenable. What does that mean? Nothing good.

Watching the whole “mass shootings” problem play itself out, I see two things immediately: the republicans’ responses are those of a bunch of completely corrupt servitors of the gun lobbies. The mouth-noises that they make, attempting to convince ${whoever} that they have other beliefs or an agenda are meaningless. The republicans are devoted to doing nothing and trying to get their base out to vote, with the usual lie “they are going to grab your guns.” Which, basically, has never happened. That the republican base accepts that is a sign of how ignorant and easily fooled they are. On the democrat side, I also see a lack of effective response. For example, grabbing guns might be a slightly effective response. Why, then, have the democrats not done it? I look at them and conclude that they’re in the same game as the republicans; they’re deeply interested in churning their base but that’s it. After all, what was the first thing that the democrats did after the latest shooting: they passed a bunch of legislation that they know the republicans will mostly kill. It’s all a con.

But, what can we do, assuming we actually do care about stopping mass shootings? And there is an election coming up, as usual. What do you do? Simple: you launch a flanking attack. The current strategy is not working; think of something else.

My idea is to create the Department of Social Support. Do it big, and do it splashy. Take some money away from ‘defense’ (a theme of mine) and fund this entire thing by using it as an excuse to stop participating in some war, or other. Except, to do this, I mean actually do that. The democrats have a loathsome history of saying that they are going to help, only to do a few steps of the dance and have themselves force themselves to retrench and basically accomplish nothing. [By the way, the electorate understands that.] The strategic picture is, basically, “we are not going to engage on some pointless debate about whether AR-15s are evil pieces of junk” – we’re going to leave you so that’s your dead horse to beat, meanwhile we’re setting up a massive flank attack based on a populist approach to a serious problem that has traction:

“Back under Reagan, the mental hospitals in this country were closed and mental health became a public policy problem. The Reganites turned a lot of people onto the streets who are suffering and who need help; a good society does not do that sort of thing, it is the responsibility of a government to take care of its weakest citizens, not just its wealthiest…”

The DSS would take a straightforward public health approach to analyze the risk factors in mass shooters. I can tell you a big co-morbidity in mass shooters: domestic violence. Also: despair. DSS would acknowledge the thing nobody seems to want to talk about, which is that a lot of mass shooters seem to be attempting “suicide by cop.” What are the risk factors that lead to that? Abusive or negligent parents, bullying, etc. The fact that the mass shooters often start with their parents is a really big clue. Why isn’t anyone talking about that, when they’re yakkity yakking about magazine size and the definition of “assault rifle”?

The DSS would talk about “at risk kids” and “adults who need help.” As we’ve noticed elsewhere, there is often lots of warning that someone is about to pop – what we lack is a way to engage with them and talk them down from the ledge. Here’s another way this program would be great: it’s a great job maker for veterans with PTSD, and/or people who want to specialize in helping. I imagine that the entry portal into the world of DSS would be a flowcharty sort of app that someone could access, which asks them “where does it hurt?” and works from there. Once the system determines that there’s a kid who’s getting bullied and thinks they may snap and grab a gun, it would schedule them a chance for a confidential sit-down with (let’s say) some Afghanistan war veteran, who has some training as a social worker, who can talk to the kid and learn about their problem and maybe help stabilize them while a better response is created. There would be adult versions, as well: someone who had addiction issues, marital despair, is unemployed and desperate – why not let them sit down with a guidance counselor to see if they can be talked off the ledge? Another program DSS would have is a sort of “witness protection program” for at-risk kids. If some teenager is being bullied and is thinking of killing their classmates, maybe what they really need is some counseling, a new name, and a move to the opposite coast along with opportunities to re-invent themselves doing something else? There are lots of runaways; we need to care for them, too. A lot of them have very poor outcomes, indeed.

See where I am going with this? We’re standing up a whole new agency that has adequate funding and support, which is dedicated to helping take care of our country’s people who are at risk. Who could vote against something so obviously beneficial? Well, of course there are monsters who would vote against this sort of thing, but they’d be positioned for an absolutely frightful hammering for being the uncaring evil bastards that they are. I wonder how today’s republicans would react? They’d probably puff up their chests and come up with some weird shit that is basically, “we had to destroy the village in order to save it.” But the democrats would also have to get their heads out of their asses and understand that they can’t just keep spiraling the defense budget, too, and protecting fossil fuel companies: they’d have to actually fight. That’s what you actually have to do, when you are confronting evil.

Some of you are doubtless thinking, “This wouldn’t work because the democrats don’t have enough of a majority in the senate!” I have an answer to that, too: arrest all the fucking republicans who were involved in the coup. That would change the balance of congress, bigtime. Fight.

As I write this I am wondering if maybe I should not publish it. It reveals too much, namely that when the night is dark and the fireflies are dancing in the yard, I’m perfectly capable of doing a pretty convincing “sociopath” routine. It seems to me that it’s breaking the 4th wall for a historian: when you switch from studying history, to wishing that you could make it. Don’t worry about me, though, I see no path to power and am making no effort toward finding that path and setting foot on it.

So, that’s it. The way to make progress on spree-killers and other kinds of violence within society is not to argue about AR-15s and clip sizes, etc. – it’s to take a public health approach and study the problem with an eye toward answering “why do these people do this?” What infuriates me about that is that we actually have a pretty good start on that analysis, but that conversation is not happening at all because America, collectively, has a lot of fapping that they’d rather do. I have absolutely no hope that anything useful will be done. Every time there’s a mass shooting, it seems that word comes out that the cops did a check-in on the shooter, or there was warning, or the shooters’ parents knew something was up. We can’t ignore that information, while arguing about magazine capacity.

I am painfully aware that one of the quintessential elements of the fascist mind-set is that they believe they are able to get things done. Usually, that’s delusion and narcissism. It makes me worry a bit when I start sounding like one of them.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/5/7/2167976/-Mass-Shootings-Are-A-Public-Health-Issue

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