Gun Control and Mass Shootings: How We Are Missing the Target

, by Bryan Stascavage, Staff Writer

In the wake of the Oregon shootings, I already had a sense of what was going to happen.

President Obama standing in front of the cameras decrying the lack of gun control? Check.

The pro-gun supporters countering with tired phrases like “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” or crying “Second amendment!” Check.

My disgust with both sides attempting to politicize a mass murder situation for their own ideological agendas? Check. I understand the desire to harness the energy immediately after a mass murder, but the humanitarian in me says that should be a time of healing, not a race to push an agenda.

The next mass murderer has watched the coverage of the Oregon shooter, and is preparing his attack. When and where will it happen? Anyone’s guess.

The discourse after a mass shooting has become so predictable that I can almost debate both sides by myself. It has become so boring, so unproductive. Both sides are entrenched; the media sells a lot of stories by stroking the anti-gun rhetoric, and at the end of the day? Nothing is achieved. There has been almost no progress. The stage is set for the next mass murderer.

I saw a sliver of hope when articles began to surface questioning the ethics of publishing the shooter’s name. Sheriff John Hanlin refused to name the shooter. CNN was heavily criticized for saying the shooter’s name on air before deciding to stop showing pictures and naming the shooter.

This is a potential change to the pattern, a shift in the discussions, and it gives me hope. According to the statistics, deaths from mass shootings comprise a small fraction of the total gun deaths. It is important to account for other causes of gun violence such as organized crime; for example, in Los Angeles in the year 2014, 62% of the city’s total killings were caused by organized crime.

It is my opinion that we need to completely change how we talk about mass murderers, and it has absolutely nothing to do with guns. It has to do with how we cover these events, and our culture.

The first issue is the media’s coverage of these sorts of events. Almost every mass murderer that I researched had files on the Columbine shootings. The media dissected the two shooter’s lives. Their manifestos were read by the world, their writings and activities were documented and published. Debates raged over whether video games or their music choices were responsible. The coverage of how they went about their attack on their high school was so complete that terrorist organizations have copied and improved upon their tactics.

For a narcissistic sociopath, this amount of attention is a dream come true. The Charleston shooter wanted to bring attention to race relations in the country. He was successful. The Oregon and Virginia Tech shooters wanted to make anti-religion statements. Successful.

Promise of intense media coverage and voice amplification of one’s manifesto? Those are powerful motivators. The gun or guns used are tertiary to it all, these individuals would have found a way to cause a mass casualty event with whatever means were available to them. The Boston bombers managed to create panic with a couple of pressure cookers. Any chemist can tell you that explosives or poison gas can be made with homemade materials and instructions found online.

The media isn’t exactly totally responsible, either. We all are. Our obsession with anti-heroes is well documented. The Joker character in the Batman series fascinates us. “Dexter” was a show about a serial killer that the writers cleverly humanized enough that we rooted for him, despite the fact he was killing in cold blood. We cheered Walter White from “Breaking Bad.”

We have an appetite for anti-heroes and content creators are supplying that market. When it happens in real life instead of on the small or big screen, the media knows they can cash in.

The third and final factor is how we care for those who have mental disorders. Institutionalization died after WWII due to the horrific conditions in those facilities, and how the inmates were dehumanized. The end result is that a lot of those who need care are not receiving it.

This led to a disturbing side effect: We as a country are afraid of those who have mental illness, because we don’t know who is violent or not. In my opinion, that has led to the stigmatization of those who have mental illness, which has then led to those who feel they might need help to reject care in order to not be stereotyped.

Would the Oregon or Sandy Hook shootings have not happened if we had better mental health care? Maybe, maybe not. Would either perpetrator have opted to seek out help instead of resorting to violence? That is a tough question, too.

I do feel that if we as a nation were flooded with these types of questions and discussions after a mass shooting, rather than the usual tired slate of grandstanding, this would be a lot more productive. At least we would be hitting closer to the heart of the issues.

If gun control is your passion, then in my opinion your focus should be on the availability of legal and illegal weapons in poor communities wherein disaffected youth are more susceptible to being coerced into committing organized crime, and less on mass shootings, which comprise less than one percent of all murders in America. Dig beneath the surface.

If your focus is on mass shootings, then I think it is time to change the rhetoric and the nature of the discussions to something more productive. The media coverage of the events needs to change. The anti-hero worship mentality needs a reality check. And we need to better care for those who have mental disabilities without stigmatizing receiving care. Whether gun purchases should be more regulated is a minor point.

Stascavage is a member of the Class of 2018.

  • woosh

    this is a great piece. super interesting and i definitely agree with you, bryan!

  • sumyunggai

    You do realize that many of the weapons used in urban crime come from smuggling across borders where gun purchasing is legal and easy, i.e Indiana to Chicago.

    • adam benn

      Then why doesn’t Indiana have the same level of violent crime that Illinois does? Has that thought ever entered into your indoctrinated “mind”?

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  • What???

    “It is my opinion that we need to completely change how we talk about
    mass murderers, and it has absolutely nothing to do with guns. It has to
    do with how we cover these events, and our culture.”

    It detracts from productive discourse to completely ignore any one aspect of a shooting. Access to guns is still a factor, regardless of how infrequently mass shootings occur relative to the larger scale of gun violence. I don’t think any reasonable person disagrees with you that we need to take better care of those with mental illness. But the issue remains that people, regardless of whether they are affiliated with organized crime, or are perpetrators of mass shootings, have access to guns.

    You also cite statistics then do nothing with them.
    “It is important to account for other causes of gun violence such as organized crime; for example, in Los Angeles in the year 2014, 62% of the city’s total killings were caused by organized crime.”

    What are you contributing to your point by saying this? Why is it important to account for these killings? It’s not enough to cite a statistic. How does it bolster your point? Moreover, what is your point?

    “If gun control is your passion, then in my opinion your focus should be
    on the availability of legal and illegal weapons in poor communities
    wherein disaffected youth are more susceptible to being coerced into
    committing organized crime, and less on mass shootings, which comprise less than one percent of all murders in America.”
    Again, what’s the point of this statistic? It seems to point out the purported insignificance of mass shootings, which then makes this whole discourse on the nature of mass shootings invalid. When you cite something, I implore you to explain how it’s relevant. Otherwise, your point is entirely lost.

    • Bryan Stascavage

      Hi there,

      Thank you for the feedback and critique!

      I accept the following to be true:

      An otherwise normal individual picking up a gun does not magically transform him or her into a mass murder. Therefore, the individual has made the decision to commit mass murder before obtaining the gun.

      Similarly, an individual who has made the decision to commit a mass murder will not magically be transformed into a normal well-adjusted individual if he or she cannot access a gun.

      Therefore, mass murderers who find they cannot locate a gun will then search for other means limited only by his or her morbid creative thinking process. A couple of high school kids in Colorado managed to build several functional pipe bombs.

      The statistics are meant to complement this point. When one goes to paint a house, they don’t break out an artist’s brush and start in the corner with small strokes. They break out a roller and paint large portions quickly. After it is over, then they touch up with a smaller brush.

      The mass murderer is the small artist paintbrush in this analogy. The statistics show the broad side of the house is located in poor neighborhoods that have access to illegally obtained guns.

      I appreciate the critique about not integrating my statistics better, but I assumed the reader could make the jump in logic without hand holding. Perhaps I had an error in judgment.

      With respect to integrating the statistics, I assumed the reader would understand that the large number of organized crime related deaths indicates this is where the pro-gun control experts should focus their efforts.

      Similarly, those who are concerned with the rising mass murder incidents in the country should focus on what transforms someone into the killer in the first place.

      In my opinion.

      v/r – Bryan

      • Wes

        You aren’t a mass murderer until you commit mass murder, and guns do facilitate it.

      • Anonymous

        So does a gallon container of gasoline, or simply made explosives. (instructions available on the internet…) The Tsarnaev brothers would have been more successful dropping their highly primitive bombs into any College Cafeteria..
        Guns also facilitate defense, gun free zones don’t seem to have stopped a single mass murderer.
        But certainly the attention we give to these killers seems to inspire more, and the encouragement of victimhood for any and all reasons, so that people elevate their personal pissy little irritations and self induced sensitivities into major justification of shutting everybody else down by coercion, is creating a culture among young males who just want to get power and shoot down rather than shout down and to get even… Also these are males without an active father in their lives, a rather modern destroyer of social fabric, and young males psyches.

        And to deny that these are the outcomes of liberal progressive policies over the past 50 years, is to be ignorant of history, or simply not to have lived through it.

        Yep, the bad old days were amazingly free of mass shootings, even though the firearms technology that makes it easier is more than 150 years old . (And semi auto pistols became commercially available to the public almost 120 years ago)

        So the reasons for the growth of mass shootings is social, not tecnological

  • smh

    “The Charleston shooter wanted to bring attention to race relations in the country. He was successful.” Don’t undersell mass shooters. All they want to do is bring light to social justice.

    • Jim Scotts

      You are a scumbag! Please do not reproduce, better yet lock yourself in a closet!

      • Anonymous

        You too, are unable to understand sarcasm or irony. And if your best response to someone who who didn’t attack anyone, is to engage in thug like invective, then either please STFU, or go to your beloved closet and die quietly. There, feel better now?

  • Jack London

    It’s important to point out that the author is very wrong about focusing mainly on gangland crime, which is actually a relatively small number of the overall gun homicide number. FBI figures show that the largest categories are arguments, such as drunken ones and domestics, other crime (not gang), and uncategorized, before you get to gang killings, which of course are more prevalent in certain cities with gangs.

    • Bryan Stascavage

      Hi Jack,

      I found the source you were referencing: http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htus8008.pdf#page=27

      You were looking at table 40, which is all homicides. You need to be looking at table 41, which is homicides with a gun, in which gangs clearly dominate.

      v/r – Bryan

    • adam benn

      52.5% of all murders in this country are committed by black males. They are overwhelmingly gang related.

    • Jim Scotts

      Ouch Jack, you must be another uneducated gun grabber

  • Anonymous

    All persons (especially family &
    friends) who knew about the questionable mental condition or suspicious
    activities of an individual with gun access and DID NOT REPORT same to
    authorities before that individual
    committed murder are co-conspirators guilty of MURDER to be so indicted and
    prosecuted.

    SOME
    ONE. DO SOMETHING!

    Dave Henrie

    • adam benn

      What are they going to do Dave? Cops cannot imprison or confiscate guns because somebody calls them and says they are crazy. And no they are co-conspirators. If they were then you, and the comple morons that think like you, are responsible for Katherine Steinle’s murder because you support the politicians that love illegal immigrants

      • Anonymous

        the ad-hom you’re spilling out, in a student paper, where one hopes for rational discourse, those insults you mete out really help your argument… …. NOT.
        And yes, in an awful lot of instances it seems, friends, family,therapists, and even the police did not act to shut down someone with firearms, and irrational hostility, and threats… The law is more flexible here than you imagine.
        Anyway write politely or please STFU

  • gerard

    Yep. The president and democrats get exercised about gun control after these mass shooting but ignore the equivalent of a mass shooting every weekend in chicago, Milwaukee, new orleans, DC etc. By organized crime I presume you mean gang violence predominately fueled by the drug trade. Mostly inner city and mostly black on black and almost exclusively with illegal firearms. The best way to curtail this type of gun violence would be a combination of stop & frisk and increased punishment for carrying an illegal firearm. Of course that’s not the kind of gun control the democrats have in mind because, you know, ‘mass incarceration’ and all.

    • Debbie

      Quite right.

      If they even actually start enforcing current gun laws strictly and vigorously, there will be a “disparate impact” on young Black and Hispanic males who “progressives” would like to see incarcerated at rates that reflect their relative percentages of the total population rather than their percentages among the subset of the population that chooses to become violent criminals. Those who whine about “mass incarceration” of favored minority groups will whine even louder.

      And of course, the thug-lovers of BLM will fight tooth and nail against aggressive policing in high crime areas that need it.

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