A Gun Again

(This is an excerpt from a larger analysis on Brian Klaas’ Substack.)

39 years ago, I was baptized in Annunciation Church in southwest Minneapolis, my parents and Godparents beaming, as light filtered through pale blue and golden stained glass windows behind them.¹

Last Wednesday morning, a deranged, mentally unwell shooter with easy access to weapons of war and unlimited ammo, shattered those same windows while spraying bullets into children who were praying in pews.² It was the first week back to school.

In less than two minutes, the shooter unloaded 116 rounds. As the glass exploded, a fifth-grader named Victor dove on top of another 10 year-old, shielding his tiny body from the armor-piercing NATO-grade military rounds—bullets that were bought legally nearby. Victor was shot in the back, but survived.⁴ Another student, wheelchair-bound Ryan Palattao, couldn’t duck under the pews. A heroic teacher named Becca Heer dragged him out of the chair, pinned him beneath her body, and saved his life.

The death toll could have been far worse. The door to the church was locked, forcing the shooter to attack from the outside. That detail was treated as an unequivocal positive—and thank goodness the door was locked that morning. But the door to a church being locked during services by default is also a dystopian canary in the American coal mine. Rather than dealing with the root problem, the United States has made political choices to live this way, where the only way to try to keep kids safe is to lock the world out. . . .

Deranged zealots, bigots, evil, hateful murderers, and mentally unwell people exist everywhere on the planet. There are people like the Minneapolis shooter in every country in the world. But routine mass shootings occur with regularity in just one developed rich country. Why is that?

There was something in the shooter’s video that offered a far better explanation than any incoherent manifesto ever could: a bewildering array of guns and an enormous cache of ammunition, all legally purchased. . . .

There are three key factors that are relevant to understanding elevated levels of targeted, mass violence in the United States: social dysfunction, elite incitement, and above all, easy access to unlimited guns.

Social dysfunction—poverty, racial hatred, inequality, cultural anger, gang violence, a broken health care system, and so on—create a toxic cocktail that inevitably leads to elevated levels of violence compared to better functioning peer societies.

Incitement to violence and hate-filled polarization spewed from politicians, prominent public figures, and influencers in the media can amplify the risks further, particularly in terms of targeting specific groups.

For example, it is unlikely that Vance Boelter, the Christian extremist Minnesota assassin, would have killed Democratic politicians in a political culture that was built on tolerance and mutual respect. It was little surprise that someone like Boelter acted after years of asymmetric Republican demonization of their political opponents as “treasonous scum” who are secretly pedophiles, complete with outlandish conspiracy theories, violent memes, and jokingly praising would-be assasins or endorsing January 6th rioters as victims.

But both of these factors are dwarfed by the causal trigger that makes the United States a unique international outlier: easy, unfettered access to guns. It is currently a country with more political capital being spent on banning books than banning assault rifles. The ugly truth is this:

The United States is the only rich, developed nation in the world that politically tolerates and legally ensures the slaughter of its own citizens.

It’s the guns.

Last year, 17,927 people were murdered with a gun in the United States.

In England and Wales⁶, that same figure was 22. You didn’t read those numbers incorrectly. It’s really 17,927 vs. 22.