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The U.S. is a dangerous country. Over 33,000 of us die each year from getting shot one way or another, including by our own hand. And over 11,000 of us die each year by being murdered by someone using a gun to kill us. Approximately 67 percent of all US homicides are committed using a firearm. The US has the most firearms per capita than any other country in the world. Americans are 10 times more likely to be killed by a gun than people in other developed countries. Gun-related murder in the US is 25 times higher than the other 22 high-income nations — even though the US has half the population of those 22 other nations combined (see the American J. of Medicine, vol. 129, issue 3, pp. 266-273).
Scientists, whose job it is to draw conclusions, conclude that guns are killing us. Others, who eschew conclusions and go with their gut, want more guns.
Clearly this is a situation that cries out for social and other psychologists to get involved and become active in trying to get guns out of the U.S. culture.
What are the psychologists up against? Is it even psychologically and socially and culturally possible to get rid of guns? Here are two reasons that you never hear discussed which suggest that getting rid of guns in the U.S. is impossible.
Reason 1. Americans love guns more than they love their children: 91 percent of children under 14 who die by guns die in the U. S. — thus, the U.S. is far more dangerous than ISIS. This fact is obvious from all the school shootings (averaging every 60 hours, so far — as of late Feb. 2018). And this fact alone is sufficient to bring on profound pessimism. Not all weeping mothers and fathers are left-wing. Some are right-wing. Yet neither of these two sets of weeping parents do anything about the gun violence. It seems wildly implausible that losing a child to a shooter is some sort of cultural honor or badge, but what other conclusion can we draw from such inaction? This behavior is so strange that it demands close and persistent attention from the psychologists.
Perhaps there is something else going on here. Perhaps those in positions of power, those with the power to stop gun violence, are rationally certain that their children will never suffer such a dark fate as being killed at school. Why? Because those in power are rich and put their children in private schools with robust security measures. This coupled with the millions of dollars spent by the National Rifle Association on Congress-people results in no action. On this view, the weeping parents are simply powerless...all they can do is weep.
Here is how bad it really is. The following is a description by a real teacher involved in school-mandated active shooter drills in a grade school:
It’s children killing children. Not only that, but schools now have drills to train and prepare teachers and children for such tragic events. I was reminded of a mock shooter simulation we had at our school a few years ago. The secretary stated over the intercom that we were in lockdown. We were trained “Locks, lights, out of sight.” So I locked my door, turned off the lights, and directed the children to the safest area of the classroom. We waited quietly.
We were also trained to NEVER open our door. Not for any reason. It would be unlocked by a sheriff’s deputy or an administrator. 10 minutes in and someone rattled the door handle. My little ones looked terrified! I reminded them it was just a drill. 20 minutes in, the door is unlocked and it is a sheriff’s deputy with a gun across his shoulder. We are instructed to line up and put our hands on our head to exit the room. Children are following me as I take them out of the building, down the sidewalk, and onto a bus that is waiting to take us to the 4-H barn. Halfway down the sidewalk, I turn to make sure my little ducklings, with their hands still on their heads, are in tow and it hits me like a brick! You know that awful pain in your throat you get when you want to cry but realize you have to hold it in. Well, I had that pain. My throat ached, my eyes burned, and my ears felt as if they would explode! I looked at those little 8 and 9-year-old children and all I could think was they should NEVER have to do this! Not for real or in a simulated drill! I fought back my tears and waited until I got home that evening to cry. I cried again this morning watching the children in Florida leave their school with their hands above their heads. I cried for the victims. I cried for their families. Children should never have to experience this! Ever! (By Kim Dietrich)
Note the large difference between active shooter drills and fire drills or (from the '60s) duck-and-cover drills. The latter two kinds of drills are for events that happen in spite of our best efforts. Though we work hard to prevent fires, we cannot prevent all of them, and though we work hard to prevent nuclear war (we used to anyway), we cannot always prevent someone from blowing us up with a nuclear bomb. So we learn and practice safety measures (though the duck-and-cover method is now known to have been hilariously inadequate).
But this is not the situation with school mass murders sponsored by the 2nd Amendment. We aren’t working hard or even working lazily at preventing mass murder. The truth is that we are not even remotely trying to prevent mass murder. So we subject our children to the horror of school mass murder.
Reason 2. Americans are protected by the largest military in the world. Our military is larger than the next nine largest militaries put together, and our military budget dwarfs the next 7 largest budgets combined, and that includes both China and Russia (see Business Insider) Our police are well-armed and often well-trained. Yet Americans fear.
What do we fear? We fear abortion (as an essential component to women’s rights), animal rights, any religion besides conservative Christianity, bans on hunting, birth control, carbon footprints, the politics of caring, controlling energy use, controlling mining, discussions of sexism, diversity, economic crashes, education, euthanasia, evolution, flying planes into buildings, gay marriage, gender (and the word “gender”), getting mugged, gun control, home invasions, homosexuality, immigration, not logging, statistically not common sexual behavior, population control (and discussing same), protecting the environment, races other than the white one, restrictions on parenting, running out of gas and oil, science, sex, taking global warming seriously, talk of climate change, talk of social class, talk about the Second Amendment, terrorism, transgendered humans, types of governments besides ours, vaccinations . . . .In fact, we fear discussing gun control so much that Congress has prevented our Centers for Disease Control from conducting any research on gun control. Such willful blindness is not only immoral, it is illegal (trying getting away with willful blindness in a criminal case).
Why do Americans fear so much? Because fear is good politics. Nothing brings a people together and keeps a ruler in power like fear. And it has been this way since we were first human hundreds of thousands of years ago. A central and important paper on this topic is “Bad Is Stronger Than Good” by Roy F. Baumeister, Ellen Bratslavsky, Catrin Finkenauer, and Kathleen D. Vohs; Review of General Psychology 2001. Vol. 5. No. 4. 323-370. For evolutionary reasons, humans fear, and we take fear more seriously than happiness. Fear dominates our lives.
But why do Americans fear so much? The above explanation explains why humans fear. But why do Americans fear as much as they do — more than the people of other nations?
Because of guns, obviously. Guns are for killing, so they naturally generate fear. Guns are everywhere in the U.S. (I have had students show me their guns at school.) And guns have come to live in our psyches as our main tool for “personal protection.” So, Americans get used to thinking in terms of guns. Not all Americans think this way, but a strong and vocal and well-funded subset of Americans do think this way. And thinking in terms of guns is fearing.
And so Americans assuage their gun-caused fear with more guns. And all this gun buying is making gun companies and gun advocates obscenely rich. A side-benefit to promulgating fear at the expense of our children.
Meanwhile, the U.S. goes on advocating murdering our children. And so our children will continue to be murdered.
