The scope of the America's gun violence problem includes every facet of life that culture touches, which means most every element of daily life, writes Elizabeth Bruenig for The Atlantic. Violence begets injury begets death, and any culture debased to vacillating between violent struggle and idle nihilism is shuddering toward its end as a culture of death.
A Culture That Kills Its Children Has No Future (The Atlantic)
Excerpt from The Atlantic: The murders in Uvalde barely begin to describe the scale of American violence, but they do provide insight into its character. School shootings are only a subcategory of mass shootings, which are themselves only a subcategory of gun crime. America sharply surpasses other comparably developed countries in each of those classes of violent crime. A country in which those indicators aren’t necessarily signs of terminal decline is conceivable. But these aren’t the growing pains of a society making difficult advances toward an orderly peace. These are the morbid symptoms of a society coming undone, and they arise largely from policy choices made by interested parties with material motives.
According to the New York Times, the reasons for the violence are familiar and incontrovertible. The United States has many more guns than citizens, about 400 million firearms and only 331 million people.
The Stupefying Tally of American Gun Violence (New York Times)
Excerpt from the New York Times: The toll of the violence, especially on children, has only grown. The CDC reported that the rate of gun deaths of children 14 and younger rose by roughly 50 percent from the end of 2019 to the end of 2020. Last year, more than 1,500 children and teenagers younger than 18 were killed in homicides and accidental shootings, compared with about 1,380 in 2020, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a database tracking gun deaths. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, a young legislator when the children were killed in Sandy Hook, exhorted his fellow senators to action on Tuesday. “What are we doing? What are we doing?” he said on the Senate floor.
The Week reports on six possible proposals to prevent gun violence that include expanding and strengthening background checks, creating red flag laws that identify individuals believed to be a threat to themselves or others, ending the filibuster in the Senate to be able to pass gun control laws with only a simply majority, passing legislation to better track domestic terrorism threats, or developing a nationwide alert system for active shooter emergencies.
6 modest proposals to prevent gun violence in America (The Week)
Excerpt from The Week: The Center for American Progress on Wednesday suggested that if elected officials at the state or federal level aren't getting anything done, city and county officials in Texas could instead "take meaningful steps to prevent gun violence" on their own, without legislative action. In its recommendations, the CAP suggests community initiatives like improving gun violence data collection and reporting, addressing the problem with "racial equity and trauma-informed solutions," and partnering with schools and school boards to bring conversations surrounding gun violence prevention into classrooms.
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