The pandemic kept Americans home for a year. Now that they’re venturing out again, the mass shootings have resumed. Last week a gunman killed eight people in Atlanta, Georgia. This week another killed 10 in Boulder, Colorado.
Each of America’s mass shootings sparks a gun rights debate that misses the root of the problem: a culture of violence.
I grew up in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, an hour’s drive from the King Soopers where this week’s shooting took place. My childhood was steeped in America’s rural gun culture. As a boy I shot my own Marlin .22 rifle, mostly at targets but occasionally aiming hollow-point bullets into streams and ponds for the fun of seeing big splashes. I helped my father reload ammunition for other firearms, including .223 rounds for his collection of AR-15 rifles. I attended the University of Colorado at Boulder for four years, one of them while living in its Kittredge dormitories on the south edge of campus, two miles from this week’s shooting.
It was taken as gospel in my family that the solution to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. The question, “What if nobody had guns?” never came up. Nationally, it probably can’t. Even advocates of gun control push only marginal measures, such as banning assault weapons, but any gun can be used in an assault and so can other weapons.
The problem lurks farther down the chain of events that produces an active shooter. If the only change we made in America was getting rid of guns, would the violence end? If the ingredients that made an active shooter were altered so that he did not want to kill people, would it matter that guns were available? No and no, are my guesses.
From within America, it’s hard to notice the country’s obsession with militaristic conflict, but from a culture that does not share that obsession it becomes blindingly obvious. It pervades every corner of America, hardening into contentiousness and fierce tribalism so ubiquitous that we become accustomed to them and don’t realize that they’re not the default for human society. I didn’t notice the constant conflict in America until moving to Japan almost 19 years ago. Seething gave way to safety. Few people even gesture angrily at other motorists, much less want to kill for killing’s sake.
The ones who do, however, manage to get it done, and this is instructive. American commentators sometimes say that mass shooters would not do as much damage without guns, but Japan’s rare killers have found ways.
In July 2019 an arsonist walked in the front doors of a Kyoto Animation building carrying 11 gallons of gasoline and set the place on fire, killing 36 people and injuring 33 more. The massacre reached a level more horrifying than most of America’s mass shootings, including the August 2019 attack at a Wal-Mart in El Paso, Texas (23 killed, 23 injured); the February 2018 shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida (17 killed, 17 injured); and the April 1999 Columbine High School rampage in Columbine, Colorado (15 killed, 24 injured).
The primary driver of mass violence is not the means, but the desire, and the United States produces this desire in great quantities.
Founded by war and engaged in war for much of its history, America has reached the ironic state of needing the right to own guns to protect against the right to own guns. The country lives under a cloud of mutually assured destruction, affirmed by the Supreme Court in its 2010 Heller decision stating that the right to own guns isn’t for national defense but guarding against gun-toting neighbors.
Japan’s massacres by other means suggest that Japanese people could kill each other more frequently and on an American scale if they wanted to, but they don’t. They’re taught in school that maintaining society’s harmony, called wa, is paramount. Children remind their classmates to avoid meiwaku (annoying others) and jama (hindering others).
In America, by contrast, kids are taught an us-and-them worldview. The two primary tribes—let’s call them left and right—are pitted against one another and resort to violence when unhappy. We get riots from the left and riots from the right, each side excusing theirs and condemning the other’s. Small wonder, then, that when I asked a Japanese friend who once lived in California if he was surprised by the many shootings in America, he replied, “No, I’m surprised there aren’t more.”
Maybe this time, in the wake of the Atlanta and Boulder tragedies, we can set aside the Second Amendment impasse to focus elsewhere. The best time to stop a shooter is before he becomes one.
