On the long list of excuses and deflections gun rights activists use to shut down any talk of gun regulation, one critical angle comes down to numbers. Mass shootings, school shootings, gun massacres — whatever you want to call them — only make up a tiny percentage of the number of people killed every year by guns in the United States. That's true. Relatedly, AR-15s, the mass shooters' firearm of choice, account for only a tiny percentage of overall firearms deaths in the United States. That's true. Indeed, some noted that the 10 African-Americans murdered in a Buffalo supermarket on May 14th may not even have been a majority of the African-Americans killed by firearms on that single day. Using these very real numbers, gun rights activists portray supporters of assault weapons bans, bans on high capacity magazines and the rest as reactive and innumerate. It's similar to the way that gun activists sometimes try to shut down restriction conversation by noting how people horrified by all the carnage don't know all the technical differences between this gun and that one.
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These numbers are real. Upwards of 50,000 Americans die every year by firearms, a number that massively dwarfs a dozen or two fatalities in even the biggest mass shootings. But the whole line of argument mischaracterizes the role of mass shootings in U.S. culture and society. It's an argument made in bad faith on the gun supporting side of the equation. But it exists on the restrictionist side as well. That's part of what gives the argument such power.
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School shootings and all of what we call mass shootings in the United States are properly understood as terror crimes. They function as such and they are intended as such. They cast a pall of terror far beyond those immediately affected by them. Definitions here get in the way of proper understanding. The most common definition of a "mass shooting" is an incident in which four or more people are shot in a single incident, or series of incidents closely related in time and location. That definition comes from the FBI and the Congressional Research Service. But that includes all sort of crimes most of us aren't thinking of when we think of mass shootings: robberies gone wrong, domestic disputes, gang killings. Those victims are just as shot. They are just as dead. But they're not what most of us are talking about when we talk about mass shootings. If they meet a technical definition then we need a new set of words to describe what we're talking about.
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The hallmark of almost all of these attacks is their randomness. Sometimes they target specific groups — African-Americans at the Buffalo Supermarket or the Emanuel AME church shooting in Charleston or Jews at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. But the shooter seldom has any relationship with his victims. He doesn't know them in most cases and they don't know him. They have no reason to know he's coming. Indeed, there's no particular person he's trying to kill. He's just trying to kill as many people as possible. In the vast majority of cases he's already decided he's going to die in the attack, which puts him beyond any negotiation or threat or deterrence. It's the randomness and spectacle that casts a pall and specter of terror far beyond the individual crime.
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From one perspective, racist or anti-Semitic or misogynistic attacks are in a different category from the more random school shootings that don't seem to have any clear purpose or ideological agenda. They are certainly different to the targeted groups. But I would argue that the commonality is greater than the differences. They are all massacres as spectacle and terror. And it is these crimes where AR-15s really are central to the deed. There's a reason why virtually every mass shooter uses one. They are symbols of overwhelming force and massacre. They also kill the most people in the shortest period of time.
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America has a whole other largely handgun-based problem. That's the one that facilitates the firearm suicides that make up almost half of all firearms death. It's behind most intimate partner killings, toddlers stumbling on unsecured gun and killing themselves, killings in robberies, gang killings and more. That's the source of the great majority of deaths. It's disproportionately a hand gun rather than a long gun problem. But it's mostly distinct from these terror crimes which have a logic, a goal and origins that are quite distinct.
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We can't address this problem without understanding it properly. And we can't be distracted by bad faith arguments that are facilitated by lack of a proper understanding.
