The Earth in Anarchy
This is most likely the last thing I will ever write in this space on mass shootings.
This is not an issue I prefer to comment on for a very large number of reasons, the most emphatic of which is that it has become clear to me that it is precisely the writing and proclaiming and glorifying of such events that is most responsible for their continuation, as a virtually unique, imitative, mass-media-driven phenomenon. Mass shooters commit mass shootings first and foremost because they have heard and read about other mass shootings, have become deeply impressed by the cultural and social and political impact of such events, the fear and grief and anger they inspire, the iconic and symbolic nature of the killings, the manifestos and disaffection and claims and identities of the killers, and the deep, universally-acknowledged sense of meaningfulness about all the above, and so have decided to imitate them. The most directly impactful thing I, and probably most of you, can do to prevent mass shootings is to ignore them unless you are directly or indirectly affected by them. Even then, it is quite clear to me that the mass-media and political circus around such events deeply harms the actual victims of shootings, preventing them from grieving and moving forward by cynically channeling their grief into the news cycle. I have no desire to participate in any of the above, however remotely.
Nonetheless, in the current mass media landscape, such events as these are supposed to lead to conversations and policy debates about "gun control" and "gun violence." These conversations now commonly involve direct accusations of opponents being responsible for murder and the death of children, and lead, in practice, mostly to an increase in the generally violent valence of American society.
Despite the above cautions, probably for the only time, is my own contribution to this discourse. It will not be repeated.
I should perhaps repeat at the outset that I do not own a gun, have no desire to own a gun, and in fact possess a fairly strong personal aversion to firearms, which was perhaps inherited from my maternal grandfather, who despite owning a firearm as a practical necessity (in his career as a cattle farmer), had a strong aversion to guns and avoided using them as much as possible.
It is certainly true that "gun violence" is a characteristic feature of modern American society. A brother of mine teaches at an inner-city high school. Many of his students own or possess guns, by one means or another, and his students frequently die or commit suicide by means of guns. One such student, by all accounts a sober, studious young man not involved in any kind of gang-related activity, was shot to death and his body dumped in the parking-lot of a strip club. There was no police investigation.
Americans kill each other in relatively large numbers, especially Americans in certain areas of the country. When they do so, they frequently use guns. These killings sometimes involve organized gangs, but more frequently represent small-scale, domestic, or interpersonal conflicts that turn violent. Then, of course, in relatively small proportional numbers, certain young men in American society imitate other such young men go to public areas and kill fellow students, teachers, and/or complete strangers.
For all of the above reasons, and many more reasons related to politics and community and mass-media, Americans are remarkably distrustful and fearful of one another; and many of them want guns to protect themselves and their families. This sentiment is found, in my experience, especially often in poorer and minority communities, who face much more direct threats to their lives. The Black Panther party was extremely in favor of gun ownership, for obvious reasons.
Americans also commit suicide in large numbers; but how they commit suicide differs demographically, and is to a large extent responsible for the extreme differences in actual suicide mortality. Men, especially middle-aged and elderly men, use guns to commit suicide, and therefore dominate the demographics of suicide. Puzzlingly, little or no policy attention is paid to preventing such suicides, nor is it typically brought up in discussions of gun control.
Modern America also includes, to a degree unprecedented in any historical society, large numbers of extreme, fetishizing hobbyists, a class that includes (among many other groups) BDSM people and board game enthusiasts. Because of this, there exists in America, in a manner extremely unique in all of world history, a sizeable class not just of gun owners, but of gun hobbyists, people who are (to put it mildly) obsessed with guns, love them, identify with them, discuss them and think about them and buy them and sell them and modify them regularly and over and over and over again. Like most fetishists, these people are very easy to dislike for anyone who does not happen share their obsession; and it is easy and common (and very tempting) to blame them for every problem in American society associated with gun violence. Certainly, on a broad level they make society less safe and indirectly pose an obstacle to gun-related reform.
To fixate on these people and make them the center of gun discourse is, however, to somewhat miss the point.
I was extremely struck, in this connection, by how Pope Francis' reaction to one of the most recent mass shootings was subtly but definitely misconstrued by most American commentators. Virtually every American media source identified him as supporting American efforts for what is called "gun control." Though no doubt Pope Francis would support efforts aimed at the curtailment of gun ownership, his actual words were (translated literally from the Italian) "it is time to say enough to the indiscriminate trafficking of arms." In other words, what Pope Francis actually called for was the suppression of weapons trafficking tout court. In this, he was merely repeating one of the most frequent moral admonitions of his papacy, against one of his most frequent moral targets: the global arms industry, which he has consistently denounced and declared responsible for warfare and violence throughout the world.
On a global basis, the more remarkable thing about America is not that we own guns; it is that we make guns, and other weapons, in remarkable quantities, and with remarkable ingenuity and creativity and persistence, and then sell them and give them away and leave them everywhere throughout the world. It has been like this since the World Wars; and despite it being beaten to death as a phrase to the point of meaninglessness, Dwight Eisenhower was quite correct to point to the military-industrial complex as one of the most profound and overpowering political and social presences in modern politics. Indeed, it is hardly too much to say that the large-scale, focused, intensive design, improvement, production, and sale of weapons represents--along with mass-media in general and the large-scale production of advertisements and pornography in particular--one of the most uniquely and distinctively modern phenomena.
Few people seem to have called attention to the rather morbid irony of recent mass shootings being paralleled by huge blank checks of "military aid" provided to Ukraine by the American government and the American arms industry. Whether or not military aid has been extended to them directly, however, practically every military group in the world, even or especially our enemies, uses or at least imitates our weapons. It is for this reason, more than any other, that America is awash with weapons of every kind, including not only the necessary rural and agricultural firearms, hunting rifles, and small, cheap self-defense handguns that were common before the Wars, but a great deal of military surplus and a great deal of state-of-the-art military hardware and civilian imitations thereof.
The "militarization" of police forces, with their Humvees and sniper rifles, is only the most obvious facet of a broader "militarization" of civil society produced not (as in 20th century society) through actual mass conscription, but through our vast, global military, our vast, global arms industry, and their propagation and glorification via mass media. Seen in this light, Americans' odd relationship with guns and gun violence is not simply an area in which Americans are stupid or "behind the times," having failed to catch up with the rest of the civilized world: it is, rather, one symptom of our serving, as a society and a political community, as the global arms designer, producer, and merchant for the world as a whole.
Given the above, I admit that I find "gun control" mostly a morbid and deeply characteristic euphemism. It is quite correct, as many political commentators have said, that there is broad agreement in American society on the need for gun control. Democrats support gun control; Republicans support gun control; gun owners and hobbyists support gun control; the NRA supports gun control; the arms industry supports gun control; no doubt Al-Qaeda in America and the Animal Liberation Front support gun control: because in essence gun control is the way America "solves" all its problems. A vast, largely fictitious regulatory and administrative regime is created out of nowhere to solve a problem driven transparently by deeper causes: and transparently does not solve the problem, but to an extent mitigates it, to an extent distracts from it, enough to keep the system stumbling along through its periodic crises.
So yes, I support gun control, but I don't believe in it. I have no doubt proposed increases in the regulatory control exercised over legal gun ownership will indirectly save some lives; I also have very little doubt that, in the forms most likely to be adopted (i.e."create a regulatory regime that while relying for its enforcement on precisely the industry that profits from selling guns (see fig. 1) both keeps guns incredibly common and widely available to all Good People who might want them (see fig. 2) and prevents all Bad People (see fig.3) with Mental Health Problems (see fig. 4) from buying them"), they will not make American society noticeably less violent, prevent most instances of gun violence, or end the cultural phenomenon of mass shootings.
The most remarkable thing about the American gun discourse, then, is how much of it consists in an elaborate attempt to distract from the central realities of a global arms industry and a shattered political and social world. As stated above, it is easy to hate fetishizing gun hobbyists, even in relatively mild forms. It is even easier, I think, to hate contemporary politicians, who are as a class almost totally irresponsible and working within the bounds set by American Empire and industry. It is even easy to condemn ordinary people who own guns and support gun ownership because they are afraid and view their society as violent and dangerous.
All this, however, rather misses the point about the essentially cyclical nature of such things. People buy up guns after mass-shootings, not just out of fear that they will no longer be available, but as one logical response to the increase in generalized fear of one's neighbors brought about by these mass-media events. Violence, as Rene Girard pointed out long ago, is inherently contagious: it inspires fascination, attention, anger, fear, hatred, and therefore imitation. We, as a society, are truly fascinated by violence, especially mass violence, especially mass shootings: and we reap the predictable results.
By his own account, the man recently arrested trying to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh did so, ironically enough, as a reaction to the recent mass shootings. As a liberal supporter of gun control faced with an event of mass violence, his initial response of obsessive anger and despair rapidly gave way to anger and a fixation on Kavanaugh as the "monster" responsible for the contagion of violence in society; he therefore decided that the best way to end the problem of gun violence was to murder him with a gun. This is how people generally respond to violence: with more violence. And in this, general mass media discourse is emphatically not helping, but hurting everyone.
The above is fairly negative, but I will attempt to end on a relatively positive and constructive note by pointing to what I believe is a helpful historical parallel: indeed, what I believe is perhaps the only close historical parallel to the modern American phenomenon of mass shootings.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there suddenly emerged the phenomenon of "anarchist terrorist attacks." I use scare quotes here because it is extremely clear, in retrospect, that these events were neither anarchist nor terrorist in the colloquial sense of those terms. While anarchism existed as a (very small) political movement centering on Russia, the Italian middle and artisanal classes, and associated emigre communities, there was no real organized anarchist movement outside of Russia, and little or no association between this movement and the actual attacks. Rather, practically all of the attacks outside of Russia were carried out by socially-isolated young men, usually recent immigrants, almost always presently economically working-class, but frequently from middle-class or higher backgrounds, often out of work, not especially politically active, not actual members of anarchist circles, but sometimes with tangential ties to them and sometimes aware of their propaganda through mass-media. The attacks they carried out fell into two broad categories: (1) assassinations and assassinations attempts against heads of state and members of royal families using small pistols, and (2) dynamite attacks against the general public. The latter both at the time and in retrospect has been seen as the more innovative and shocking type of event, and indeed in retrospect marks the beginning of something almost entirely new in world history.
Upon their inception, anarchist attacks became a newspaper sensation, and rumors and speculations ran rampant. Frequently, articles in the popular press indulged in wild speculation about secretive, organized networks of anarchists tied together in a conspiracy against the public and imminently ready to begin a mass revolution throughout the world and seize power. This press fever lasted a surprisingly long time, and made a deep impression on many people; for one excellent, if impressionistic look at the effect of this phenomenon on one sensitive young man, see G.K. Chesterton's "The Man Who Was Thursday," which centers precisely on a fictional version of the imagined "universal anarchist conspiracy" engaged in dynamitings and assassinations. It was certainly something that must have obsessed many ragged young men as Chesterton describes it obsessing his protagonist. Many young men who eventually engaged in attacks did so after reading about previous attacks, the men who had carried them out, and their ideological positions in the newspaper; and they usually carried out attacks in explicit imitation of what they had read.
In the short term, this press fever led to an extraordinary burst of governmental and police efforts aimed at providing security for both heads of state and the general public. Indeed, it is not too much to say that this press scare represented the true beginning of the modern security state. In many countries, including America, it was the main incentive behind the centralization of policing and security systems, and especially the development of new methods of criminal identification, filing, and surveillance. These efforts, taken together, succeeded to a remarkable degree in creating for the first time a network of national and international police systems capable of recording and communicating identifying information about individual criminals from one country to another and from central databases to local police and back again. The primary goal and achievement of this system in the short term was to identify every known anarchist in Europe and America, surveil them, and track their movements. Within a short time, existing anarchist circles became little more than police fronts, with their meetings and activities closely monitored and half of the members paid to inform on the other half. The main anarchist newspaper in Europe, in Paris, was largely funded by the French police.
Nonetheless, given that that the thesis that the attacks were the work of organized cells was false, and given that practically all of the actual people carrying out attacks were not active members of the few anarchist organizations, it is unlikely, to say the least, that these efforts actually prevented any terrorist attacks. Indeed, though it is impossible to tell given the distance in time, there is good reason to believe that a number of attacks were eventually carried out at least by paid police informants, and perhaps even at the active instigation of agents provocateurs.
Despite its large contemporary profile, anarchist terrorism is largely forgotten today, for one reason: because of how quickly it vanished, and what it was followed by. After a period where anarchist attacks became more and more frequent and press attention built to a fever pitch, both the attacks and attention paid to them vanished almost overnight. There are a few reasons for this, I believe, in order of increasing importance: (1) anarchism was a fairly small-scale movement that for a short time succeeded in "punching above its weight" in its intellectual influence, but even at its height found purchase not in the true industrial proletariat, but in areas where industrialization was a recent and violent shock, and largely from the former pre-industrial middle and artisanal classes. For this reason, it rapidly fell out of public consciousness and was replaced by the Socialist and Syndicalist labor movement and the era of the great General Strikes; (2) international politics moved into an era of confrontation culminating in the World Wars, which took young men en masse to the frontlines and killed them off in unfathomable numbers; and (3) for both of the above reasons and also because of simple boredom and distraction, the press and general public at first gradually and then totally lost interest in the phenomenon and accompanying conspiracy theories.
Some takeaways from this analogy:
(1) The mass murder of strangers by strangers for no political reason is neither historically normal, inevitable, or destined to last forever. It is, rather, a vanishingly rare, historically contingent, imitative response to very particular historical circumstances (and almost always to previous events). Mass killings can and do disappear, and their disappearance is emphatically the historical and social norm.
(2) If you wish to actually bring an end to imitative mass-media-driven cultural phenomena like mass shootings and dynamitings the easiest way (and perhaps the only way) is to redirect social attention on a large scale. Theoretical social and political and policy and security solutions aside, this is what actually brought a complete end to anarchist attacks, and it is likely the only thing that will completely bring an end to modern American mass shootings.
(3) Aggressive, invasive security solutions are to be avoided at all costs. True lone-wolf attacks almost by definition cannot be prevented given a reasonably intelligent attacker. They especially cannot be prevented by the favored security methods of the modern world: surveillance, infiltration of political networks, use of agents provocateurs, and so forth, which will do little or nothing other than expend an enormous amount of time, energy, and money and possibly make the problem worse.
4) Other sorts of more preventative, protective security solutions have their usefulness, but frequently do more harm than good. The creation of the modern systems of protection for Heads of State is the direct result of the anarchist scare. Common sense would seem to indicate that such measures are reasonably effective against more spur-of-the-moment and unprepared assassins (such as the "anarchist" that killed William McKinley). They have certainly had a number of unintended consequences, however, the most severe of which has been to drastically increase the distance between ruler and ruled in the modern world and create an almost entirely new "language" of power that has very little to do with the Republican and Democratic historical models that modern societies flatter themselves with. The suit-clad President of the United States, riding in a black, bullet-proof car and surrounded by sunglasses-wearing Secret Service Agents with drawn guns, is an image of political dominance that is no less effective than, even if drastically different from, Late Roman Emperors dressed in sparkling gold and surrounded by armored soldiers.
Protecting Heads of State, however, is a vastly simpler and more focused task than protecting every grade school and shopping mall and church in America. This task is almost certainly impossible to any significant degree (as the TSA has demonstrated well in other arenas), and arming teachers and making schools into prisons would do such enormous collateral social and psychological damage that it's hard to imagine anyone contemplating it with a straight face. As Matthew Walther has asked, do we really want to teachers to step into their classrooms every day armed and mentally-prepared to shoot and kill their own students? It is almost impossible to overstate just how much psychological and social damage even the very limited attempts to "securitize" American schools have done--for almost certainly no real gain at all.
(5) The root cause of such events is social and economic disruption on a large scale. It is notorious that in America today mass shootings are carried out almost entirely by white, middle-class men: in other words, they are carried out not by the generationally repressed, but by groups that have rapidly experienced social and economic change for the worse, especially disruption of communal networks and consequent isolation. For this reason many anarchist terrorists were recent immigrants, especially from places like Italy or Spain where industrialization had occurred more recently as a violent shock to a relatively stable, existing social, economic, and religious system. Members of the long-term, native proletariat of the industrialized Protestant countries, who had experienced industrialism and its violence for generations, did not as a rule engage in such activities.
Given both the recent and continuing effects of the pandemic (discussed in a previous column), and the fact that American society is increasingly based around social and economic disruption as a primary goal, it is hard to see what systemic use could be made of this insight in our society without something resembling a revolution. Still, it remains the underlying cause and contains in itself the only real and satisfying solution, not just of one particular symptom, but of the disease as a whole, on both the individual and societal level.
(6) Means-based solutions (i.e. gun control) to these sorts of events are nebulous, but not impossible. Controlling dynamite to a sufficient degree to actually prevent workers from accessing it was likely impossible so long as dynamite remained a widespread, commonly-used industrial tool in a widely-industrialized society. (I do not recall any serious attempt to control the kind of small, short-range firearms used in assassination attacks.) Nevertheless, the fixation on dynamite as a means played an important role in the public understanding and framing of these attacks and in the psychology of those who carried them out.
Mass shooters today could almost certainly access other ways to carry out their attacks if they were sufficiently motivated, but their fixation on guns in general and on the AR-15 in particular is not without its usefulness. When dealing with an imitative phenomenon, surface-level, even symbolic means can actually be more effective than systemic ones. It is thus probably the case that outright banning certain firearms commonly used by shooters would have an effect much greater than the mere facts would indicate. It is possible that banning certain categories of guns and attachments that allow for rapid shooting would reduce the death-toll of mass shootings. But removing certain symbols from play would likely outright prevent some attacks.
So, to end constructively: the problem of mass shootings is far from inevitable, far from from insoluble, and far from impossible to mitigate. Doing any of those things, however, will require a rather different approach than the common ones on display in contemporary media.
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