[30 years ago this week, Congress passed the groundbreaking gun control legislation known as the Brady Bill. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of key moments and layers to the debate over gun control and guns in American society, past and present!]
[NB. This
is another older post, part of a 2018 year in review series. But like yesterday’s,
I think it speaks to both overarching topics and our own moment, so am sharing
it as part of this series.]
On what’s
not new, kind of new, and entirely new about our worst contemporary tragedies.
Seven
years ago to the day, I wrote a year in
review piece on the January 2011 Gabrielle Giffords shooting, and on how
pioneering scholar Richard
Slotkin’s AmericanStudies analyses
of violence and guns in
American history and identity could help us understand such
shocking and disturbing acts of political and social violence. The fact that
I’m writing a year in review piece seven years later about another mass
shooting—and, more exactly, the fact that I could have picked any one of the
almost literally countless other 2018 mass
shootings as a starting point for this post; although we must keep
counting, and must keep thinking about each of
them and their victims individually—proves Slotkin’s theses and then
some. The final book
of Slotkin’s trilogy called America a “gunfighter nation,” and
hardly a day has gone by in 2018 that hasn’t featured literal, painfully
exemplary acts of gun-fighting. Indeed, one of the most frustratingly common
responses to such mass shootings—the idea that we just need
more guns and shooters to intervene—represents yet another layer to
that symbolic but all-too-real gunfighter nation mythos.
So we’ve
always been a nation deeply linked to images and realities of violence and
guns, and mass shootings like the February
14th, 2018 massacre at Parkland, Florida’s Marjory
Stoneman Douglas High School have to be put in that
longstanding and foundational American context. But at the same time, no
AmericanStudier or American historian (or even slightly knowledgeable and
engaged observer of American society) could possibly argue that mass shootings
have not become more ubiquitous, more of a fact of American daily life, over
the last few years; that whatever the longstanding impulses or inclinations to
which they connect, these horrific acts of mass violence have not found more consistent
outlets in the 21st century. Or, to put it more exactly and
crucially, that white Americans have not been forced to deal with the threat of
mass violence more fully—as African
Americans, Native
Americans, and Asian
Americans (among other groups) can attest, such threats have been part of
the American experience of too many communities for centuries. But in 2018, the
threat of mass violence has for the first time become a genuine possibility for
every American community at every moment and in every space, from night
clubs to synagogues, supermarkets to high
schools.
That
constant threat comprises a dark new reality, perhaps especially for American
parents (my sons have to do monthly active shooter drills in their schools,
something I can’t quite bear to dwell on). But in the aftermath of the Parkland
shooting, young
students at the high school also modeled another and very different new
reality: a generation willing and able to use their voices, their social
media presence, and their activist
acumen to challenge such dark histories and their causes. We’ve only
just begun to see the potential effects of this group of young people and the
broader generation they represent, although the November
midterm elections certainly exemplified the kinds of victories
this cohort can help produce. But while electoral and political results are
certainly important, the fundamental truth is that the Parkland students have
already and significantly changed the conversation, making clear that both gun
victims and student communities will have a say in the ongoing debate around
mass shootings and guns in the United States.
Next gun
control history tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do
you think? Histories or contexts you’d highlight?
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