The politics of talking about violent crime

Here are a couple of pieces about the Michigan State shooting. One is about how safe the author felt on campus as a young child in the 1990s; the other is about how the author’s fears of violence as an undergraduate ten years ago must now be much worse for today’s students.

 I think about the words Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer spoke on Tuesday morning – “Our Spartan community is reeling today” – and I wonder if the “reeling” ever ends and, if it does, what comes afterward.

There are clinical answers to these questions, guidance in the lived experiences of previous mass shooting survivors and their families, and the traditional wisdom that time heals all wounds. But as we wait and hope for that healing to start, we must contend with the fact that, inevitably, more people will soon be a part of this growing community of loss.

I wonder if the kind of blissful memories I made as a child, unencumbered by fear, will even be possible for generations to come.

it hurts to realize the pain that today’s MSU generation feels from everything they’ve had to face, the experiences and issues that I evaded only by chance. The students are already planning protests, my sister informed me, but how many of these will they need to do? Why does nobody care, why are their lives consigned to mere chance? A world that seemed hopelessly violent to me when I first walked by the Red Cedar only seems more so to those who are now scared of even going to class. Real people are getting hurt, and the magical occurrences that a place like Michigan State can inspire will suffer, too. Every gunshot is a step toward a more fearful, less open world. It can always get worse.

I don’t want to minimize the secondary traumatic effects of mass shootings on people who haven’t experienced them. There’s a strong argument to be made that these sorts of shootings, where someone goes with a gun to a public space and shoots a bunch of strangers, are psychologically speaking a form of domestic terrorism. The strategy of politically motivated terrorists has always been, as the phrase has it, “few victims; many observers,” and mass shootings in contemporary America, although often only vaguely political if at all, have this effect. (BTW I’m making a distinction here between the kind of mass shootings we saw at MSU, Parkland High School, Las Vegas, Boulder, etc. etc. etc. etc. and “mass shootings” in the looser sense of any shooting in which multiple people are killed and/or injured. Most mass shootings in this latter sense are not terroristic in the same way, as they involve things like fights in bars or at parties that spiral into gunfire, street gangs warring over turf, i.e., more banal and less frightening to the general public forms of gun violence.)

And there’s no question that over the past few decades there’s been an epidemic — that is, a rapidly rising incidence — of mass public stranger shootings. As I’ve noted before, these kinds of shootings basically didn’t exist in the USA prior to the 1980s, and have really exploded in the 21st century.

But there’s another side to all this, which is that the focus on mass shootings as an example of how America is becoming an increasingly violent and dangerous place is both quite false, statistically speaking, and quite insidious in the way it inevitably feeds into the whole “violent crime is out of control” discourse, which has had such terrible effects on public policy, in the form of the prison-industrial complex, militarized police forces, the war on drugs, etc.

As to the falseness of the narrative, while there’s been an explosion in mass public stranger shootings, these sorts of events still make up an almost infinitesimal percentage of the gun violence in America, which in turn is — although still atrociously high by the standards of other developed nations — much lower than it was a generation ago.

Murder/violent crime rates in the US, per 100,000 population:

1980: 10.2/596.6

1990: 9.4/731.8

2000: 5.5/506.5

2010: 4.8/404.5

2019: 5.0/379.4

Homicide and violent crime rates, which skyrocketed in the 1970s and 1980s, have been in a steep decline for more than 30 years now, although we’ve seen a pronounced uptick during the pandemic, which is probably closely related to it in some way, and is likely to recede along with it.

Now I get that mass public stranger shootings are quite understandably panic-inducing in the public as a whole, as they create a sort of generalized anxiety about how anyone can be shot to death at any time in any sort of public space for purely random reasons. But they also fuel a discourse about how violent crime and gun violence in America are spiraling out of control, which is completely false, statistically speaking, and also extremely dangerous, politically speaking, in a country where one of the two parties has been taken over by authoritarian ethno-nationalists with an unhealthy dash of millenarian theocratic lunacy in the proto-fascist mix.

On yet a third hand, it’s also true that rates of violent crime in general and homicide in particular remain ten times higher in the US than in the civilized world, even though they had, pre-pandemic anyway, fallen in half from where they were a generation ago.

So it’s a complicated situation on multiple levels. But while we should of course be fighting to reduce the still-obscene levels of gun violence in America — 125 deaths per day, two thirds of which are suicides, probably half of which wouldn’t happen if a gun hadn’t been so easily available — we should also be careful about feeding narratives about how society is getting so violent that college students can’t go outside without fearing for their lives.