The Ongoing, Childish Gun Control Debate
Recently, I’ve been exposed to some conspiracy theories about mass shootings and anti-depressant medication. Read for yourself if this interests you. I personally don’t credit these theories, but I think they present an interesting opportunity for a thought experiment in which the U.S. demos believes pharmaceuticals, rather than guns, are responsible for mass shootings. This thought experiment avoids the pitfalls of other comparisons to gun violence (for example, my own comparison to automobile deaths) by referring to the actual, unique problems of gun violence while also positing a community of millions of peaceful people, who believe their lives are improved by their commitment to an alleged cause of mass violence. And most usefully, the people who love anti-depressants and the people who love guns tend to not be the same people, so the reversal of perspective has a chance to be enlightening.
Ban Anti-Depressants!
Let’s imagine the following scenario: anti-depressant medication, specifically the serotonin re-uptake inhibitors (SSRIs) like Prozac, which became popular in the 1990s just as mass shootings became much more common, are linked to almost every mass shooting since their invention. Well-regarded researchers, noticing this correlation, hypothesize that in addition to an acknowledged increase in suicidal ideation, some people taking SSRIs experience homicidal ideation. Their subsequent research confirms it: 95% of mass shootings likely would not have occurred in the absence of SSRI medications, and since there is no way to predict who will experience symptoms of homicidal ideation before prescribing the medication, researchers recommend a total ban on SSRIs.
Under these circumstances, there is a heated national debate over the continuing legality of SSRI medications. SSRI-users, approximately thirty million of them, are resistant to the findings of the researchers. These drug supporters attempt to make a positive case for SSRIs: the medications help many people when nothing else will, and anyway, people, not anti-depressants, kill other people. Some SSRI supporters will not believe the “science” that shows their medical crutch causes mass murder. Each time they are asked how many mass shooting casualties it will take to convince them to give up their drugs, they reply that such violence could happen every day and not change their minds — they don’t believe the causal connection. Other SSRI supporters understand that the drugs are problematic, but believe banning them would unfairly and unwisely discard the known advantages of anti-depressants. The problem is more nuanced, they plead, and more effort should be made to allow non-mass-shooting SSRI-users to enjoy the benefits of the medication while screening out potential murderers.
But the opponent of SSRIs don’t care about any of these issues: not having used the medication themselves, they insist it has no value. Supporters of the ban call SSRI-users cruel, immature, and selfish for clinging to what makes them happy at the cost of hundreds of lives lost each year in mass shootings. They show SSRI-users the data from other, more enlightened countries, where both anti-depressants and gun violence are rare, and imply by the comparison that SSRI-users are uncivilized and backward. When supporters of the ban get tired of arguing with their deranged opponents, they say that SSRI-users are bought and paid for by Big Pharma, whose shameless lobbyists are breaking democratic politics and subverting the will of the people; they call SSRI-users mental children, who make unrealistic claims about the necessity of being treated with medication that didn’t even exist thirty years ago; they accuse SSRI-users of white privilege, and prove their case by showing that white people disproportionately use SSRIs while victims of mass shootings are disproportionately non-white. And at each renewal of the public violence, SSRI opponents cry and scream and ask the recalcitrant users: “How many times must this occur before you stop being so selfish and stupid?”
An Unserious National Discourse on Gun Control and Mass Violence
This thought experiment might seem facile — it certainly does to me. The only purpose is to prompt gun control advocates to imagine that their opponents are fully human, with thoughtful and sincerely held beliefs about the social value of firearms and the efficacy of gun control. They are not themselves violent, and are not insensible to child murder. So facile it may seem, but this thought experiment is at the level of our national discourse. Actually, it might still be above the level of the national discourse, in which allegedly serious people are now advocating that we look to traumatized teenagers for policy advice.
The only thing the children have to say is that they have been through something horrible, which isn’t news to anyone familiar with Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, and all the others. But just as belittling the psychological development of gun owners will never cause them to question the social value of their weapons, no one who was insensitive to gun control after seeing twenty dead first-graders in Connecticut will change their mind now that seventeen more dead children confront them in Florida. The political strategy that assumes gun control opponents just haven’t yet considered the danger to children is thus self-indulgent and unserious. It must feel good to assume that the people who disagree with you literally don’t care when children are murdered, but that’s juvenile. A serious political leader would say and do whatever has a chance of making a difference, rather than what is self-validating.
In my life, I’ve seen victims of gun violence insist, not that guns be banned, but rather that no one will ever take away their guns and their ability to self-determine their own safety. Assuming that people only react one way to gun violence — by supporting gun control — is both arrogant and lazy. It seems almost purposefully designed to talk past and infuriate gun owners, who will need to be on board with any gun control legislation that becomes law. People do not get “blood on their hands” by pointing out that an assault weapon ban wouldn’t have prevented Virginia Tech or Columbine’s massacres, or that the most recent shooter in Florida could have picked a different gun and been equally effective. A serious political leader would recognize this, and would stop equating gun control opponents with actual murderers.
At a CNN “town hall” broadcast shortly after the shooting in Fort Lauderdale last week, one student told Marco Rubio “It’s hard to look at you... and not look at Nikolas Cruz.” I wonder what he sees when he looks at any of the Democrats who will only talk about — but never with — America’s seventy-one million gun owners, and whose righteous but impotent anger will never help anyone. Such unsophisticated views are fine for children, but the adults have no excuse. Virtue signaling and demonizing the NRA will not save a single life, and the adults know it. It’s time they stopped acting like children.
