My daughter’s afraid of being shot and I don’t know how to tell her not to be
We have a culture problem
My oldest daughter is eight — just started third grade — and currently in love with Wonder Woman. She’s precocious and kind. And each day I’ve picked her up from school this week, she’s asked me about the Las Vegas shooting. She’s worried about all the people that were hurt, over 500. But how many died, dad? My friend said 200. On the first day, it was all concern about the magnitude of the tragedy — she marveled at the sheer impossibility that one person could hurt so many so quickly, how random it all seemed.
She worried about the shooter, too. Why did he shoot those people? On day two, the news on the car radio reported the shooter had plans to be in Chicago. Is he still alive? Can he still get us? She worked herself up. I stopped the car to hold her, to tell her she doesn’t have to worry about mass shootings.
(Absurdly, I think the above sentence bears repeating.)
I stopped the car to tell her she doesn’t have to worry about mass shootings.
I stopped short of telling her that she doesn’t have to worry about getting shot.
Here is my daughter — all bright eyes and tangled hair— wound tight as coil. How do I tell her that this year alone 1,300 kids — triple her school size — will be killed by a gun? Or that when she grows into adulthood, she’ll confront the reality that 1 in 3 women will be the victims of intimate partner violence — a predictive and corollary indicator of gun homicides? Or that there are more guns in America than there are people? That a tiny armed minority of adults are holding the rest of us all hostage?
Last year, I left a good-paying business consulting gig to work on a political campaign — a statewide gun violence prevention initiative. My daughter is not the only one who’s asked if the law I helped to pass would have made a difference in Las Vegas — in other words, if the choice I made was worth it.
In the conversation around gun violence and the efficacy of laws, we tend to flatten the gun conversation around the physical firearms, but the reality is more complex. Gun violence is not an independent force. It’s not even really about the guns themselves. It’s about access. It’s about the ability to reach over and grab a gun amid the extremities of human nature. Gun violence shows up along every violent, social fault line across America — race, class, gender. Wherever violence or the risk for accident is — which is virtually everywhere on the planet (including and especially among white dudes) —the presence of guns makes matters worse.
Gun violence isn’t the most recent mass shooter; it’s the trending tip of the ice berg. Our problem — which political leaders have, in this moment, found a modicum of unity around — isn’t one that can be solved by outlawing bump stocks. There are too many guns in America. Not just in our streets — but in our homes, in our cars, in our purses (never mind on the hips of our over-militarized police).
The pervasiveness of guns cannot explain it all away though. We have a fragile male ego problem. We have an economically-driven racial disparity problem. We have a domestic violence problem. We have culture problems, and we wed our gun obsession to each of them.
Don’t get me wrong. Bump stocks should absolutely be illegal, and to address the logistical nightmare of half a billion guns in America, we’ll need a flexible network of tens of dozens more tiny measures that tamp down access. But we’re also in the midst of a culture war — the president is the standard bearer and the NRA is the arms dealer. And until we can have a frank and honest conversation about societal structure — how white supremacy and gender norms undergurd our most fundamental ideals — the desire for guns will persist, and we’ll never be able to stop the onslaught.
For my daughter, it’s one of her first encounters with an irrational society that leaves her defeated. As I hold her hand trying to comfort her, I remember it’s easy in this moment to succumb to fear — especially when it’s intractably tied to the impending inevitability of human life. This moment has the power to make the whole fight for better gun laws feel futile, but it too is a signal that we cannot let up. Fighting the good fight often means pushing against the ocean. With persistence, we may shift the tides.
