The Guardian: From Columbine to Parkland: how we got the story wrong on mass shootings

The school shooter era. Even 10 years after Columbine, I still couldn’t perceive what we were living through in that way. No one could. It had been going on far too long, but it was hard to predict its endurance or trajectory. While I despise the media scorekeeping – awarding the killers titles like prizefighters, giving them exactly what they crave – one stat is worth noting: what was then the most notorious mass murder in recent American history no longer ranks in the top 10. Four of the five deadliest attacks in the US have occurred since then, three of them in the past three years. In a five-day period near the end of last month, the US suffered four mass murders in four different states: Louisiana, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Florida. This is not going away, it’s getting worse. [...]

Since 20 April 1999, I have studied most of the major mass shootings and some of the smaller ones. I have written about them individually and collectively. I have joined the Academy of Critical Incident Analysis (ACIA) team in studying several incidents, including on-site studies at Virginia Tech after the 2007 shooting and in Las Vegas in 2017, and an off-site analysis of Norway’s 2011 Workers’ Youth League attack in Utøya. A troubling trend emerged: many of the mass murderers emulated Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. The FBI released more than 1,500 pages of documents about the horror at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012, when Adam Lanza killed 20 first-grade students and six members of staff, as well as his own mother. It details just how obsessively Lanza was following Harris and Klebold. He amassed a hoard of Columbine information on his hard drive, frequented a chat room dedicated to the attack, and role-played the killers in an online game. If only this were an isolated incident.[...]

We had good reason. In the wake of Columbine, America was united in one idea – that something had to change in three obvious areas: police, schools and guns. The police surrounding Columbine High had failed to consider the possibility that the gunmen had no demands. They just wanted to kill people. After considerable analysis, police forces across America upended their response to these attacks with the active shooter protocol. They now neutralise most major attacks within minutes, saving countless lives. Schools responded too, with threat assessment teams, lockdown drills and advance coordination with law enforcement, who now have blueprints to their buildings and alarm codes. The changes were swift, and dramatic, but they were primarily aimed at reducing the death count once bullets were already in the air.

On prevention? On minimising the ability of perpetrators to arm themselves to the hilt, US politicians responded with ... nothing. Worse than nothing, they have regressed. Columbine brought great hope for gun control, but almost no meaningful legislation. Politicians of all stripes were afraid of the power of the National Rifle Association (NRA). In 2000, vice-president Al Gore stuck his neck out. He defied the conventional wisdom that gun control was politically toxic, ran on it and lost the electoral college, by a whisker, in two southern states he should have carried easily. Either one would have led to him defeating George W Bush. Guns were blamed, and the Democrats went from squeamish on gun control to terrified. [...]

In fact, the two were uninterested in their particular victims, just the body count. Mark Juergensmeyer, one of the great thinkers on terrorism, captured the essence of that phenomenon in one phrase: performance violence. A defining characteristic of terrorism is some sort of political agenda. But the Columbine killers realised they could employ those same tactics for their own petty self-aggrandisement. A whole generation of murderers have followed in their wake.

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Vox: A year after Parkland, support for stricter gun laws wanes

A new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll found that 51 percent of Americans support stricter gun laws in the United States. While that’s still a slim majority, it’s a significant drop from when the same poll was conducted last year, soon after the Parkland shooting, when 71 percent of Americans said gun laws should be tightened. [...]

It’s a familiar pattern: In the immediate aftermath of mass shootings, there is a bump in support for gun restrictions, and calls for gun control increase. But over time, public attention on the issue fades, and Congress fails to act. It’s what happened after the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, at Pulse nightclub in 2016, and at a Las Vegas concert in 2017. [...]

According to the Giffords Law Center, legislators on both sides of the aisle in 26 states and Washington, DC, enacted 67 new gun safety laws last year. And gun control advocates saw some important victories in the 2018 midterms — Washington state voted to raise the legal age to buy semiautomatic refiles from 18 to 21, and Democrats won governorships in states such as Wisconsin and Nevada and took back the House of Representatives, potentially setting the stage for more action at both the federal and state level. The House Judiciary Committee just this week approved two bills that would expand background checks for gun purchases. [...]

Those attitudes show up in the NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll. Fifty-eight percent of Americans say it’s more important to control gun violence, but 37 percent prioritize protecting gun rights. And 58 percent of Americans believe the right to own and carry a gun is just as important as other constitutional rights, such as freedom of speech, religion, and the press. Americans seem divided on what guns mean for crime: 28 percent think more people owning guns leads to more crime, 26 percent think less, and 42 percent don’t think it will make a difference.

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Vox: Why the NRA is struggling

A particularly low point came during the 2018 midterm elections, when the NRA was outspent by gun control groups for the first time in recent history, even while allegedly coordinating with GOP candidates in two states.

The NRA has also been enveloped in a Department of Justice investigation into Russian efforts to influence US politics that featured Russian nationals using the organization as a conduit to the Republican Party. It’s been decried for paying millions of dollars to contractors and close associates of the organization while laying off dozens of employees. And that doesn’t even mention that between January 2017 and November 2018, two of the NRA’s biggest legislative initiatives resulted in failure — derailed by high-profile mass shootings.[...]

For the NRA, the Obama administration provided what any organization needs: a motivating threat. But now that threat, however existent or nonexistent it may have been, is gone, replaced by an unreliable ally in Trump. Furthermore, the organization has been so successful in changing not only America’s gun laws but the gun conversation more broadly (and what potential restrictions on guns are even floated as possibilities) that the NRA isn’t thinking big anymore — because it doesn’t have to. [...]

This is perhaps unsurprising from a president who grew up in New York City and once advocated heavily for gun control before he aligned himself with the Republican Party. In Trump’s 2000 book, The America We Deserve, Trump decried members of the GOP who “walk the NRA line” and resisted restrictions on guns. [...]

And the NRA is certainly on Trump’s side, which might be part of the problem. While real threats to gun rights and the Second Amendment still exist, as we saw in the Philando Castile case — one the NRA decided to opt out of — the NRA’s turn toward Trumpian right-wing culture warring has possibly turned off those who might be supportive of the groups’s actual messaging on guns. Coupled with the group’s stance on bump stocks — which has turned off many gun owners — one source told me that the NRA’s turn toward culture-warring has given rise to more direct criticism of the NRA even from within the gun rights community.

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Vox: How the Parkland shooting changed America’s gun debate

According to the Giffords Law Center (which supports stricter gun laws), 26 states and Washington, DC, enacted a total of 67 new gun control laws this year — more than triple the number of stricter gun laws enacted in 2017. The 2018 measures include a higher minimum age to buy guns, restrictions for domestic abusers, “red flag” laws that let law enforcement take away guns from people deemed a risk, and new urban gun violence reduction programs.

Some of these passed in states with Republican leaders. In Florida, the GOP-controlled legislature and Republican Gov. Rick Scott approved legislation that raised the minimum age to buy guns and added a waiting period for firearm purchases, among other changes. In Vermont, Republican Gov. Phil Scott signed gun control laws that included expanded background checks and a “red flag” law.

At the same time, there was a decrease in the number of new laws loosening access to guns. So Parkland didn’t just apparently inspire more support for gun control; it also led to less support for new, less-restrictive gun laws. [...]

When it comes to overall support for stronger gun laws, there was a significant spike shortly after Parkland: Based on Gallup’s surveys, support for stricter gun laws in March 2018 hit 67 percent, up from 55 percent in October 2016 and 60 percent in October 2017 (after the Las Vegas mass shooting). But that support dropped by October this year to 61 percent — still higher than it was previously, but not that far off historical levels. [...]

The problem, then, has never been whether a majority of Americans support gun control. The problem, instead, is what’s known as the intensity gap: Essentially, even though more Americans support gun control laws, those on the side opposing stricter measures have long been more passionate about the issue — more likely to make guns the one issue they vote on, more likely to call their representatives in Congress, and so on.

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statista: Does Gun Violence Get Enough Federal Research Funding?

After the devastating mass shooting at a school in Parkland, Florida, student survivors urged politicians to take action in order to prevent more children from being killed by firearms. Even though many proposals and policies have been raised in recent weeks, their possible impact and effects have rarely been studied scientifically.

A study conducted last year found that the amount of money allocated for federal research into gun violence is extremely low in comparison with other major causes of death in the United States. For example, $431 million in federal research funding was set aside for motor vehicle deaths between 2004 and 2014 with 12.33 deaths per 100,000 people occurring during those 10 years. Federal research funding about HIV came to $19.32 billion during the same period while 3.14 lives were lost to the disease per 100,000 people.

Deaths from firearms are subject to far less scholarship, according to research from David Stark and Nigam Shah. Despite 10.40 deaths occurring per 100,000 people from 2004 to 2014, only $22 million in federal research funding was made available for gun violence research.

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CityLab: When Teens Protest, Race Matters

In the spring of 2016, African-American children as young as 11 marched in protest against the gun violence in their Miami neighborhood of Liberty City. The low-income area had lost 13 teens and children so far that year to guns. The kids demanded the right to play outside safely; they held signs and chanted slogans like “We want to live” and “We want to see another day.” Phillip Agnew, leader of the Florida-based Dream Defenders, a youth-led group fighting for racial justice, said the demonstration didn’t get much attention from the national media at the time.

Liberty City is about 40 miles from Parkland, Florida, site of the deadly shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School two weeks ago. But it’s been hard not to notice the difference between how youth-led protests against gun violence in these two communities were received. Since the Parkland tragedy, the national news has been filled with the school’s student survivors, who rose up to protest school shootings and demand—in eloquent and defiant terms—tighter gun legislation. Across the country, teens have been walking out of class in solidarity, often standing together in silence for 17 minutes, one for each of Parkland’s victims. National walkouts are planned for March 14, the one-month anniversary of the shooting, and April 20, which will mark 19 years since the Columbine High School massacre. [...]

In contrast, teens and adults of color have often faced very different responses when protesting gun violence. Indeed, while youth of color have been confronting the issue for years, the protests and actions associated with the Movement for Black Lives have often been criminalized, greeted with police repression and public scorn, or simply ignored.

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The Atlantic: A Bright Red Flag for Democracy

Another group is speaking out, too: people who believe the deadly shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas was staged, and that students like Gonzalez are actors, not victims. Far-right provocateurs have focused on David Hogg, a 17-year-old student who had the self-possession to interview his classmates while the shootings were taking place. Hogg’s composure in interviews, his criticism of President Donald Trump, and the fact that his father is a retired FBI agent have fueled a conspiracy theory that claims Hogg has been paid—by Hillary Clinton, George Soros, or favorite figures among conspiracy theorists—to promote an anti-gun agenda. Supported by media figures like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly, the conspiracy theories have received a big boost from YouTube, with its algorithms that push videos targeting Hogg to the top of trending video lists.  [...]

In the mid-1960s, 77 percent of Americans reported trust in the U.S. government to do the right thing all or most of the time, according to surveys from Gallup and the National Elections Survey. Asked the same question in a Gallup poll late last year, only 18 percent reported trusting the government. This isn’t a Trump-specific phenomenon. Trust has been falling in the United States for decades, and it hit comparably low points during the Clinton and Obama presidencies. [...]

Despite having good reason not to trust the political process, the students are doing what we’ve been taught to do as citizens: tell our legislators what we think, and if they don’t listen, demand to be heard. So far, that’s not gone especially well. One group of students traveled to Tallahassee to meet with legislators and instead watched 71 Republican legislators block debate on bills to limit high-capacity magazines. A town meeting with legislators, televised by CNN, went little better, as politicians squirmed uncomfortably and failed to answer the blunt questions put forward by students. [...]

Mistrust is expensive. When people worry that the media is being manipulated, it takes work to get to a set of facts we trust, and more work to get to a common set of facts we can discuss or debate. When people worry legislators aren’t listening to citizens, but to corporations and lobby groups, they move beyond letters and phone calls to protests and rallies. Two decades ago, the author Frank Fukayama posited that high-trust societies were wealthier than low-trust ones because fiscal transaction costs were lower. As Americans experience an increasingly paralyzed and dysfunctional federal government, it’s clear that mistrust is raising the costs of representative democracy.

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The Atlantic: Where the Gun-Control Movement Goes Silent

Gun-control advocacy groups occasionally bring up Burger’s words to buttress their campaign against the special-interest group to which he was undoubtedly referring, the National Rifle Association. But in the decades since, as the push for tighter limits on guns has surged and stalled, again and again, none of them have taken up the suggestion implicit in the justice’s critique: There has never been a serious effort to rewrite or repeal the Second Amendment. [...]

The new players in the gun-control advocacy space have not, however, dramatically widened the scope of proposals to reduce gun violence. The main ask for most advocates remains a universal background check system that closes loopholes that allow people with criminal records or mental illness to buy firearms at gun shows or from private dealers. The groups largely also back a ban on assault-style rifles, limits on high-capacity magazines, a crackdown on straw purchasing, and an end to the prohibition on federally-funded research into gun violence as a matter of public health. [...]

In 2008, that all changed. Writing for a 5-4 Supreme Court majority, Justice Antonin Scalia—the conservative who filled the vacancy created by Warren Burger’s 1986 retirement—authored the decision in District of Columbia v. Heller that interpreted the Second Amendment as granting an individual right to bear arms. The ruling struck down D.C.’s handgun ban and provided a landmark victory in the decades-long push by the conservative legal community and gun-rights supporters.  [...]

The simplest reason why there hasn’t been a movement to change the Second Amendment is the daunting process for amending the Constitution, which requires a two-thirds majority vote in each chamber of Congress and ratification by three-quarters of the 50 states. The 27th and most recent amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1992, and none of the efforts since—including bids to ban same-sex marriage or require Congress to balance the budget—have come close to success.

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FiveThirtyEight: Why Dozens Of Mass Shootings Didn’t Change Americans’ Minds On Guns

The exact number of mass shootings is hard to pin down, but gun violence is disturbingly common in the United States, especially compared with other developed countries. And repeated exposure to acts of violence — even when that exposure comes secondhand through the news — can have a numbing effect, according to Yuval Neria, a professor of psychology at Columbia University.

This effect has been mostly studied with regard to terrorist attacks in countries like Israel that have experienced chronic violence, but there’s no reason to imagine that it wouldn’t extend to mass shootings or other acts of gun violence as well, Neria and other psychologists said, because the two events aren’t psychologically distinct. “There isn’t a difference between mass shootings and acts of terrorism in terms of how they affect the brain — they’re both intentional, man-made acts that inflict horror and fear,” he said. [...]

Slovic’s research has shown that because feelings and intuition play such a strong role in our evaluations of risk, we’re less likely to instinctively perceive items that are familiar or beneficial as something that’s hazardous and should be banned or regulated. This has particularly strong implications for gun owners. “A lot of people own guns or know someone who owns a gun or see a general benefit to guns,” Slovic said. “Positive feelings about something like guns can dampen the emotional response to an event like a shooting and make it feel less risky.” [...]

Another crucial distinction between terrorist attacks and mass shootings, from a psychological perspective, is that terrorists’ ideologies and goals are relatively clear, while mass shooters’ motives tend to be diverse or opaque. The apparent randomness of mass shootings makes it hard to collectively focus blame or anger, according to Sarah Lowe, a professor of psychology at Montclair State University. This could help explain why repeated exposure to terrorist attacks in Israel is seen as having helped strengthen national unity, while mass shootings in the U.S. seem to sow divisions.  

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Vox: We aren’t having an evidence-based debate about guns

“There’s some evidence that certain types of gun laws, like universal background checks, may be useful,” David Hemenway, a Harvard University professor who has written extensively about injury prevention and guns, told me. “There’s no evidence at all about raising the age to 21. There’s certainly no evidence about arming teachers. There’s evidence [that] arming more people is typically good for the gun industry and bad for society.”

What we do know is that fewer guns likely lead to fewer deaths, as Vox’s German Lopez has explained at length. So improved background checks and higher age limits could reasonably be expected to help. But these are largely inferences from other countries with stronger gun laws rather than rigorously researched theories that have been tested in America. (We do have a few non-government studies, from Connecticut and Missouri, that suggest background checks help reduce gun deaths.)  [...]

We don’t know much beyond that. Congress has made it effectively impossible for federally funded researchers to study gun violence. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health are the gold standards for public health research in the United States. But they are effectively barred from studying a problem that kills more than 35,000 people in a year.

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Vox: Will a boycott hurt the NRA? Take a look at Bill O’Reilly.

While the NRA has faced public pressure in the past, this the first time it’s been hit with such a broad boycott, according to Adam Winkler, a law professor at UCLA and the author of the book Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America.

Something similar happened last year, when more than 80 brands pulled their ads from The O’Reilly Factor after sexual harassment complaints against host Bill O’Reilly became public. The advertising boycott wasn’t the only factor behind his ouster from Fox News, but it was a major one. Faced with an exodus of advertiser money, the network that had been protecting O’Reilly for years finally decided to cut ties.  [...]

The NRA boycott is different from what happened to O’Reilly in a number of ways. Most obviously, the NRA, a nonprofit group, doesn’t depend on companies like Delta and Avis the way a TV show depends on advertisers. It does, however, depend at least to some degree on deep-pocketed donors — in 2016, the group’s political arm took in more than $124 million in contributions and grants from individuals, corporations, and other entities, including a single donation of $19.2 million, according to Mother Jones. An exodus of corporate partners could have a chilling effect on those donations. [...]

Still, Winkler noted, corporate boycotts are “an increasingly important avenue for social change” in America. In addition to O’Reilly’s departure, the repeal of North Carolina’s anti-transgender “bathroom bill” may have been influenced by the NCAA’s pledge not to hold championship events in the state until the law was scrapped.

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The New York Times: Companies Cut Ties to the N.R.A., but Find There Is No Neutral Ground

For companies like MetLife that are caught in the middle of these angry social media storms, actions tied to divisive social issues can be a lose-lose proposition. A year ago, Nordstrom first faced calls for a consumer boycott because it carried the Ivanka Trump line of clothing. But it quickly drew another round of boycott cries from the other side of the ideological spectrum when it quietly stopped selling her products. [...]

But in the days since the Florida school shooting, the push for boycotts and meaningful change has mobilized faster than with previous mass shootings. Professor Schweitzer noted that reflected the fact that the survivors are teenagers who are well versed in the usage and power of social media. [...]

Still, in some cases, the rapid assembly on Twitter and Facebook may have resulted in a speedy response. In less than 24 hours, at least eight companies that had offered N.R.A. members discounts or special deals announced plans to separate or end affiliations with the organization, including Hertz, Enterprise and Avis Budget; SimpliSafe, which gave N.R.A. members two months of free home security monitoring; and North American and Allied Van Lines.

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Slate: The Parkland Teens Will Win. Eventually.

In response to the Parkland shooting, advocates are trying a few tactics that are relatively new to the gun-control debate, if not to progressive activism writ large. Students in Connecticut are trying to plan a National School Walkout on April 20, the anniversary of the 1999 Columbine massacre. Teachers have discussed doing their own. High school survivors from Parkland have announced a March for Our Lives to take place in Washington on March 24, with concurrent satellite marches in other locales around the country, along the lines of the Women’s March held the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration. It has the potential to be the largest national demonstration for gun control the U.S. has ever seen.

Those who’ve watched children slaughtered in their classrooms many times over with no discernible change in gun-control policy or decline in American gun ownership may have reason to doubt that any of these activist measures will accomplish what the others have not. None of the organizations founded after other massacres have shifted the U.S. gun-control conversation in meaningful ways, jolted the general public into a new sense of urgency, or changed the hearts and minds—and, more importantly, the votes—of legislators. Recent polling shows that 97 percent of Americans support universal background checks for gun purchasers, including 97 percent of gun owners, and more than two-thirds support a nationwide ban on assault rifles. Clearly, public opinion is not enough to sway public officials bankrolled by the National Rifle Association, which opposes any expansion of federal gun regulations, including stronger background checks. [...]

In other words, the best outcomes gun-control activists can hope for in the foreseeable future are incremental. Florida legislators have agreed to consider instating a three-day waiting period for all rifle purchases and raising the legal age for assault-rifle possession to 21. Such a law might have prevented Nikolas Cruz, the 19-year-old who allegedly murdered his Parkland classmates with an AR-15, from buying his gun, but only temporarily. The same legislative body refused to even discuss a possible ban on assault weapons, while teen survivors of Parkland looked on, even as they approved a resolution calling pornography a public health risk. These are not people prepared to be moved by a rousing address, postcards from progressives, or a march on the National Mall.

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Quartz: Dear America, here’s how other countries stop mass shootings

Research shows that countries with fewer guns have lower homicide rates. Even US states with fewer guns have fewer homicides; in a landmark 2002 study, analysis of data from 1988 to 1997 showed that states with “high” gun ownership had three times the rate of homicide than states with few guns. A decade later, a 2013 study found that every percentage point increase in gun ownership corresponded to a 0.9% higher risk of gun homicide. Countries and states that legally limit overall gun ownership simply have fewer gun deaths. [...]

The United States stands out among countries for the frequency with which its mass shootings occur. But last year, after the US witnessed its most fatal mass shooting in history at Las vegas, the Trump administration made it easier—not harder—for people with mental illness to buy guns. (That decision rolled back Obama-era restrictions that had been passed in the wake of Sandy Hook.) [...]

Back in 1996, it took only 12 days after a mass shooting for Australia to pass the National Firearms Agreement, which banned automatic and semi-automatic weapon for “personal defense.” The country created a temporary buyback program for guns that had become illegal. Stricter background checks were enforced. As Zeif pointed out yesterday, there have been no school shootings in Australia since.

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