I’ve accepted what I cannot change, but I’ve opined over the years about when and why the United States will tighten gun laws.
I predicted among friends at the time of the most horrific shooting to date, Sandy Hook, that nothing would change. In fact, laws loosened around the country. I wrote a sarcastic piece after the largest mass shooting in history knowing that nothing would change. Laws continued to loosen.
Mass shootings affect an infinitesimally small percentage of the population. The lion’s share of gun deaths are due to suicides and accidents. So it’s not completely irrational for a critical mass of people to conclude that as long as they stay away from black people, don’t commit suicide and don’t have any accidents with guns, then having such an unregulated industry doesn’t affect them.
Mass shootings, while rare and statistically unlikely to affect you, strike at the heart of that logic. They happen anywhere at any time, and everybody is a target. They have an outsized impact on public opinion. Guns only enter the national conversation in the wake of particularly horrific ones. But not standard shootings. You need at least 20 kills to generate political debate.
Then again, there are surprises. The few changes we have seen didn’t follow what I would have considered inflection points. When 20 first-graders were among 28 murdered in Sandy Hook in 2012, nothing changed. But when 19 grade schoolers were killed in Uvalde, Congress passed he greatest tightening in a generation.
Sidenote: it was a modest tightening, but good politics means taking what you can get when you can. Then you get more later.
The 2018 Parkland school shooting, which didn’t break the top five of deadliest mass shootings at the time and has since slipped out of the top 10, had an outsize effect in spawning high-profile activists from the students who were there, who went on to lead national marches. David Hogg is still in the game.
So it’s hard to predict inflection points, but the latest mass shooting in Kansas City gave me an idea what will be next. The Feb. 14 shooter was not deranged or suicidal looking to kill as many as he could for notoriety. It was a petty street fight between multiple parties who fired recklessly in a crowd. A well-known local radio personality was killed.
Thinking about that radio DJ, I thought about who else was in that crowd: Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce, Missouri Governor Mike Parsons, Kansas City mayor Quinton Lucas.
Politicians have been shot. That doesn’t move the needle. But popular-culture celebrities would. Can you imagine if Patrick Mahomes were killed or suffered a career-ending injury ? Or if the same happened to … deep breath … Taylor Swift? She wasn’t there but it’s not hard to imagine if she had.
That will move the needle, and I don’t see any reason why a popular celebrity won’t shot in a mass shooting. On a long enough timeline, that day is coming.
Maybe change will come first. I often repeat about American politics that the actuary tables may drive change first. When enough boomers die off and are replaced by enough Zoomers and others who grew up doing school-shooting drills, laws will change. Sometimes it just takes time.